Common Paradox Tech Blog

Fresh off having the most popular music video in YouTube/Vevo’s history (“Bad Romance” with 140 million views and counting), Lady Gaga’s latest – “Telephone” – featuring Beyonce, has made its debut on the Web.

The video is choc-full-o Lady Gaga shock value, and at more than 9 minutes in length, could probably classify as a short film. Dating site PlentyOfFish somehow managed to get prominent placement (fast forward to 4:27 if you’d rather skip the rest of it).

Early indications are that “Telephone” will be every bit as popular as recent Gaga hits, with the song, its participants, and even a string from its URL already dominating trending topics on Twitter ahead of its official premiere on E! later this evening. It also briefly took Vevo — YouTube and the record labels new music video website — offline.

Here’s the embed for what could be the latest member of the 100 million view club (“Just Dance” also recently broke the milestone):

Update: It looks like someone might have jumped the gun at YouTube/Vevo, as the video seems to be going back and forth between private and public. Here’s a few images we were able to grab while we had it open:

Update #2: Vevo now tells us the video will be back at midnight ET.

Tags: beyonce, Lady Gaga, music, telephone, vevo, youtube

Welcome to Act III of the OK Go/EMI drama: According to EMI, the pop band has decided to leave the record company and form their own independent label, Paracadute Recordings, under which they will take over control of their third album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky.

Here is the full statement from EMI:

“OK Go, the band whose inventive internet campaigns and self-directed music videos have set records and won the band a GRAMMY® Award, and EMI Music’s Capitol Records, the band’s label since 2001, have agreed to part ways by mutual agreement. OK Go has formed their own independent label, Paracadute Recordings. They will take on all distribution and promotion functions for their latest album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, which was released in January. ‘We’d like to thank the people at EMI Music who have worked so hard on our behalf,’ said OK Go singer Damian Kulash. EMI Music said: ‘We’ve really enjoyed our relationship with OK Go. They’ve always pushed creative boundaries and have broken new ground, particularly with their videos. We wish them the greatest success for the future.’”

How Did We Get Here?

As we have reported in the past, OK Go took arms against the sea of troubles that arose back in January when EMI and YouTube disabled embedding on a video for one of their new singles, “This Too Shall Pass.”

The band has built its reputation to some degree on the popularity of its viral videos, and Kulash and the rest believed that the lock-down version of “This Too Shall Pass” was hindering fans’ enjoyment of the video as well as any publicity the band might garner from sharing. Kulash released a public statement on the band’s site and even wrote an op-ed in The New York Times on the issue.

An interesting tidbit from the op-ed:

“When EMI disabled the embedding feature, views of our treadmill video dropped 90 percent, from about 10,000 per day to just over 1,000. Our last royalty statement from the label, which covered six months of streams, shows a whopping $27.77 credit to our account.”

Blogs, fans and news outlets were buzzing, and it was clear that people were interested in the issue of ownership and the battle between achieving virality and making money. In fact, according to a release from Big Hassle Media, who represent OK Go, Kulash’s blog post about the issue went viral itself, garnering more than 500,000 hits in just two days.

The State Farm Factor

Therefore, the band had the world’s attention when they released another video for the same song last week, this time featuring a Rube Goldberg machine and fully embeddable, thanks to sponsorship from State Farm Insurance. Just for point of reference: At press time, this video, which was released on March 1, has nearly seven million views. The first video, featuring the Notre Dame marching band, was released on January 8. As of now, it only has 1,181,070 views.

When asked whether he thought the controversy surrounding the first video contributed at all to the success of the second, bassist Tim Nordwind said, “It’s hard to know if Damian’s op-piece has made a huge difference, but for people who pay attention to it, yes, I think that it’s one reason that people are paying attention. Or maybe even possibly rooting for us… I think what people are responding to is that it’s just kind of an awesome video. I think people are reacting to the Herculean effort that it took to make this thing.”

According to State Farm Advertising Manager Todd Fischer, the band and the insurance company had been in talks since the fall of 2009 about the possibility of making a sponsored video. “Both of us kind of looked at each other as iconic brands in our own sense — the OK Go guys liked what State Farm has been doing in the music and entertainment space… On the flip side, we obviously — like so many other people — had great respect for what OK Go had done in the social media space and how they had used their videos to connect with young adults and with music fans along the way.”

Although the insurance company has done branded integration with movies and TV before, this the first time they’ve been involved in a viral music video, an avenue by which they saw an opportunity to connect with a whole new market. We’ve reported in the past on several viral video campaigns that made use of this growing medium as a way to grab the attention of the Internet-savvy set — the Ray-Bans tattoo commercial and the Chuck Liddell Reebok spot spring to mind.

Fischer says that the partnership speaks to the evolving manner by which we consume media. “You see a lot more brands starting to play in the space [of viral videos]… I think it’s changed the way people look at a 30-second television ad spot because they also think of how it will translate to the online space, because of the power and the influence that online has in reaching so many more people these days.”

On OK Go’s side, the band was able to create the video that they wanted, while also attracting tons of media attention. “We had this idea to do a Rube Goldberg project and it was a slightly more expensive idea than what we had had in the past and they were willing to sponsor it, but also let us do whatever it was we wanted to do,” Nordwind says.

According to Fischer, the company would also be game to partner with the band again, as well as other bands that might have similarly innovative ideas.

What Does This Split Mean?

This chain events, as well as the most recent chapter in the drama, raises the question that everyone’s been asking as of late: Does OK Go — or any band for that matter — require a relationship with record company in order to survive?

According to an representative from EMI, the label was instrumental in setting up the partnership with State Farm. EMI has a unit called Brand Partnerships, Licensing and Synchronization that basically brings bands and brands together — they’re the ones who get songs into commercials (which is becoming a more and more common way for a band to make money). According to a rep from EMI, the label approached State Farm and pitched the idea to the company.

“Basically our label sort of worked as a middleman,” Nordwind says, “but it was basically us sort of dealing with State Farm. But to be really honest, the label and State Farm were very hands-off with us. They really just let us do what we wanted to do.”

Therefore, the question becomes: Is the band/label situation a kind of Rube Goldberg machine in its own right — an overly elaborate system built up to achieve a simple outcome? Can OK Go achieve the success on their own? It will be interesting to see what results from their breaking away from EMI, and how they continue to use the medium of the Internet to spread their music.

We’ve reached out to the band for further comment and will update this post if we hear anything more.

Tags: EMI, music, OK Go, State-Farm, youtube

The Super Bowl may be long over, but Brand Battle 2010 continues to rage on, as yet another commercial is bit by the controversy bug — this time one of those adorable spots from E-Trade featuring a talking baby named “Lindsay.”

According to the New York Post, actress Lindsay Lohan is suing the investment site on the grounds that the man-eating, substance-abusing baby in the commercial is based on her.

Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, is asking that the commercial be taken off the air and every copy of the offending spot be rounded up (which could now be more difficult given today’s coverage). The actress is also asking for $100 million.

According to Ovadia: “Many celebrities are known by one name only, and E-Trade is using that knowledge to profit… They used the name Lindsay…They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”

Ovadia also says Lohan was mistreated because E-Trade didn’t get her approval nor offer her compensation for allegedly being referred to in the ad. Now, the lawyer says her client is owed $50 million in exemplary damages, as well as $50 million in compensatory damages.

Although Ovadia says that the spot — which debuted during the Super Bowl and aired during the Winter Olympics — helped garner E-Trade mucho money, it wasn’t one of the most popular ads to premiere. It didn’t rank tops with either online viewers or couch potatoes (although the talking baby series has racked up a lot of success in the past).

Still, today it joins a cadre of commercials that cleaned up on hits due to controversy — including the Tim Tebow spot, GoDaddy’s rejected “Lola” ad and men’s-only dating site ManCrunch’s similarly punted ad.

One could argue that by suing E-Trade, Lohan is calling even more attention to the ad in question. As of right now, the ad has nearly 2.5 million views on YouTube. It remains to be seen — most likely tomorrow — what effect this lawsuit has on further increasing visibility. But judging from the fact that it’s been cropping up all over the web since the litigious news hit, you can bet Lohan’s legal ire will ensure the vid’s virality for at least the remainder of this week.

Check out the vid below and let us know in the comments whether or not Lohan has a case.

Tags: legal, lindsay lohan, MARKETING, Super Bowl, viral video, youtube

The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; YouTube; Wordpress: these companies, built from the ground-up, are mainstays in social media. None of them were created by a large tech company, and all but one remains independent.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, when you think about it. Large tech companies have had limited to no success creating their own social media home runs. In an era where communication is increasingly taking place on these channels, the inability of these digital giants to build social networks is rather striking.

Two titans in particular are making social media headlines for different reasons: Yahoo has decided not to create it own social network, but is instead striking partnership deals with Facebook and Twitter. Google on the other hand, not only bought YouTube, but it is attempting to carve out its own piece of the social media pie with Google Buzz.

Partnership vs. in-house development; content vs. technology; Yahoo vs. Google: which company has the right social media strategy? What are the goals of both companies in the social realm? Do either have a chance against new and nimble startups like Facebook and Twitter?

Let’s take a look, shall we?

The Yahoo Strategy: Partner in Order to Drive Traffic

In 2006, Yahoo made a $1+ billion bid for Facebook. As we all know, Yahoo failed to close that deal and the story ever since has been the rise of Facebook and the slow decline of Yahoo, who was nearly acquired by Microsoft for over $40 billion in 2008.

Now with new leadership (led by CEO Carol Bartz), Yahoo is trying to make a turnaround and bring back some of the authority it once commanded. The Internet portal is turning to social media as a cornerstone of its growth strategy, but it isn’t focused on acquiring a Twitter or building its own social network, but on creating partnerships that integrate every facet of Yahoo into social networks, primarily Facebook and Twitter.

In September 2009, Yahoo announced that it would integrate Facebook Connect in its most popular web properties. The goal was to truly make Yahoo your portal to the web by not only delivering news, email, and finances, but also your social graph and the status updates of your friends. On the flip side, Yahoo would also benefit from the traffic bump that comes with sharing articles and content on Facebook’s news feed.

Yahoo has continued to push this partnership strategy in recent months. Two weeks ago, Yahoo partnered with Twitter to give users access to their Twitter feed from within Yahoo, update their status, and integrate Twitter content into the company’s search and media properties. A few days ago, Yahoo Mail hooked up with Facebook, the first integration between Facebook Connect and Yahoo.

Yahoo seems content in partnering with the major social services, rather than compete with them. Social media efforts like Yahoo Buzz, the tech giant’s answer to Digg, which hasn’t made a dent in the social voting powerhouse, have likely left a bitter taste in the mouths of its executives. Yahoo is now focused on using social media to generate traffic, eyeballs, and engagement times.

The Google Strategy: Dominate

Google’s strategy goes in a completely different direction to Yahoo’s approach; its strategy is also all over the map.

Like Yahoo, Google doesn’t have a good record in social media. Google Friend Connect isn’t even close to Facebook Connect in terms of adoption, Orkut never made inroads in the U.S., Blogger has nowhere near the traction of WordPress, and other acquisitions such as Jaiku and Dodgeball haven’t panned out.

You’d have a very good argument if you said that Google’s only social media hit has been YouTube, and that “only” cost the company $1.65 billion. Google has a lot more social properties than many people realize, but it’s a hodgepodge of acquisitions (Blogger, YouTube, Picasa) and internally-created services (Orkut, Google Knol, Friend Connect). The company’s batting average, though, has been pretty poor, especially by Google’s standards.

That was before Google Buzz, though. With the launch of its most advanced social product yet, Google’s strategy has finally begun to emerge, and it is a good one. If Google can stir up adoption for Buzz (which it has via Gmail), keep that engagement (this remains to be seen), and launch a standalone version of its social media tool, it can carve out a piece of the (very large) social media pie. Linking or integrating it to YouTube, Picasa, Orkut, Friend Connect, and its other social tools could provide a boost to those services as well.

There’s no reason to believe Google will succeed with Buzz, given Google’s social media track record. However, Buzz is the most complete product Google has put out yet and has some strong engagement numbers. It’s riskier than Yahoo’s strategy, but the payoff could be be titanic.

Google and Yahoo Are Very Different Companies

Yahoo’s strategy is focused around integrations with already-popular social services, while Google is focused around building and acquiring its own social media powerhouses. While Yahoo does acquire social media companies (e.g. Flickr) and Google has some strong partnerships (e.g. Twitter in Google Real-time search), that’s not the focus of their respective social strategies.

The reason their approaches to social media are so different has little to do with their leadership teams or the quality of their decision-making. No, it boils down to one simple truth: Google and Yahoo are very different companies.

I argue that Yahoo is, for the most part, a content company, while Google is focused on technology. There was a point where Yahoo was known for its tech innovations, but that mantle has long since passed to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others.

I explored this phenomenon in my first Social Analyst column, Content vs. Technology: What MySpace and AOL Have in Common. MySpace and AOL were also tech giants, but at some point lost their technology edge (MySpace lost to Facebook, AOL lost to DSL and Cable Internet) and thus began to focus on ramping up content creation and driving traffic to their web properties. Yahoo falls into the same camp.

Because of this key difference between Yahoo and Google, it’s no surprise that they are implementing different approaches. Google’s is focused on building technology that will drive adoption, revenue, and information through its doors. Yahoo’s focus is on bringing more eyeballs to this content and keeping them on Yahoo for longer periods of time.

Who Has the Right Social Media Strategy?

Now for the big question: is Google or Yahoo doing better at social media? Which one has the right social media strategy?

If you’ve read this column carefully, you can probably guess that I’m not going to outright declare that one company is “right” or that one is “wrong.” What I want you to take away from this week’s column is simple: your long-term plan and company composition should determine your social strategy.

Yahoo is simply better at content than Google. Yahoo Finance is, in my opinion, simply a better product than Google’s version. Its array of hosted news content is bigger, and it owns properties such as OMG, which is doing well as a celebrity news hub.

Google doesn’t write its own news or acquire a newspaper for a simple reason: it’s just not their focus, and they wouldn’t be very good at it. Would it make any sense for Google to focus on using social media to drive traffic to its content? The answer is no.

On the flip side, Google’s technology prowess trumps Yahoo by large margins. Google can build better technical products (e.g., Search, Gmail, Buzz, Android, Chrome) in a shorter amount of time than Yahoo can, and it can iterate faster than almost any large-scale public Internet company (its rapid privacy changes to Buzz is one good example).

These things are no longer Yahoo’s strength. So does it make sense for Yahoo to try to build a social network to rival Buzz, Facebook, or Twitter? Could it really keep up with any of them over the long haul? I severely doubt it.

So here is my conclusion: neither company’s direction is “wrong” because each one requires a different social strategy to succeed. Based on their strengths, Yahoo and Google are implementing the right strategies.

Now it’s just about executing them.

Tags: facebook, Google, google buzz, social media, The Social Analyst, twitter, Yahoo

comScore just posted its monthly report on online video viewership, and the total number of videos viewed in January slipped slightly as compared with December.

In December, 179 million people watched 33.2 billion videos. In January, it was 173 million people and 32.4 billion videos. It’s not a big decline, and we already saw in one of our monthly top webisode round-ups that special holiday content can boost viewership during December, so we know that this probably isn’t indicative of a downward trend.

In fact, the larger trend is very much up. YouTube — by far the web video viewership leader — had users watching an average of 93 videos in January. That’s 50% more than a year ago, even though it’s almost a 4% decline since December.

YouTube still dominates, though. “Google Sites” (mostly YouTube) accounted for 39.5% of web video views in January. The nearest competitor was Hulu with just 2.8%, followed by Microsoft sites with 1.5% and Yahoo sites with 1.3%.

The narrative we’re hearing here is that we’ve settled into something of a groove. There’s an upward trend, but the numbers are still dominated by almost exactly the same outlets. Are there any startups you believe will upset these stats in the future or is this going to be the lay of the land for the foreseeable future?

Tags: ComScore, Google, hulu, microsoft, News, web video, Yahoo, youtube

It’s here: the biggest action movie for gadget geeks, Iron Man, returns with a sequel, and you can see just how high-tech it’ll all be in the Iron Man 2 trailer, now available on YouTube.

Besides a long-haired, electric whip-wielding Mickey Rourke, the movie features more iron man suits than you could ever desire, and you get to see most of them ripped apart to shreds. Yes, this thing is destined for success. Check out the trailer below.

Tags: Iron Man 2, video, youtube

adeelarshad82 writes “Google’s YouTube announced that it has moved its automatic speech-recognition and closed-captioning technology out of beta and has now made it available to the YouTube community at large. Most, if not all, YouTube videos now include a ‘CC’ button that, if pressed, will automatically generate the closed-captioning technology. The technology processes the audio feed using the speech-recognition technology used in the core voice search feature that has also been built into the Android voice search feature, the GOOG-411 phone search, and other products.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube may be closing in on $1 billion in annual revenue, according to some new research performed by a Wall Street analyst.

Using MySpace’s estimated CPMs and YouTube’s estimated page views, Mark Mahaney of Citigroup calculates that Google’s video site generated $727 million in revenue for 2009, and will pull in $945 million in 2010.

The research, published earlier today by AllThingsD, uses the simple assumption that YouTube’s traffic and monetization efforts will continue to expand — trends that are readily apparent in recent headlines about the company.

What’s interesting is that the revenue estimate varies greatly from one that was widely circulated last year, when Credit Suisse projected that YouTube would bring in only $240 million in revenue for 2009. That report also pegged YouTube’s expenses at $711 million per year, in turn creating a $471 million loss for Google.

While Citi’s report doesn’t touch on the expenses side of the equation, it’s much higher revenue assumption (which is in-line with other recent research) adds some meat to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent comments that suggest YouTube might turn a profit this year.

So maybe Google did overpay for YouTube by around $1 billion by 2006 standards — something only them and a handful of other companies had the resources to do. But now, the company may be close to starting to make some of it back, while at the same time enjoying an enormous lead in the now many times larger online video market.

Reviews: Google, YouTube

Tags: Google, youtube

Don’t get us wrong, we love YouTube’s new automatic captioning feature. A couple of years ago it was almost unimaginable that someone (or something) could take videos, convert speech to text, then translate that text into 20 or 30 languages, and do it all automatically, in a blink of a second.

But we also know that machine translation is not even near replacing human translation, and speech recognition isn’t exactly perfect yet. Machine translation alone will often get you hilarious results; add translation to the mix, and the translations often end up being very weird. Now, users are noticing it and already posting funny examples like this one.

In fact, a simple Twitter search will reveal many similar examples, ranging from unfortunate to hilarious. We’re posting several favorites below.

What’s your favorite YouTube caption fail? Let us know in the comments!

[Images by tristopiaTV, kman101, AJCShow]

The Internet is such an easy place to play that it’s easy to forget that some are forced to struggle in it. People with hearing impairments are one obvious example–there’s a lot of sound in the online environment, and not experiencing that sound makes the Internet a less enjoyable place to be. YouTube’s been working to overcome that problem by allowing captioning of videos. It is now going one step further and implementing auto-captioning on all video uploads.

Auto-captioning, which will at present be restricted to English language videos, uses speech recognition to create an automatic transcription using the voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice. Videos, once uploaded, will be available to a wider audience of people than before. And YouTube is aiming beyond just those with hearing impairments. It sees this feature as useful for making English language content available to non-English speakers.

It looks like YouTube will apply auto-captioning retroactively–to all the English language videos in its collection. (Video owners can speed up this process by running their videos through the auto-captioning process.) And, YouTube’s goal is to expand the reach of auto-captioning to include other languages. Still, the technology is in its infancy, and YouTube suggests some patience with the transcriptions–they aren’t foolproof just yet.

Image Credit: YouTube