Given its reputation as the home of online user-generated material, YouTube hosts a lot of corporate content these days. Of course, it always has done, from vintage archive material to pirated recent output. But rather than trying to stamp it out, more and more entertainment industry players are getting into bed with YouTube and Google, its parent company: MGM and FremantleMedia, for instance, have entered into deals with the site in recent weeks.
A look last week at the site's current 20 most viewed clips of all time - all with more than 50m hits - offered a snapshot of the corporatising effect. A good half of them were professional music videos, including work by Avril Lavigne, Chris Brown, Leona Lewis and a saccharine Asian pop number complete with karaoke subtitles, whose popularity has been attributed to its misleading title, xxx.
Bafflingly, more than 60m hits have also been clocked up by Lezberado: Revenge Fantasies, an impassioned viewer response to the lesbian-themed TV series The L Word, and particularly the despicable behaviour of a character called Jenny. Although it appears to be user-generated, the clip comes under the branding of Showtime, the channel that shows the series.
Even among actual user-generated content, many of the most popular clips are based on bestselling pop culture, albeit in creative ways: the evergreen Evolution of Dance plays on its audience's familiarity with dance crazes, while Crank Dat Soulja Boy Spongebob is a cunning mash-up of the infectious dance hit and the infectious cartoon series. Potter Puppet Pals in The Mysterious Ticking Noise is part of an entertaining series of puppet-based fan fiction - this particular episode offers an a cappella song made up of the characters' names, and ends with a bang.
The only exceptions are moments of home-video larking about involving laughing babies - see Hahaha and Charlie bit my finger - again ! - and a virtuoso guitar solo delivered by an adolescent with his face hidden by a baseball cap (guitar).
When it comes to wholly original content conceived, executed and uploaded by a YouTube user, one video is in a league of its own - the Spanish-language short Lo que tú quieras oír (Whatever You Want to Hear) shown above, by Guillermo Zapata. It's a cute little story about a woman, Sofía, who returns home to find her husband has dumped her by answerphone; she re-edits the message, turning it into a plea that she take him back - which she then rejects. Whether it deserves more than 77m hits is arguable, but it's notable that the film engages with creative editing as subject matter - Sofía essentially creates a mash-up of her husband's message - and was posted under a Creative Commons license, which allows for wide redistribution of the material rather than attempting to assert conventional copyright control. In these ways, it shows both where user-generated content is, and where it's heading.
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