Directed by Joshua Caldwell (Layover, South Beach), the untitled comedy-drama from tells the story of Jordan Jay (played by Espinosa), a teen pop star who just wants to lead a normal life. Jordan abandons his sold-out tour and runs away to a small town where he meets Emily, a girl described in a release as “a rebellious street artist who wants nothing to do with [Jordan].” CDS Films’ upcoming title also co-stars Sarah Jeffery (Shades of Blue), Tava Smiley (General Hospital), Caitlin Keats (Kill Bill: Vol 2), LaMonica Garrett (Sons of Anarchy), and Allison Paige (The Lizzie Bennet Diaries).
CDS Films is producing and provided financing for the upcoming feature. Espinosa is executive producing alongside CDS’s Jeff Levin. Angelique Hanus and CDS’s Gary Binkow and Amee McNaughton are co-producing, while Lamar Damon (Bunheads) will pen the project.
Espinosa grew to social media popularity thanks to his Vine account, where he posts short comedy sketches. The 18-year-old Virginia native currently boasts over six million followers and more than one billion video loops on that platform alone. In addition to Vine, Espinosa also claims over two million subscribers on his YouTube channel and more than 3.4 million followers on Twitter.
[Editor’s Note: Tubefilter Charts is a 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 time frame. Check out all of our Tubefilter Charts with new installments every week right here.]
Scroll down for this week’s Tubefilter Chart.
It’s another installment of the weeklyTubefilter Chartof theTop 50 Most Viewed U.S. YouTube Channelsand no one can seem to stop a particular 21-year-old pop star’s YouTube dominance.
Chart Toppers
Justin Bieber maintained his spot on the top of the U.S. chart for the fifth week in a row thanks to the continuing popularity of the music video releases associated with the November 13, 2015 debut of his latest studio album Purpose. Beliebers and the world at large viewed videos on Bieber’s YouTube channel nearly 192.9 million times in the week. In a distant second place is Ryan ToysReview. One of the world’s biggest family-friendly toy and unboxing channels ended the week with just about 111.3 million views.
FunToyzCollector is up next in the #3 spot. The channel formerly known as DisneyCollectorBR that was the first breakout channel in the toy unboxing trend was up 5% on the week to top out at almost 94.8 million views. WWE is next up in fourth place. The YouTube home for clips and highlights from World Wrestling Entertainment dropped a minor 1% in views to end the week with more than 91.7 million of them.
And rounding out the Top 5 is The Ellen Show. The YouTube home of Ellen DeGeneres’ eponymous daytime syndicated talk show closed out the week down 12% in views to bottom out at more than 90.2 million.
Top Gainers
The honor of one of our Top Gainers in the U.S. this week goes to BuzzFeedBlue.
One of the handful of channels in BuzzFeed’s growing online video empire had a particularly great week on YouTube thanks to a steady stream of uploads with enticing titles (like “People Try Bull Testicles“) and one particular athletically-oriented video. “People Try To Catch Passes From An NFL Quarterback” stood out in helping BuzzFeedBlue to a 154% week-over-week increase in views, nearly 27.6 million views on the week, and the #42 spot on the U.S. chart.
Channel Distribution
The top 50 most viewed U.S. YouTube channels this week amassed a total of 2,493,830,896 views. Here’s the distribution of a few of those channels by multi-channel network:
VEVO: 16 channels in the U.S. Top 50, with Justin Bieber the highest-ranked channel of the network at #1.
Maker Studios: 6 channels in the Top 50, with DisneyCarToys at #11.
BuzzFeed: 3 channels in the Top 50, with BuzzFeedVideo at #8.
Collective Digital Studio, Fullscreen, OhMyGenius: 2 channels each in the Top 50, with Collective’s FamilyFunPack at #7, Fullscreen’s PopularMMOs at #15, and OhMyGenius’ Kids Channel at #37.
OpenSlate is a video content analytics platform that tracks more than 250,000 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.
First Lady Michelle Obama wants Americans to attend college, and in order to push this initiative, she has turned to the world of online video. For her latest collaboration with a digital brand, she has joined forces with CollegeHumor to star in a rap video about higher education.
The music in CollegeHumor’s “Go To College Music Video” was written by The Gregory Brothers and performed by Saturday Night Live’s Jay Pharoah and the First Lady. The video itself features plenty of unsubtle overtures to young viewers (such as emoji-esque pictures that appear among the song’s lyrics), and FLOTUS raps exactly as well as you would expect a 51-year-old mom to rap, but the message itself is honest and true.
Mrs. Obama, like her husband, has used the power of the Internet to further her pet campaigns. As part of her Reach Higher program, she talked with YouTube star Tyler Oakley about college. More recently, she announced an initiative called Better Make Room, which includes the new CollegeHumor video among its output.
“When I launched my Better Make Room campaign in October, I said that this campaign is about celebrating students the same way we celebrate athletes and celebrities,” said the First Lady in a press release. “I want to honor and empower young people who are working hard in school and pursuing their dreams – and I want to do it in a fun and fresh way – and that’s why I was so excited to film this “music video” with Jay Pharoah, CollegeHumor, and The Gregory Brothers.”
Welcome to the Fund This column! Each week, we’ll look at a planned web series or other online video project currently in search of funding on crowdfunding sites. We’ll tell you what the series is all about and explain why it is worth your money. Do you have a project that’s currently being crowdfunded? Contact us to let us know and we may feature it in upcoming installments and check out previous installments righthere.
Description: Two ladies living in the city are getting ready to share their adventures with the world. Laura Hankin and Jane Bradley are the creators and stars of Emergency Contacts, a planned web series currently seeking funds on Indiegogo.
Hankin and Bradley describe the protagonists of their series as “two mismatched, socially-inept roommates as they navigate life in the big city.” That on its own won’t turn any heads, but the next line forecasts a wacky, unique lineup of situations. “You can expect: a ‘Beauty & the Beast’-themed hallucination sequence, an Empire State Building employee with anger issues, a laundromat shotgun wedding, and more,” it reads.
On the character side of things, Hankin and Bradley are clearly going for an “odd couple” setup. Their rapport is on full display in the project’s pitch video.
Creator Bio: Hankin and Bradley met when they were both cast in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. As they put it, “we’d come offstage giggling so much we nearly peed our petticoats.”
Best Perk: If you kick in at least $25, Hankin will create a Mad Lib for you. She says it will be “friendship-themed,” which sounds significantly less lewd than the Mad Libs I used to make in third grade.
Why You Should Fund It: The basic plot and setting of Emergency Contacts will sound familiar to viewers who watch a lot of indie web series, but what impresses me about Hankin and Bradley’s project is the number of angles with which they plan to approach their themes. By pairing a cheery extrovert with a quiet homebody, Emergency Contacts can hit a lot of different emotional beats. It can be mirthful and sarcastic, pithy and extravagant, quiet and bombastic, and a lot of other unusual combinations. Judging from the scope Hankin and Bradley have planned for their episodes, that sort of variety is exactly what they have in mind, and their project is therefore one worth looking into.
Got a crowdfunding campaign you’d like to see featured in Fund This? Be sure to contact us here.
Since he introduced himself to the online video world as one of the original hosts of SourceFed, Elliott Morgan has worn a lot of different hats. We’ve followed him across his various gigs, and his latest one is his most ambitious yet: He performed an hour of stand-up for Premature, a comedy special produced by Supergravity Pictures and distributed through Vimeo On Demand. With Premature set to arrive, we chatted with Morgan about his voyage from SourceFed to stand-up. Here’s what he had to say about his journey:
Tubefilter: How did this thing happen?
Elliott Morgan: It came to be maybe a year ago. I’ve been doing stand-up for about 3 years. I started doing stand-up after I felt myself getting comfortable at SourceFed. I always loved stand-up and I tried to do it. I didn’t tell anyone. I was going to open mics and trying to build minute after minute of material.
After I went to Mashable, I kept on working on this stuff. I then connected with [Supergravity co-founders] Max [Benator] and Marc [Hustvedt] and I started talking about stand-up and the special organically came out of that. Now it’s a real thing.
TF: What do you get out of doing stand-up?
EM: I grew up doing theater and I originally did acting. When I became a host, I wanted to get back to a more performance-based type of thing, and stand-up provided that thing. It’s almost a mixture of theater and hosting. I also got to inject bigger themes into stand-up than I would with a three-minute YouTube video. I got to offer audiences a different version of myself that wasn’t jump-cut or edited or based on YouTube material.
TF: What’s your stand-up like? Describe it.
EM: It’s like…do you know at the end of a wedding when they release the flock of doves into the sky? And it’s like, you get this rush of endorphins, and everything in the world makes sense, and you start to question how you got to where you are, and why you’re at that wedding, because you don’t know the people and you just showed up, and you stare at the doves and wonder how long they were in the box for?
I do very dry humor with performance-based skits that comment on how I am a middle-class white male individual and poke fun at that. I try to kind of poke fun at things that people on the Internet maybe don’t want to poke fun at, but I try to do it in a way so that everyone is in on the joke. I don’t do shock value, but I do try to ruffle feathers a little bit….not terribly unlike a flock of doves.
It’s an hour of content. If it’s an hour of content, you’re probably looking at laughing for a good 30 seconds of it, so that’s pretty good.
TF: How long did it take you to get that hour of content?
EM: It took a long time. That’s why i love stand-up so much. Because you can grow with it. I have jokes in the special that I’ve had for years, to the point where it was nauseating to say them, but I’d spice it up. I didn’t want there to just be an hour of jokes. So I spent the last year stringing them together. [The special] starts out commenting on social media and YouTube and more of where I come from and growing up in a religious environment, and ends on more personal stuff.
TF: How was the crowd?
EM: Dude, it was awesome. My parents were there. There was a buddy of mine who’s a philosopher, and another philosopher, and this weird mix of people. Halfway into the set, I kind of make fun of the bible, and I was kind of nervous. Then, right before that, there was this music that was playing over the speakers and it was like God himself had come down on the special not to disrupt it but to say hi, which was a cool thing for God to do.
TF: How do you see the stand-up Elliott Morgan working with and growing with the YouTube Elliott Morgan?
EM: I think they both complement each other in different ways. I think YouTube connects in a way that nothing else does. The disconnect with stand-up is that you can’t connect with viewers that way. Moving forward, I may want to mix the worlds a little bit. The goal is that the audience is connected to me while I’m in the stand-up world as well, so they’re still with me and they also see a journey into a different art form…I’m really excited for people to see it.
The 2015 Game Awards officially surpassed its popularity from last year. The video game-centric awards show, produced by video game industry veteran Geoff Keighley and airing on December 3, 2015, had over 2.3 million live stream views in the course of just two hours.
The Game Awards’ impressive viewership stat was a 20% overall increase from 2014’s show numbers. That event garnered 1.93 million live stream views over the course of three hours. While The Game Awards had several streaming partners (like Steam and Xbox Live), viewership of the event increased more than 40% year-over-year specifically on YouTube and Twitch. YouTube Gaming hosted the awards show’s live stream, and Twitch let any broadcaster on its platform co-stream its official live coverage of The Game Awards.
In addition to seeing 2.3 million live streams, the 2015 Game Awards also generated over one billion Twitter impressions (up from 341 million in 2014) and a 95% favorable sentiment for the hashtag #TheGameAwards, as tracked by social media analytics company Sysomos. Snapchat users around the world were able to tune in to a Live Story focused on the Game Awards and the after-party with a performance by Skrillex. Additionally, users on Verizon’s go90 service, which was the official presenter of this year’s Game Awards, were able to watch exclusive content related to the show’s games and nominees.
“This year we saw significant audience growth and were able to bring on a great sponsor with go90 — but we still maintained our independence,” Keighley wrote in an email to Tubefilter. “We’re pioneering a new model for digital tentpoles and it’s exciting to see gamers embrace the format and the approach. All I wanted to do was keep building the franchise and we’ve accomplished that in year two.”
You can learn more about The Game Awards by visiting the event’s official site. And if the Awards follow last year’s lead, the full 2015 show will eventually live on the event’s YouTube channel.
Created in conjunction with Sims‘ publisher Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), Smart Girls Build with The Sims 4 is described in a release as a show which demonstrates “girls can be and do anything they can dream up, by exploring their unique passions and talents in The Sims 4.” Each episode finds one young woman partnering with an EA producer who creates a personalized Sim character based on the girl’s traits, personality, and life goals. The young woman can then realize her talents and dreams in The Sims 4 video game. The first episode of Smart Girls Build with The Sims 4 features 13-year-old Celeste teaming with The Sims 4 associate producer Azure Bowie to build a Sim who loves to dance, just like Celeste.
Each year, YouTube and Portal A team up to create a music video that looks back at the past 12 months on the world’s most popular video site. These YouTube Rewind videos are typically filled with cameos from dozens of online video stars, and this year’s edition is no different. The 2015 YouTube Rewind, subtitled “Now Watch Me 2015,” features guest appearances from more than 150 content creators.
The 2015 YouTube Rewind features the same basic structure as in years past. Step one: YouTube stars show up en masse. Step two: They reenact various viral videos from the recent past. Step three: In the background, a musical track (which this year was composed by The Hood Internet) mashes together the year’s top musical hits. Step four: The credits roll, and viewers realize all the cameos they missed along the way.
This year, that fourth step is particularly prominent. Recognizing all of the YouTube stars who show up is virtually impossible on the first playthrough, so expect superfans to rewind the Rewind in order to spot their favorite creators; should those fans realize that their favorites didn’t make the cut, expect them to offer up some vociferous complaints in the comments section.
Of course, you don’t have to use the Rewind as an exercise in YouTube trivia. On a macro level, it has some very nice scenes, such as a quick trip back through the ten-year history of YouTube and a multilingual version of Shia Labeouf’s “Just Do It” speech that underscores YouTube’s evolution as a global enterprise.
No matter how many times you choose to watch the Rewind, you can also check out all of the auxiliary content supporting it. A few hours earlier, YouTube shared the top videos of the year across a series of playlists. Check them out over at the official YouTube Rewind landing page.
NBCUniversal is ready to bring some more comedy to your digital screens. The broadcast network has set January 7, 2016 as the official release date of its ad-free, comedy streaming subscription service SeeSo.
SeeSo will be available at seeso.com and on iOS and Android devices, with NBC planning to add more platforms in the coming months. Several original series and specials will be available at the time of SeeSo’s launch, including the animated comedy The Cyanide & Happiness Show (brought to you by the Streamy Award-winning team behind the Cyanide & Happiness YouTube channel and its more than five million subscribers) , the Matt Besser special Besser Breaks the Record, and the Amy Poehler-hosted variety sketch show The UCB Show. NBC will release new episodes for each of SeeSo’s five original series every week after the service’s official launch.
Google has a new way for families to listen to music and watch YouTube videos. The Alphabet-owned tech giant will add family plan pricing to its Play Music subscription service. And that pricing will include access to ad-free videos on YouTube Red.
Google explained in a company blog post how its new family plan will allow up to six different users (like other family members or friends) to stream music simultaneously from the same subscription account. The new family plan will also keep each users’ playlists and preferences separate for a more customized listening experience. But the most important aspect of Google’s family plan option for Play Music is that it includes access to YouTube Red for all U.S. subscribers. YouTube Red and Google Play have been priced and sold together for $9.99 per month since the video subscription service’s launch in October 2015. It’s a synergistic tactic for Google to group its owned-and-operated properties into one plan to increase adoption for all, but the combination has benefits beyond giving the end-user access to programming and music. To stymie the myth YouTube wouldn’t be able to pay creators during Red’s 30-day free trial, YouTube used subscription revenue from Play Music as an interim payment for these creators.
Google said the Play Music/YouTube Red family plan will cost $14.99 per month (as opposed to the regular aforementioned $9.99 per month subscription for a single user). The family plan will arrive in the next few days for subscribers in the U.S., UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Australia.
As was the case last year, the Project For Awesome Indiegogo campaign is split into two halves. During the first three-and-a-half days of the seven-day fundraising drive, all of the money collected on Indiegogo will go to a pair of charities selected by the P4A team: Save the Children and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. During the second leg of the campaign, all proceeds will go to charities championed by members of the online video community and chosen by fan voting.
As John Green explained last year, this two-part setup allows the P4A to troll-proof the fundraising process; no matter which organizations the community chooses to support, at least two reputable nonprofits will receive big donations. Green also provided a few additional details about the 2015 edition of P4A in a video he released on the Vlogbrothers channel:
If you’d like to chip into the Vlogbrothers’ annual campaign against the force they describe as “worldsuck,” you can do so right here. If you’d rather wait to see what other charities P4A will support, stay tuned to the drive’s website, where a 48-hour livestream will begin at noon on December 11th. From that point, there will still be time to contribute; the P4A Indiegogo page will close just before midnight on December 13th.
Amazon Studios has set the release date for one of its upcoming original series. The digital production branch of the e-commerce powerhouse will release the comedy series Mad Dogs on January 22, 2016 via Amazon Prime Instant Video.
Based on the UK series of the same name, Mad Dogs stars Steve Zahn (Dallas Buyers Club), Billy Zane (Twin Peaks), Romany Malco (Weeds), Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos), and Ben Chaplin (The Thin Red Line) as forty-something friends who reunite in Belize to celebrate a friend’s retirement. However, the friends end up dealing with unexpected twists, including long-hidden secrets and murderous intentions. Shawn Ryan (The Shield) executive produces alongside Cris Cole, the original creator and writer of both the UK and U.S. Mad Dogs series. Amazon produces the comedy series alongside Sony Pictures TV.
“Mad Dogs explores what happens when four college friends go on an exotic vacation that shockingly descends into a harrowing roller coaster that tests their mettle, their friendships, and their very sense of identity,” said Roy Price, VP of Amazon Studios, as reported by Variety. “The show has a fantastic cast and is led by Shawn Ryan. We look forward to customers’ reactions.”
“I loved working on a comedic, albeit dark, story like Mad Dogs and know that the performances by Steve, Michael, Romany, and Ben will resonate with all who have had longtime friendships that evolve and change as the years go on,” added Ryan.
Amazon originally picked up Mad Dogs in November 2014. The digital studio released the comedy’s pilot for its fifth pilot season a few months later in January 2015, along with 12 other pilots ranging from children’s programming to dramas. Amazon Studios then ordered a full season of the comedy series in February after receiving positive viewer feedback during the initial pilot season.
You can watch the first episode of Mad Dogs for free via Amazon Prime. The rest of the comedy series’ episodes will be available starting January 22.
