{"id":2632,"date":"2008-09-07T15:08:15","date_gmt":"2008-09-07T19:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2632"},"modified":"2008-09-07T15:08:15","modified_gmt":"2008-09-07T19:08:15","slug":"avrils-video-tops-100-million-views","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/09\/07\/avrils-video-tops-100-million-views\/","title":{"rendered":"Avril&#8217;s video tops 100 million views"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, the day has finally come. A video on YouTube has finally topped 100 million views, and for better or worse it belongs to Canada&#8217;s pop princess, the pride of working-class <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Napanee\">Napanee<\/a>, Ontario: Avril Lavigne. The video for her song &#8220;Girlfriend&#8221; is now at about 110 million views, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=cQ25-glGRzI\">well ahead<\/a> of second-place holder Justin Laipply&#8217;s &#8220;Evolution of Dance.&#8221; The fans over at Avril&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.avrilbandaids.com\/\">BandAids forum<\/a> are no doubt celebrating, since the record is the culmination of a viral marketing campaign cooked up by the site. First, BandAids came up with a YouTube &#8220;view-o-matic&#8221; page, which loaded the Avril video every 15 seconds. This cheat was picked up by dozens of media outlets &#8212; including yours truly, in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theglobeandmail.com\/servlet\/story\/RTGAM.20080623.WBmingram20080623143124\/WBStory\/WBmingram\/\">a post<\/a> at my Globe and Mail blog, which got linked to by Perez Hilton (watch those servers melt!).<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Alas, it later turned out that BandAids knew YouTube would &#8212; as its policy states &#8212; block the IP address of its automated viewer page after 200 consecutive views. Embedding for the video was also eventually disabled, although it&#8217;s not clear if that was YouTube&#8217;s doing or something Lavigne&#8217;s label did. In any case, what the fan site was really after was publicity for the video, which it got in spades. As a post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.avrilbandaids.com\/forums\/avril-lavigne-news-updates\/58617-two-steps-ill-always-ahead-you.html#post1846022\">at BandAids detailed<\/a>, the resulting PR helped push the views of the video closer to 100 million every time a story was written about it.<\/p>\n<p>The detail-oriented will no doubt point out that another video hit 100 million views before Avril&#8217;s: a homemade music video for the Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy&#8217;s hit &#8220;Music is My Hot, Hot Sex,&#8221; which was used in an Apple iPod commercial, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cansei_de_Ser_Sexy\">hit 112 million views<\/a> earlier this year. The video was eventually removed from the top-view leaderboard by YouTube, however, after a controversy over manipulation of the viewer numbers (something Andy &#8220;Waxy&#8221; Baio <a href=\"http:\/\/waxy.org\/2008\/03\/new_video_overt\/\">looked into<\/a> in depth), and the clip was later removed by its creator. All of which means Avril stands alone at the peak of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/results?search_query=*&amp;as=1&amp;and_queries=*&amp;exact_query=&amp;or_queries=&amp;negative_queries=&amp;geo_name=&amp;geo_latlong=&amp;search_duration=&amp;search_hl=&amp;search_category_type=all&amp;search_sort=video_view_count&amp;uploaded=\">YouTube viewerdom<\/a>, which will eventually <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alleyinsider.com\/2008\/7\/avril-lavigne-s-2-million-youtube-payday-not-coming-soon\">make her millions<\/a>.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, the day has finally come. A video on YouTube has finally topped 100 million views, and for better or worse it belongs to Canada&#8217;s pop princess, the pride of working-class Napanee, Ontario: Avril Lavigne. The video for her song &#8220;Girlfriend&#8221; is now at about 110 million views, well ahead of second-place holder Justin Laipply&#8217;s &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/09\/07\/avrils-video-tops-100-million-views\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Avril&#8217;s video tops 100 million views&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2632\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}