We receive a ton of tips every day from independent creators, unaffiliated with any major motion picture studios, television networks, new media studios, or other well-funded online video entities. The Indie Spotlight is where we’ll write about and shout out to a select few of them and bring you up to speed on the great (and sometimes not-so-great) attention-grabbing series you probably haven’t heard about until now. Read previous installments here.

As projects like Cool Freaks Wikipedia Club show, the Internet’s most popular free encyclopedia features a seemingly endless supply of interesting articles. The latest channel diving into the Wikipedia rabbit hole is Wendover Productions, which has translated unusual articles into an education web series called That Wikipedia List.

The database referenced in That Wikipedia List‘s title is this one, which catalogs hundreds of strange, unusual, and otherwise curious articles written by the site’s many editors. For each episode, Wendover selects a random article from the list and explores it in detail that goes far beyond what is written on Wikipedia. So far, in three episodes, viewers have learned about left-handed presidents, unclaimed Saharan territories, and, most recently, fake towns placed on maps in order to catch plagiarizing cartographers.

That Wikipedia List is valuable not just for the depth with which it navigates its subject, but also for the clarity it uses in presenting its topics. Each video in the series is oddly spellbinding; fire one up, and you’ll find yourself watching to the end, even if you thought you had no interest in the esoteric material Wendover is highlighting. Plus, once you’re done, you can head down into a Wikipedia rabbit hole of your own — and that activity has the potential to provide plenty of additional amusement.

OTHER UNDER-THE-RADAR SERIES TO CHECK OUT

• Fully Engaged. A couple navigates all of the zany hurdles between their engagement and their marriage.
• Third Wheel. A writer moves in with an engaged couple. Hilarity ensues.
• Living Thru The Lens. This series examines the Millennial obsession with cell phones.

Got a series you’d like to see featured in the Indie Spotlight? Be sure to contact us here. For best coverage, please include a full episode in your e-mail.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Indie Spotlight, News by Sam Gutelle
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The rise of late night TV content on YouTube is a powerful and much documented trend, much to the chagrin of some online video content creators. In order to dive into late night TV’s digital presence, The Hollywood Reporter used data from YouTube to determine which host scored the most views in March 2016. Spoiler alert: It was Jimmy Fallon.

Fallon, who has been largely responsible for the rise in late night YouTube content since launching an official Late Night channel in 2012, scored 233 million views in March; according to The Hollywood Reporter, a September 2015 video starring Ariana Grande did a lot of the heavy lifting. Jimmy Kimmel Live’s 154 million views were good for second place, though The Late Late Show with James Corden was not far behind with 127 million views. Despite only hosting his show for a year, Corden has already become a big draw on YouTube thanks in large part to his Carpool Karaoke series.

When the late night YouTube channels are measured by watch time, a different picture emerges. Fallon is still king, but John Oliver, who entices viewers with long-form videos that dive deep into contentious issues, is right behind him. Here, via The Hollywood Reporter, is the chart in question.

These numbers show the contrasting styles late night hosts use as they attempt to engage their respective audiences. Fallon, whose Tonight Show channel adds several new videos each day, is winning with sheer volume, but Oliver’s consistent schedule and highly-engaging delivery is a winning strategy as well. Plus, with other late night hosts, such as Stephen Colbert, beginning to build their own digital empires, the same chart could look very different in the coming months.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, News, Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon by Sam Gutelle
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A BuzzFeed live stream just exploded on Facebook. The viral content company drew more than 800,000 concurrent viewers to a broadcast in which two of its employees wrapped rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded. That makes BuzzFeed’s “Watch us explode this watermelon one rubber band at a time!” the most concurrent viewed Facebook Live video of all time.

BuzzFeed isn’t the first channel to pull of the exploding watermelon trick. The Slow Mo Guys accomplished the same feat in a video they released on their channel in 2012. BuzzFeed can take credit, however, for turning their fruit-based shenanigans into April 8th’s must-watch live event. As viewers flooded onto the company’s Facebook channel, the stream’s comment section filled up with predictions about the number of rubber bands it would take to finally pop the watermelon. The ultimate total: 690.

Here’s an on-demand version of the stream. At the time of this post, it has already counted over 19,000 likes, 321,000 comments, and 3.9 million views:

 
 
The watermelon stream isn’t just the latest example of BuzzFeed’s impeccable knack for creating viral content. It’s also a shining example of the potential power of Facebook’s video technology. The social media giant recently tweaked its algorithm to promote live video and recruited celebrity partners to post their own streams in exchange for an undisclosed share of the profits. On April 6th, for instance, Facebook rolled out several new features for its live product, and founder Mark Zuckerberg also hinted at stronger monetization options for creators who choose to distribute their streaming content through his site.

The BuzzFeed video is evidence that Facebook can deliver massive reach for its partners. The only requirements are an active page, a pair of diligent employees, and a lot of rubber bands.

Filed under: Articles, Buzzfeed, Featured, News by Sam Gutelle
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[Editor’s Note: Tubefilter Charts is a new weekly rankings column from Tubefilter with data provided by OpenSlate. It’s exactly what it sounds like; a top number ranking of YouTube channels based on statistics collected within a given timeframe. You can check out all of our Tubefilter Charts – with new installments every week – right here.] 

Scroll down for the Tubefilter Chart.

It’s another installment of the Top 100 Most Viewed YouTube Channels Worldwide and Justin Bieber maintained the top spot, but just barely.

Chart Toppers

Justin Bieber held onto his channel’s #1 spot on the worldwide chart this month, but it wasn’t by much. The 22-year-old international pop star’s online music video catalog’s popularity is still massive, but it’s waning. The Biebs’ YouTube channel dropped 10% in views in March to bottom out at just above 646.2 million. Next up is Ryan ToysReview in a very, very close second place. The family-friendly channel featuring a playful six-year-old boy and his favorite toys ended the month less than a million views behind Justin Bieber at more than 645.2 million.

In the #3 spot is still WWE. World Wrestling Entertainment’s YouTube destination jumped up 5% in the 31 days of march to take home more than 613.2 million views. In fourth place yet again is FamilyFunPack. The home videos of America’s favorite suburban family of seven racked up over 543.4 million views on the month.

And rounding out the Top 5 is T-Series. The YouTube channel of the self-proclaimed number one music label in India saw an 11% bump to end the month with nearly 506.8 million views.

Top Gainers

The honor of one of our our Top Gainers this month goes to ToyMonster.

The seemingly U.S.-based channel with a solid handle on the Korean language and culture is the latest in an ever-growing line of WTF?!?, family-friendly YouTube channels climbing up the Tubefilter Charts. The anonymous uploads feature a set of adult hands playing around with slime, candy, Play Doh, jello, or some other malleable or viscous substance that covers the full Roy G. Biv color palette. It’s part DisneyCollectorBR and part Blue’s Clues. And it gets a ton of views.

Uploads to the channel like “How To Make Colors Jelly Slime Clay DIY Rainbow Slime Syringer Toy Learn Colors” receive unbelievable eight-figure view counts and helped ToyMonster to a 235% month-over-month increase in views, more than 276.4 million views on the month, and the #23 spot on the worldwide chart.

Channel Distribution

The Top 100 Most Viewed YouTube channels this month amassed in aggregate a total of 23,404,416,923 views. Here’s a look at the distribution of those channels broken down by the most-represented YouTube Multi-Channel Networks on the chart:

• VEVO: 18 channels in the Top 100. Justin Bieber is the network’s highest ranking channel at #1.
• Maker Studios: 10 channels in the Top 100, with TheDiamondMinecart at #12.
• BroadbandTV: 3 channels in the Top 100, with Fernanfloo at #56.
• Studio71: 3 channels in the Top 100, with FamilyFunPack at #4.
• AIR, BuzzFeed, Machinima, Movieclips, OhMyGenius, Studio71, XMediaDigital: 2 channels each in the Top 100, with AIR’s Miss Katy at #15, BuzzFeed’s BuzzFeed Video at #18, Machinima’s JuegaGerman at #75, Movieclips’ Movieclips Trailers at #46, OhMyGenius’ Kids TV at #82, Studio71’s FamilyFunPack at #4, and XMediaDigital’s mashamedvedtv at #8.

And here’s a look into the distribution of the this month’s Top 100 by country of origin:

• The United States: 48 channels in the Top 100.
• Great Britain: 8 channels in the Top 100.
• Canada, India, Spain: 5 channels each in the Top 100.
• Japan: 4 channels in the Top 100.
• Brazil, Russia, Thailand: 3 channels each in the Top 100.
• South Korea, Ukraine: 2 channels each in the Top 100.
• Argentina, Chile, Denmark, El Salvador, Ireland, Jamaica, Jordan, Netherlands, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Sweden, Turkey: 1 channel each in the Top 100.

As always, keep up to speed with the latest Tubefilter Charts and all of our news at Tubefilter by following us on Twitter, becoming a fan on Facebook, and watching our videos on YouTube.

OpenSlate is a video content analytics platform that tracks more than 800,000 YouTube video channels and measures their ability to attract, engage and influence an audience. By providing one consistent measure of quality – the SlateScore™ – OpenSlate helps marketers, producers and agencies hone their online video marketing strategy.

Filed under: Articles, News, statistics, Statistics, YouTube, Youtube Chart by Joshua Cohen
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Homestar Runner, once a preeminent and influential series in the web video space, has recently been limited to a few sporadic uploads from its creators, The Brothers Chaps. For their latest videos, the brothers have revived one of their former segments and delivered a 30-minute string of answering machine messages.

A recurring feature on the Homestar Runner website was Marzipan’s Answering Machine, in which the titular character — the main cast’s only woman and one of its few voices of reason — combed through the messages she had received from the series’ kookier personalities. The most recent Answering Machine episode came out in 2009; that is, until The Brothers Chaps brought it back with a new segment that arrived on April Fools’ Day.

In clearing out her answering machine for the first time in seven years, Marzipan has a lot of emails to go through, and the result is the longest video released by the Homestar Runner team to date. It is a half-hour of running jokes, comedic twists, and pop culture references that span the first half of the 2010s. Here, check it out for yourself:

For those who us who loved Homestar Runner back when it updated regularly, the 30-minute episode is essentially Christmas on April Fools’ Day. It certainly provides enough impetus to spend the rest of the day on a trip down nostalgia lane, and viewers who crave The Brothers Chaps more recent work can also check out Two More Eggs, the web series they created for Disney XD.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, News, Web Series by Sam Gutelle
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Netflix’s global expansion looks to be shaping up rather nicely in the UK.

According to a study by research group Enders Anaylsis, Netflix gained 1.8 million new accounts in the UK last year to amass a total subscriber base of 5.2 million. This means that subscribers grew at a rate of about 37%. Netflix’s 1.8 million subscribers is more than the 1.3 million subscribers garnered by all of its competitors combined in 2015, including Sky, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk.

But Netflix’s explosive growth in the UK — where it launched in 2012 — has not yet hurt linear TV providers, according to The Hollywood Reporter, which says that many SVOD subscribers overlap with pay-TV subscribers there.

Netflix has more than 75 million total users today — 45 million of which are in the US, and 30 million internationally.

Enders also took a look at the growth of services like Amazon Prime and YouTube in the UK. Prime, which counted 1.6 million total UK users last quarter “looks set to balloon” in 2016, according to Enders, as a result of British broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson (formerly of BBC’s Top Gear), who is set to headline a highly anticipated though as-yet-unnamed motoring show. Amazon Prime is also poised for growth, says Enders, given that Amazon accounts for 24% of all UK e-commerce.

And there are 35 million monthly unique YouTube users in the UK, according to Enders — though this figure skews strongly toward millennials. “Those 55 and older will take longer to move beyond catch-up TV to embrace a wider range of VOD options,” according to the firm.

Filed under: Articles, Netflix, News, Statistics by Geoff Weiss
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In February, YouTube revealed its plan to bring back its NextUp program in a big way. The contest, which provides monetary assistance and production resources to aspiring content creators, has long served as one of YouTube’s strongest tools for identifying and supporting up-and-coming talent on its platform.

Now, the 51 US and UK creators who will be included in this year’s NextUp class have been identified. According to a YouTube blog post, hundreds of channel owners sent in applications, but in the end, only a select few were chosen for the program. While the average YouTube viewer is unlikely to recognize most of the selected creators (that’s the point), there are a few familiar names on the list. Rikki Poynter, for example, has made a name for herself as one of the Internet’s most prominent deaf videomakers, while Mike Boyd’s self-teaching videos have gained him his own share of Internet attention.

The NextUp winners will gain access to a “creator camp” that will take place at YouTube Spaces around the globe. They’ll also earn a $2,500 voucher they can put toward production equipment, and they’ll receive tutelage from previous NextUp winners like Blogilates, Marcus Butler and Jack & Dean — all of whom have gone on to make it big on YouTube.

The 51 US and UK NextUp winners will be joined by hundreds more who will be recruited in cities where YouTube Spaces are located. In total, 360 creators are expected to be included in the program. Next up in NextUp is Tokyo, where applications are currently being accepted. Contests in Sao Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Toronto, and Mumbai will follow in the coming months.

Photo of Rikki Poynter by SullyZen.

Filed under: Articles, Featured, News, NextUp, YouTube by Sam Gutelle
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Just as talent managers entered the digital space to guide the careers of influencers who unwittingly rose to celebrity out of their bedrooms, a similar movement is apparently happening among their canine counterparts.

The Dog Agency, reports The Wall Street Journal, is one of the first talent management agency for influencer pets — many of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers across social media and high-profile marketers clamoring to collaborate.

The Dog Agency was founded by Harvard Law grad and entrepreneur Loni Edwards, who is mother to a famous pooch of her own, Chloe (with 126,000 followers on Instagram). For the most part, famous dogs seem to be finding their groove on Instagram, and Edwards’ current clients include The Dogist, French bulldog sisters Piggy and Polly, and goldendoodle Samson. Thus far, she has inked deals with Google, Merck, PetSmart, Ritz-Carlton, and Dyson, and is currently negotiating deals with Nikon and Equinox, she says.

Edwards told the Journal that she founded the agency after noting that many owners of popular pets had neither the time nor the business savvy to manage the burgeoning careers of their animal companions. And while it’s surely not as much as human influencers, animals can still command a pretty penny. Dogs with between 150,000 and 250,000 Instagram followers can receive upwards of $3,000 for a single post — of which Edwards says she takes a standard cut.

“With dogs, you’re reaching men, women, kids, grandparents. They just have this wide appeal,” Edwards said. And as marketing vehicles, the dogs — being blissfully ignorant of their growing fame — aren’t necessarily perceived as selling out. “People don’t treat them as ads. The dogs are creating content, which is what they like to do.”

Filed under: Articles, Industry, News by Geoff Weiss
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