Over at TechCrunch a guest poster, Dan Acker Greenburg, has revealed how the company he works for creates viral videos on YouTube. Go and read the details, but it basically boils down to marketing tricks, and less to do with the content itself.

Wait — that doesn’t do it justice.

It basically boils down to manipulating structures within a social system to promote videos that are seemingly popular through an organic (i.e. “real”) sense of popularity.

Wait — that doesn’t really do it justice, either.

What it *really* boils down to is creating multiple puppet accounts, creating fake controversy to pump up the pageviews, and under-the-table renting of popular bloggers opinions on given videos, and / or the bribery of certain email list owners to pimp said videos.

Yeah, that’s about it.

Right now, the post is absolutely burning up TechCrunch with almost 200 comments, and you can bet there will probably be more. Mike Arrington himself seems a bit taken aback by how honest the post is, but is anyone *really* shocked?

Are your (or anyone’s) sensibilities *really* that delicate?

I mean, its been a year now since the Edelman Wal-Mart fake-blogger fiasco. And around the same time I was posting / ranting regularly about how Digg might or might not be manipulated.

In fact, one of my last thoughts on the topic was that the best marketers are going to be gaming Digg in a way that is not visible to most people; that Jay Adelson’s rhetoric about not having any submissions being manipulated were total hubris as well.

Bottom line is that this post pulls the curtain back on a phenomenon that any rational thinking individual would already suspect.

That is, when there is financial incentive and opportunity to game a system — even when that system has the appearance of being “open”, “transparent”, and built upon the goodwill and trust of its users (how typically quaint!) — someone will do it.

And the best of them will do it in such a way that no one else will even *know*.

At times like this I almost feel bad for Ted Murphy, one of the guys behind PayPerPost. Not just because I met him and he seems like a nice guy. But rather that he tried to build a business that was attempting to do something in a fairly open and transparent way, and with the new Google PageRank adjustment is getting burned for it.

Whereas guys like Dan Greenburg? They’re paying bloggers and list owners under the table where Google will _never_, *ever* be able to tell, and they’re making out like bandits. And that’s besides the practice of creating puppet accounts to pimp their “viral” marketing tactics.

Again, am I surprised and shocked? Not really.

But I think we should all take anything that seems viral and organic with a grain of salt these days. Because no matter how “real” something popular seems, there just might be a marketing or PR firm behind it.

There’s nothing intrinsically good or bad about it (but, really, mostly bad), but clearly in an age of “social media” and “user generated” content, there’s a strong case to be made for new media literacy.

And guys like Dan Greenburg, and this post in particular, need to be made case example number one.

If this isn’t the biggest news item of August 22nd, it should be. I’m referring of course, to Google / YouTube introducing in video ads, which is covered in detail by Jordan McCallum (who does a good job), and the New York Times.

The gist of it is this: Google / YouTube has fastidiously avoided in-video advertising since its purchase. Probably because they were trying to figure out the best way of monetizing the site. Which is a good thing (monetizing that is), as YouTube serves up billions of minutes of video per month, all waiting to be monetized in a way that serves the video uploader / producer, as well as the advertiser, and of course Google.

The reason why its a “big deal”? Not because other sites haven’t already done in video advertising. Look to sites like VideoEgg for things like that. No, the reason why its a big deal is because YouTube is sitting on an absolute gold mine of material that people are spending minutes — nay, hours — watching every day, week, or month.

Google announcing its monetizing YouTube in a creative non-obtrusive fashion is like Google announcing that its monetizing its search with its Adwords technology.

There’s no question that there’s going to be a slow roll-out, almost certainly slower than with Adwords, because they’re limiting exactly where the ads go and who can advertise. But, from what I understand about how these will work — in the bottom half of the video, only starting 10-20 seconds into the video, which can be switched off any time, and put on a frequency such that users aren’t ’saturated’ with in-video ads — I’m encouraged to hear how this actually works out for advertisers and Google.

Because if the conversion rates *do* pan out the way the initial stories make it seem like, then wow — this isn’t say, bigger than Jesus, but its another huge milestone in Google’s monetization of its assets and one that no Google-watcher should over look.  It might not transform the way online video is being delivered, but it has the potential to transform Google’s bottom line into something even more impressive than it already is.

Well, you may or may not have heard that Real has released a new RealPlayer — one that tries to shed its bloatware past, and tries to don some new lean, YouTube ripping, duds. Well, that’s what advance press has said about it anyway, in TechCrunch, Scoble, and the Wall Street Journal.

Interested in checking it out for yourself?

You’d be out of luck until the end of the month as alpha’s are hard to come by … unless you happen to read Deep Jive Interests, of course! :)

If you’re interested in checking out an alpha build of the “new” realplayer, which CNet describes as “impressive“, as it allows you to “download and organize nearly all embedded internet video content (Flash, WMV, QuickTime) including content from popular video sites like YouTube, Comedy Central, and of course, CNET” — this is what you need to do:

Leave a comment explaining what’s the very first embeded video you’d like save onto your hard drive that you never got the chance to do before.

Winners will be announced within a week (I promise).

Good luck, and start commenting!

It seems like the world of technology — the world that I write about and care about, anyway — has cruelly decided to explode in a supernova of news in the past 48 hours while I’ve been away at Mesh. Anyway, some thoughts on some of the larger bits of news over the past few days that I haven’t yet commented on — but will do so if I have the time.

• Google launched Google Gears, a plugin (how simple!) which allows people to take online data offline. I think that the importance of this release cannot be overestimated. Although Gears is a product that is agnostic with respect to particular web applications, clearly Google is positioning itself to move its own Google Applications offline. This has enormous consequences, and most importantly from the way that it positions Google as a direct competitor to Microsoft as it applies to Office products. With the way that its secretly building data centers and locking up dark fibre so that it can solidify its on-line offerings, Google is a behemoth that is moving and evolving faster than, I think, many can hardly imagine.
• Jason Calacanis launches Mahalo, a human-filtered search engine that seems to use a combination of Wikipedia, Google Search Results, and hand picked terms to populate its index. On one hand I can see the attraction for wanting to do this — common search tems can often get clouded by “irrelevant” stuff — on the other hand, I just don’t know what the objective is. Do they think they’re going to out-Google google? Are they trying to penetrate a niche market? If I want information on popular terms why not just go to Wikipedia? In any of those cases it becomes a branding issue — but Google *already* owns what people think of in terms of search, and Wikipedia *already* owns the concept of common ideas, things, places, people, and so on.
• Bill Gates and Steve Jobs shared a stage for the first time in recent memory — and it seems like people, such as Om Malik, think that it was the ever personable Jobs who was clearly the most memorable … for all kinds of reasons. Which brings me to a thought: what would ever happen to Apple if they lost Steve Jobs? No, seriously. Do they have any kind of insurance policy for that circumstance? What do you think Apple’s market cap would do *then*?
• EMI allows YouTube to broadcast its music videos and Apple officially releases DRM free music: Big sounding developments from the arena of copyright and legal wranglings — but as Ethan Kaplan pointed out yesterday about DRM-less music at Mesh, you wonder if its going to make much of a difference towards anything. DRM-less music is more appealing but it still has to compete with free music. YouTube can now allow people to release music videos from EMI’s library — but who watches music videos any more? No, seriously — who does? I’ll give my stock standing-on-the-fence type answer: “time will tell” … but it would be interesting if it didn’t make any difference at all in the long term.
• YouTube on AppleTV? Its happening, now. I can’t help but wonder if this is as lame as it sounds; on one hand it kind of makes sense — on the other, are people really going to be interested watching grainy 30 second clips of human inanity on their 40 / 50″ television screen? I mean its one thing to watch it if you’re in a constant state of partial attention (like at your PC multi-tasking), but its another to sit in front of your TV and do it — with nothing else niggling for your your attention.
• RealNetworks has released a new Real Player that will allow you to download almost any streaming format, from flash, to YouTube videos, to Real Media and Windows Media. I think the biggest hurdle they’re going to have is in the early adopter circles — not the technology itself. Real Media player was probably one of the first pieces of bloatware, coupled with a terrible consumer experience married to an ongoing contempt for what users seemingly want. And it lasted that way for years. Everyone knows it and everyone remembers it. But it seems like they’re doing what Dell has done — they’ve put a face to the company, they’ve started a blog and they’ve started admitting their mistakes. It’ll be interesting to see if it works, as there’s a lot of negativity about the brand — but certainly no more than Dell.
• Zooomr Mark III still isn’t up.