Statistics and Ethnography of YouTube

by Nalts on August 15, 2008

Have you discovered Mediated Cultures (Digital Ethnography by Kansas State University)? Professor Michael Wesch spoke at the Library of Congress, and posted his video of the presentation here. I haven’t been through the whole thing because I didn’t see Nalts in the index. Hah. It’s funny because it’s true. But I did see that Bnessel does appear.

I ran into the blog while trying to research some recent stats about YouTube. While on the crapper this morning, I read in Streaming Media that YouTube streamed 3.8 billion videos and was trying to compute the “market share” my ~1.6 monthly million views. The math confused me and my calculator, so I decided instead to take solace that I represent more than 1% of what Hulu got that month.

Welsch also writes about something called Aethetic Arrest, which is a tricky concept that I won’t even try to summarize. But you know I arrest you with my aesthetics, don’t you? Especially when I find out my daughter just got ear rings yesterday without my having a say in it (video below).

I really like it when people use literary or philosophical terms to describe YouTube videos. It’s such a weird mix. I had someone approach me after my presentation at a Yahoo conference in Toronto and characterize my videos, and now I can’t even remember the words she used (something about bringing absurdity to the benine, but benine isn’t even a word… Maryland, what did she mean?). It reminded me of when we used to study literature in school and I was pretty convinced we were thinking way deeper about the work than the author ever did.

Then she explained to me that the art and the analysis of the art are two different things. And that made sense to me at the time. Except for the fact that she referred to my crap as art. Sorry I’m still in shock about the ear rings.

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