The Annoying Orange Web show has taken YouTube by storm. The YouTube channel has well over 1 billion views and more than 2 million subscribers. Dane Boedigheimer, the creator of the phenomenon, recently spoke with WebProNews about the viral sensation and its television deal.
Boedigheimer, who is more commonly known as “Daneboe,” told us that he had created several one-off talking food episodes prior to the launch of Annoying Orange. He expected Annoying Orange to follow the same trend, but instead, it took off.
Boedigheimer credits a large part of the success of Annoying Orange to their efforts on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook page has over 10 million “likes” and the pages for individual characters have many fans as well. Twitter is also a key tool for the show since users can read what are, essentially, mini episodes from the various Twitter accounts set up.
What’s more, the show captured the attention of the Cartoon Network. The TV series is set to air in June, but the Web show will continue. Boedigheimer told us that he hopes the shows will work together and push traffic to each other.
He is excited about the future and said his team will continue to create consistent content.
Have you jumped onto the “Annoying Orange” bandwagon? We’d love to know.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Mar 3rd, 2012. 
Last year, YouTube announced several partnerships with media and production companies in an effort to bolster original programming on its site. One of the new partners, the Young Hollywood Network (YHN), launched last month and is finding that YouTube is quickly turning into a “destination viewing” site.
WebProNews spoke with RJ Williams, CEO and Founder of YHN, who told us that this trend is happening since YouTube now has its own exclusive content. As a result, more people are watching the content and the engagement level is higher.
The YHN channel focuses on the entertainment industry and includes exclusive celebrity interviews and behind-the-scene footage. Williams told us the network has a new show six days a week at 10am PST/1pm EST.
Although the channel is new, Williams said the results have been phenomenal and that YHN plans to continue to please viewers with its content.
What do you think of YouTube’s plan and all the new channels? Let us know.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Feb 14th, 2012.
On April 29th, the world of social media will explode when the latest Royal Wedding takes place. The soon-to-be nuptials of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, which takes place at Westminster Abbey, is the first Royal Wedding to take advantage of the Internet and the forecast is easy to predict.
There will be a run on Royal Wedding related Twitter hash tags, Facebook will explode with posts from ladies who dream of being in Middleton’s place, and of course, YouTube and Google will be in on the fun as well. In fact, YouTube will be streaming the event live, and some publications think the video king of the Internet could see viewership records broken as people flock together around mobile devices and laptops everywhere, eager to get a glimpse at the attractive couple.
It almost reminds one of a family gathering around the radio; however, in order to capture it correctly for this generation, instead of a black and white photograph, the medium would be a mash-up video of various people watching the event on their computer. With that in mind, it’s hard not to picture the video looking like a Chatroulette session.
Currently, there’s a countdown page on YouTube’s page for the Royal Family — the Royal Channel, naturally enough — reminding us that currently, only six days and 12 hours remain until the most anticipated wedding of the 21st century, considering the massive amounts of hype, anyway, kicks off. Interested YouTube members can upload best wishes and congratulatory videos if they so choose, which is the 21st century version of signing the wedding book:
YouTube’s page for the Royal Wedding also features the Buckingham-Palace-to-Westminster-Abbey procession route the couple will travel, making use of Google Maps in order to do so. There’s already a Google Earth-powered video of the route, which was previously discussed by WebProNews:
As for the records in doubt, as pointed out by The Vancouver Sun, the previous viewer record for a live stream was set when approximately 30 million viewers watched the YouTube Symphony Orchestra concert. If the whole world is indeed watching this wedding, creative license-ly speaking, of course, then that number should fall quite easily.
YouTube’s coverage starts an hour before the Royal Wedding does, giving users ample time to get their drink orders in and fulfilled.
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Filed under Internet Marketing by on Apr 23rd, 2011.
As the desire for user-generated content continues to climb, we are going to see more and more of this kind of thing: Celebrities using social media services like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, allowing their fans to get closer to them, at least in a technological sense. Unfortunately, there are still legal issues if you want to get physically closer to the object of your idolatry.
In this case, we have Lady Gaga, and in order to allow her fans increased access, she’s teamed up with YouTube, allowing members to ask Gaga questions via her official YouTube page. There is, of course, an introductory video with Gaga inviting her fans to participate:
As indicated, questions are submitted on Gaga’s page, or, users can submit a video if they so choose. Fans can also vote on which question they’d like to see answered, which helps further the idea of the importance of user-generated content, especially when it comes to marketing in this technological era.
MTV has some more details about Gaga’s interview process, saying, “In addition to the video network, fans can tweet their questions using the hashtag #GoogleGoesGaga. Fans have until the end of the day Friday to submit their entries.”
The only thing missing from Gaga’s current fan engagement is the use of Facebook for the interview process. Maybe next time. Head on over to Gaga’s YouTube page, or hop on Twitter with the appropriate hash tag if you’d like to further the journey into Gaga’s mind. The first person to get a successful answer to the “Are you simply are product of marketing or are you a legitimate artist?” question, preferably with an in-depth, revealing response, wins.
Filed under Internet Technology by on Mar 17th, 2011.
Does the New Twitter Provide Mass Appeal?
This week, Twitter introduced a new redesign of Twitter.com with a two-pane format aimed at providing a richer user experience, and you can easily tell by looking at it that it does just that.
“Twitter has always been about getting a lot in a little,” says CEO Evan Williams. “The constraint of 140 characters drives conciseness and lets you quickly discover and share what’s happening. Yet, we’ve learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn’t always fit into 140 characters or less.”
Twitter has partnered with Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, Twitgoo, TwitPic, Twitvid, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube to make tweeted content more useful directly from Twitter.com itself. Users will have less reason to click away from the site.
The first pane is essentially the single pane from today’s Twitter – the timeline. In the second pane, referred to as the “details pane”, users will see additional info related to the author or subject of a tweet, when clicked. This pane will also display things like @replies, other tweets from that user, maps, videos, photos, etc. Users can click the @username to see profiles from the same page.
Making Twitter more appealing to the mainstream means greater value for businesses and marketers.
Ex-Twitter engineer Alex Payne, who parted ways with the company after failing to see eye to eye with executives on the direction Twitter needed to go in, had some interesting things to say about the redesign.
“While Twitter has been growing in mainstream significance and popularity, it hasn’t managed to adopt a strategy that clearly aims the company towards mass market success,” he writes. “I think #newtwitter changes that, turning the site into a rich information discovery platform, if you’ll excuse the buzzword bingo. The new design is a pleasure to use, and encourages a kind of deep exploration of the data within Twitter that has previously only been exposed in bits and pieces by third-party applications. Browsing Twitter is now as rewarding as communicating with it.”
“One of the striking things about new twitter is how clearly it’s designed to allow room for advertisements and promotions,” adds Payne. “As an early employee who heard a lot of internal discussion about monetization strategies that eschewed the typical Silicon Valley ad play, Twitter’s accelerating turn towards that business model is, on some level, a little disappointing. But as a stockholder and someone who wants to see the company survive and succeed, it’s clearly the most pragmatic way for Twitter to capitalize on its substantial and growing network. Ads have their role in the wheel of commerce, and just as Google’s text ads are more palatable than most forms of advertising, Twitter’s approach could end up being eminently tolerable, even useful.”
Search and the New Twitter
Danny Sullivan has a great article about the impact the Twitter redesign could have on search. This is obviously a key element for businesses to consider. Among his points:
1. The search box becomes more prominent.
2. More filtering options
3. “Save this search” becomes more prominent
4. Infinite scrolling on search results
5. People and company results more clearly separated
6. Tweets Near You feature
7. Tweets with Links feature
8. Searches for retweets by others, retweets by you, and your tweets, retweeted
How Will Users React Once its Rolled Out?
The changes will be rolling out over the next several weeks as a preview. During this period, users will be able to switch back and forth between the new design and the old one, though frankly I can’t see any advantage to using the old one.
Redesigns typically get some amount of user backlash, and this will be probably fall in line with that tradition, but this particular redesign has some advantages. For one, many Twitter users are already using apps rather than Twitter.com anyway. Secondly, Twitter has left a lot of people wondering what the point of the service is. This has been a problem since it launched. This will help people understand its value more.
Now, if Twitter could just get those Fail Whales under control…
Filed under Breaking News by on Sep 19th, 2010.
