Live, from SF: YouTube’s Biggest Stars
YouTube, the video-sharing Web destination that has become a hit with viewers but has yet to find its business model with advertisers, will stage its first official live event at the end of this month and stream it live over a branded channel.
The two-hour event will begin live at 5 p.m. PST on Nov. 22 from Fort Mason Center in San Francisco and will commence streaming. The event, billed on the YouTube blog as “a celebration of the vibrant communities that exist on the site,” is slated to include some of the performers who have made it big via YouTube, along with some of the channel’s all-time favorite videos. Confirmed appearances include singers who have gotten their start on YouTube including Katy Perry, Soulja Boy Tell’em and Esmee Denters.
After the San Francisco event, a second YouTube Live show will begin streaming from Tokyo featuring artists and video creators who have proven popular in that market. The show will stream through the YouTube Live Tokyo site.
Tickets to see both the San Francisco and Tokyo shows live have sold out from the Web sites. And the company has released no word on future YouTube Live shows.
Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, stars of the Discovery Channel show “Mythbusters,” will also attend the YouTube Live San Francisco event to demonstrate a robot cannon that fires paint at a canvas to create a semblance of the Mona Lisa.
Also appearing at YouTube Live SF will be performers who started out in the real world but were greatly helped by building a following online, including hip-hop star Akon, whose song “Don’t Matter” has racked up 60 million views on YouTube since Feb. 2007, and Grammy Award-winning singer will.i.am, whose “Yes We Can” video, inspired by an Obama speech clip, has been seen 13.5 million times on the site since February 2008.
“For nearly three years the YouTube community has been defining pop culture and in the process has made the site both a place to find and be found,’ YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley said in announcing the lineup and sponsorships for the event. “YouTube at its core is a platform where everyone, from the famous to the seemingly unknown, shares a single stage, and YouTube Live is a physical manifestation of this idea.”
Other YouTube favorites slated to appear include both Tay Zonday, who made “Chocolate Rain” a 30-million view YouTube hit in 2007, and “Chad Vader,” whose videos depict the Star Wars Jedi as a convenience store day-shift manager and who did a popular cover of “Chocolate Rain.”
YouTube has said the roughly 50 entertainers signed for the even so far have amassed more than 2.5 billion online views for their videos.
Sponsors for the event include video game maker Activision, Lionsgate Films, airline Virgin America, and Flip Video. Activision will supply “Guitar Hero World Tour” kiosks for attendees. Virgin America reportedly will launch its new in-flight wireless Internet service by streaming the YouTube Live Webcast on a special “beta” flight above San Francisco on the night of Nov. 22.
Earlier this week YouTube introduced a “sponsored videos” ad product that will let video content owners buy keywords related to their clips. When users search for those keywords in Google, YouTube’s parent company, the sponsored videos will appear in a special section of the search results page, the same way sponsored text links do now. The platform will allow content producers to target their videos in the way pay-per-click marketers aim their ads at specific search audiences.
In efforts to turn its undoubted user popularity into marketer revenue, YouTube has recently introduced several other ad-related products on its site, including click-to-buy ads, pre-roll video ads and overlay ads within the video clips being watched.
The video portal, bought by Google for $1.6 billion in stock in 2006, reportedly took in ad revenue of $150 million in 2007 and has yet to show a profit.
