After 5 years of sharing videos, YouTube is the undisputed heavy-weight champion of the LOL world. Everything from video marketing to funny personal videos make their rounds through YouTube at a breakneck pace on a second-by-second basis.

This infographic below compiled by Website Monitoring and found via Viral Blog puts all of the tremendous information that went along with building the site over five years into perspective.

Will YouTube be here for another 5 years? When it comes to the Internet, there’s never a notion of “too big to fail”. Just ask AOL or MySpace, two giants that are having to change their very fabric as a company despite nothing but blue skies at one point in their existence.

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Find more amazing data on this Social Media Blog.

A new segment of the Social Blade Show was launched this week. The “Social Blitz” portion of the show goes over some of the news from the week in social media in a short, overview-based report. Here’s the first. What do you think?

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Read more about social media on this Social Media Blog.

This video from Social Blade Theater is a quite hilarious. As a fictional depiction of Tom Anderson from MySpace joining and trying out Facebook, this video takes an offbeat look at the competition between social media giants.

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See more funny social media happenings on this Social Media Blog.

YouTube has been a valid social media marketing tool for a long time. Many companies are now starting to realize this. Others are starting to re-realize this.

Here is an example by Bacardi. The video itself is from 2007, but they are re-introducing it and its Halloween theme this month. It works on so many levels and fails on one level. First, the video:

First, the successes…

It Tells a Story

The last thing you want to do as a business trying to advertise a brand or a product is talk about the brand or product from the beginning. People are leaving television and getting more and more of their media intake through video sites like YouTube because the venue allows a level of non-marketing control. Sure, there are advertisements that pop up during videos, but for the most part they are normally advertising free. It’s everything Tivo offers without having to wait for shows to come on. You control, and that’s why you love it.

This video starts us off with some important elements:

• A clear setup (she’s going to a Halloween party and she isn’t dressing up)
• Suspense (dark neighborhood, creepy cab driver who takes note that she isn’t dressed up, plus the bunny man gives it a Kubrick-feel)
• Twist (nobody seems to be there, plus there seem to be a lot of bats around)

Branding is There, but doesn’t Interfere

Just as with television, the best branding is what happens when you aren’t being advertised to. In other words, the Bacardi logo on the top of the cab is all the branding the video needed until the end/outtro.

There are two ways to do this. Bacardi chose to be subtle and that fit perfectly with the tone of the video. The other way is to plaster branding throughout, almost making it comical. This is risky, but if the video is interesting enough, it can be forgiven.

Perfection in the “Casting”

• The main character is an attractive (but not overly so) woman, mature, and looks great in her “costume”.
• Her date is suave and mysterious, but has a goofiness about him that he displays upon entering the scene.
• The guy who plays the cabbie has a future as a cabbie if he doesn’t make it as an actor. He may have been a cabbie before acting. Perfection.

Look, Feel, Sound

This part couldn’t have been done any better. They picked the right scenes from the dark changing room to the roads to the venue for the party. They all fit in well with the tone of the video, yet still have an “excellence” about them to give viewers the feeling that this situation is not normal. The rooftop scene, the dancing, the bar… it all meshes.

The sound throughout is excellent. Not much more can be said. The right music, right buzzing at the right time; it all comes together nicely.

The Only Flaw

While the delivery was strong, the end could have been better. It works as a strong commercial but loses its ability to go viral by not having a quirky twist after the twist. For example, once it was revealed that the party was real, the bats were fake, and the man was just wearing a mask, he could have looked at the camera at the end, displayed fangs, and had his eyes glow, letting us know that she was really in danger all along.

Bacardi decided to keep it real and go after straight-forward marketing, and that’s perfectly fine. It holds down the viral, emailable, Tweetable aspect, but otherwise makes for a pretty decent push towards making a strong video for branding and promotion.

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Read more about Viral Marketing on this blog.

I just don’t get it. Movie executives must have all gathered in a room and declared, “If there’s anything on YouTube that may entice people to go to the theater or buy our movies, we should make sure to pull those down.”

It started with random wanderings through some social media site when I noticed Cinema’s 10 Best One-Man Wrecking Machines. I love lists. I love movies. Sounds like fun.

There was a video embedded that I wanted to see. Pumped, I clicked play.

In all, 3 of the 10 videos had been removed.  While I understand that fighting online piracy is important and I am one of the minority who does not support illegal downloads, YouTube is a different beast. People will spend more time watching videos online than checking emails in 2009. We like videos. We like previews. We like to see clips.

For movie studios, it’s advertising. Free advertising. In my situation, I would have probably been pumped up enough about the fight scene in Serenity to go out and rent or purchase this obscure (but strangely awesome) sci-fi film.  Instead, I’m annoyed.

For someone who hadn’t seen the movie before who saw it ranked in there with The Matrix, Gladiator, and Kill Bill, perhaps they would have watched the video and chosen to buy it.  Now, they can’t, at least not as a result of that particular article.

Recently the Alice in Wonderland Trailer hit YouTube. Disney deleted it. Are you kidding me? Were they embarrassed? Is it that bad that they wouldn’t want to take advantage of the tremendous buzz that it was getting? These types of actions make me weep for an industry that does not seem to understand what to fight and what to promote.

Leaving the videos up would have allowed millions of people to potentially get excited about it. Traditional buzz is great, but anyone who believes that traditional buzz is hampered by social media buzz just can’t see past 1998.

If it were me running the marketing for a movie, I would want every single stinkin’ eyeball imaginable to be watching every single stinkin’ clip available via YouTube, blogs, and other sites. If people made a mashup of it, I’d help promote them. If the trailer leaked, I’d push it. Heck, I would probably leak the trailer myself. YouTube can be shared. When you see a trailer on television, you can’t call your buddy and say, “Watch TV until the trailer for Alice in Wonderland comes on again!”

You can, however, tweet a link to the YouTube or blog post about the trailer to hundreds, thousands, even millions of people.

You can email it, IM it, blog about it, embed it, whatever.

I have a friend who runs a movie blog who will not post videos from certain movie studios because he’s been burnt too many times with copyright yanks.

Movie execs, if any of you are reading this (it’s the Internet, I know, so chances are slim that you are), please think about it. It’s a no-brainer.

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Read more on this social media blog.

With the help of extremely ambitious and clever fan clubs, Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” video is on the brink of hitting 100,000,000 views.  It is moving so fast that by the time you’re reading this, it’s probably already in the exclusive 9-digit league.

Just a few months ago, “Evolution of Dance” had held the top spot for a long time.  While it will still reach 100 million, it won’t be able to do it before Girlfriend.

What does this say about the state of YouTube?  Of buzz marketing?  Of the Internet in general?  Not much, but it’s a milestone that nobody has reached before (legally) and should be noted.

Some will scream that the record was fabricated, that her fan clubs using questionable techniques to pad the numbers was a breach of YouTube’s Community Guidelines.  Whether that is the case or not is up for debate, but in the end, isn’t that what YouTube is supposed to be about?  It’s a way for people to share videos.  Whether they are aggressively sharing them or not isn’t the important part.

All that is important at this point is the achievement.  Way to go, fans!

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Read more about viral marketing on this blog.

What do John Edwards, the Chinese Olympic Gymnastics Team, and certain fans of Avril Lavigne have in common?

They all may be involved in cheating.

The difference is, the Avril Lavigne fans haven’t technically cheated.  They used “cheating” to promote a viral marketing campaign.  So far, it’s worked.  They’re now #1.

For a long, long time, the innovative and clever “Evolution of Dance” video has held the top spot as the most watched video ever on YouTube.  It features a man, Judson Laipply, performing a dance routine on stage that is, as many have called it, absolutely brilliant.  In 6 minutes and through cuts of 35 songs, Laipply makes up for questionable dance skills with a creative blend of humor and physical exertion.  The end result is something completely original, though it has been copied many times over recent years.

Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend video is a music video.  It is somewhat provocative, which helped it to acquire its initial blast of 50 million+ views, but overall, it is nothing exceptional.  Don’t tell that to the fans who are trying to propel it to 100,000,000 views faster than any other video.  One way or another, they plan on pushing the video over the top.

Already, the video has taken the top spot.  Currently, it has 97,462,978 compared to Laipply’s 96,188,641.  Was there an influx of Avril Lavigne fans who have stumbled upon the video?  No.  AvrilBandAids.com created a way to “cheat” the YouTube system by refreshing the video every 15 seconds.  When fans opened a browser with the page on it, they would, in theory, help promote the video by “viewing” it over 5,000 times per day.

Several major online publications picked up on the “cheat” and cried foul.  What they didn’t know was that YouTube caps its views per IP to 200 per day.  That wouldn’t have been enough to push the video over the top.  Luckily for AvrilBandAids, their goal wasn’t to cheat to the top.  They pretended to cheat to get publicity for the site, thus pushing it to the top virally.

In other words, they used the reporting of the cheating to do the cheating for them.  The publicity was enough to push it closer to 100,000,000 and passed the champ.

While I don’t necessarily approve of the tactics, you have to admit that the effort itself was pretty darn clever.

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Read more about Viral Marketing on this blog.

***UPDATE***

Posted in a comment on the Digg submission of this story was a link to a video explaining it all.  Thank you, alpinedigital!

It’s time to run down to the nearest electronics store and grab a video camera while they’re still available.  Many of the businesses who haven’t been posting videos to YouTube will be jumping on the bandwagon soon.

There were 34 news stories listed on Google news for January 17th and 18th, 2007, stemming from the latest comScore video metrix results that have Google video sites owning over 31% of the online video market.  YouTube accounts for a huge portion of that.

Alexa data shows over 18% of Internet users worldwide visit YouTube, while Compete data has YouTube approaching 60 million visitors a month.

Perhaps most importantly, Google, Yahoo!, and some other search engines are starting to give very strong rankings to videos in their natural search results, especially those from YouTube.

All of these things point to one conclusion: the rise of video spam.

Marketing firms are already rushing to market with new products that center around YouTube.  Commercials, testimonials, interviews, product demonstrations — if it can somehow be put on a video and marketed to the public, it will be.  The industry is lucrative, with some companies asking for thousands of dollars to put videos (supplied by the customer) on YouTube and other video sites.  They promise massive exposure and search engine domination.

The only problem (other than the fact that it takes anywhere from a couple of minutes to a few hours to do what it takes to get a video on YouTube and optimized for particular keywords) is that viewers won’t be clicking on them for long.  There will be a spattering of interest, especially for useful things like product reviews, but eventually, we’ll go back to looking for extreme video crashes, Family Guy clips, and normal people doing abnormal things.

The effectiveness of the campaigns will pass, but the spam will continue for a while.

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Read more stories about YouTube and other social websites at the soshable homepage.