The Great Ad Problem

A couple years back, McDonalds ran a banner ad, presumably to promote their dollar menu. It didn't quite have the intended effect.

Pictured: what 20-somethings say when they want a burger.

For a blip of time in the mid-2000s, an animated banner ad with those three frames proliferated around the Internet. It even came out that the advertisers had no clue that "I'd hit it" had any sexual innuendo associated with it at all - they sincerely thought that it was like any other throwaway slang from the younger generation. By the time McDonalds could redact the banner ads, it had already been mocked to hell and back.

This gaffe is best explained by assuming the advertisers were out of touch with their audience. In a lot of ways, this is a problem with online advertisement in general - they're out of touch with their audience, and everyone suffers for it.

The YouTube Frontier: The Future of YouTube

This is the third article on a series on Youtube! You can read part 1 and part 2 by clicking their respective links.

Though we mentioned it in the first installment of this article series, let's talk about Gangnam Style again.

The story of Gangnam Style is one that encapsulates all of Youtube's phases of development. It was a music video that could only exist on YouTube thanks to the website's business model. It "went viral" and gained massive notoriety worldwide. Taking the #1 most viewed spot on YouTube along with hitting the billion-views mark, Psy went on to star in - and heavily theme - Youtube's year in review 2012, alongside YouTube's other significant traffic-contributors.

YouTube has found a way to reconcile its free platform with the old media industries, and has earned its niche in online entertainment. Concerns about the website's sustainability seem to be decisively gone. The question, however, is what the website may become.

The Youtube Frontier: The Business of Youtube

The music video "Gangnam Style" by Korean artist Psy was the first YouTube video to hit a billion views. This video started accumulating views in July of 2012, and hit the billion-view mark in December of 2012. The video now maintains several hundred million views more than the next-most viewed video on the website.

However, it was as recently as 2008 that the title of "Most Viewed Youtube Video" could be acquired with fewer than 100 million views. Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance" held the title until that particular year, when Avril Lavigne's single "Girlfriend" finally topped the Youtube charts. The view count for each of them at the time hovered around 89 million views. Though her music video did eventually exceed 100 million views later that year, it took the #1 spot with a view count below this number.

2008 wasn't some prehistoric time for the internet, either. Facebook was already on the digital stage, hitting 100 million active users in that year and riding high rates of growth. It was an election year, and Barack Obama was using the internet in ways previously unseen in presidential campaigns. This was even after 2girls1cup - and the many reaction videos to it - had reached its height of infamy.

Clearly, there's been some inflation in Youtube's popularity since those days. With the next few blog posts, I'd like to walk us through an analysis of YouTube's role in entertainment culture.