Last year I was pondering the topic of my 2017 online video project and was inspired by a NY Public Radio podcast of the show, Note to Self. The podcast, What Happens to Videos No One Watches spoke about “the lonely web”, a term coined by Joe Veix for Fusion. According to Joe, the lonely web…“lives in the murky space between the mainstream and the deep webs. The content is public and indexed by search engines, but broadcast to a tiny audience, algorithmically filtered out, and/or difficult to find using traditional search techniques.” The lonely web is not restricted to online videos with a handful of views, but includes Twitter accounts with a low number of followers, songs that no one has listened to and Instagram photos that remain unseen, to name a few examples.
If one looks specifically at YouTube, 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute, yet according to TubeMogul, 53% of these videos have fewer than 500 views and about 30% have less than 100 views. That means that there are a lot of lonely videos out there, desperately waiting to be seen. For this year’s project, I decided to try and find friends for these lonely videos, so each month I will find and re-make a video with less than 20 views and then post them back to YouTube to see if I can increase the number of views (friends) for these lonely videos.
There are over one billion videos on YouTube with 300 hours of content uploaded every minute. The average video is approximately 15 minutes long. This would take over 30,000 years + to watch…and you still wouldn’t be finished.
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
A renovation is a document of labour.
Lazy Susan: a rotating tray placed on a surface such as a table or countertop to aid in the distribution of food or a derogatory term for a woman named Susan who is lazy.