You Can Now Get '15 Minutes of Fame' with YouTube videos
Andy Warhol said in 1968 that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Well, you can now get “15 minutes of fame” on YouTube.
Joshua Siegel, Product Manager, Upload and Video Management, today announced on the Official YouTube Blog “We’ve increased the upload limit to 15 minutes.”
You may wonder “why now?” — the upload limit for non-partners has been 10 minutes since March 26, 2006.
According to Siegel, “Well, we’ve spent significant resources on creating and improving our state-of-the-art Content ID system and many other powerful tools for copyright owners. Now, all of the major U.S. movie studios, music labels and over 1,000 other global partners use Content ID to manage their content on YouTube. Because of the success of these ongoing technological efforts, we are able to increase the upload limit today.”
Now, what can you do with the new 15-minute limit that you couldn’t do with the old 10-minute limit? Even “Justin Bieber – Baby ft. Ludacris,” the most viewed video of all time on YouTube, is only 3 minutes and 45 seconds long.
And TubeMogul research in December 2008 found that most videos steadily lose viewers once “play” is clicked, with an average 10.39 percent of viewers clicking away after 10 seconds and 53.56 percent leaving after one minute.
So, be careful with your new 15 minutes of fame. That extra 5 minutes may not get viewed — if it doesn’t inform or inspire your viewers.
On the other hand, people can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, discover new artists and filmmakers, and even uncover the quirky and unusual — without stopping at the old 10-minute limit.
For example, during SES New York 2008, John Mulligan of SEO-PR interviewed Jason Calacanis, the keynote speaker, who then gave the first public demo of My Mahalo. We ended up with 11 minutes and 20 seconds of newsworthy video content, but had to break it into the two videos that you see below.
My Mahalo Launch with Jason Calacanis
As you can see, the first video got 1,657 views, but the second video got only 568 views. So, being able to create a video that was longer than 10 minutes but shorter than 15 minutes would have helped people see all the video content — if they had wanted to see all the video content. They would have still been able to stop viewing at any time.
The same is true with other categories of video. It’s still important to capture special moments on video — and enable users to discover and share compelling video content. But now personal video creators such as cooking, beauty, health and fitness experts; aspiring and professional musicians; amateur and established filmmakers; comedians; and professional content owners can choose to create 15-minute videos — when the content can’t be easily cut or when they’re telling a shaggy dog story.
At SES San Francisco — during Connected Marketing Week — Jonathan Allen, the Director of Search Engine Watch, Baljeet Singh, the Senior Product Manager of YouTube and the Google Content Network, and I will be analyzing and auditing attendee web sites during the two-hour Video Lab. (Think “crowd-sourcing consultancy” sessions in a live classroom environment.)
Feel free to ask us about what you can do with YouTube’s new 15-minute limit.