January 25, 2010
A brief addendum to my last post.
A few people have sent me this article on Gizmodo, which explains why those of you who tried to watch the third video I included directly on my site would have been out of luck (hopefully most of you were smart enough to click through to YouTube to watch it there, or not care).
This is the quote that jumped out at me:
With or without this embedding problem, we’ll never get 50 zillion views on a YouTube video again. That moment – the dawn of internet video – is gone. The internet isn’t as anarchic as it was then. Now there are Madison Avenue firms that specialize in “viral marketing” and the success of our videos is now taught in business school. But here’s a secret: zillions of hits was never the point. We’re a rock band, and it’s a great gig.
Yes, aren’t record labels, and EMI specifically in this case stupid!
Or, maybe they are really smart and understand that you’re generally not remarkable for long (the point I was trying to make in my previous post) and now is the time to milk this particular cow?
And, while we’re on the topic of stupid, I’m surprised that YouTube haven’t come up with a solution to this problem. I assume that Vimeo have (see below), and yet I thought all the really smart engineers worked at Google?
I recommend you go read the whole thing and be entertained and informed.
Unfortunately I can’t embed the new version of the video, as Vimeo is not one of the sites supported by WordPress.com (where I host my blog). But, for completeness, you can watch the third video there now too.