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58 P a r t I Marketing Your Business Online with YouTube
What’s Entertaining?
Informing and educating are important, and will draw a fair number of YouTube
viewers if you do it right. But everybody likes to be entertained—which is why pure
entertainment videos typically show up at the top of YouTube’s most viewed lists.
What’s entertaining? I wish I knew. I can tell you what I find entertaining, but I
can’t tell you what might entertain someone else. Entertainment, like all art, is in the
eye of the beholder; what I laugh at might leave you cold, and vice versa.
That said, here’s what I do know about entertaining videos: When they work, they
work really well. It’s the entertaining videos that are more likely to go viral.
When a viewer finds something really entertaining on YouTube, he watches it over and
over—and then shares it with his friends. That’s how viral videos are created, by one
user sharing with another, who shares it with another, who shares it with another… and
on and on, until that video is viewed by tens or hundreds of thousands of people. And
the kind of video that most often gets passed around like that is one that entertains.
What, then, do YouTube viewers find entertaining? It’s a relatively short list, includ-
ing humorous videos, those that feature amazing stunts, those that include fancy
special effects, and those that have some sort of shock value. And of all these, it’s the
funny videos that work the best. Let’s face it, people like a good laugh.
One of my favorite examples of entertaining videos continues to be Blendtec
(www.youtube.com/user/Blendtec/), a small company that sells high-end blenders.
In a creative spurt, the company came up with a concept it calls “Will It Blend?”
which it turned into a series of videos that spread across the Internet like wildfire.
The videos, all extremely entertaining, show company president Tom Dickson, who
gives off a bit of a mad scientist vibe, placing various objects into one of the com-
pany’s blenders to see if they blend. I’m not talking bananas and cumquats here;
Tom has blended (or tried to blend) things like G.I. Joe dolls, flashlights, and
iPhones. It’s all very entertaining, as you can see in Figure 5.1.
The result is an Internet phenomenon; Blendtec’s videos, each produced on a
budget of less than $100, quickly turned viral and spread across the Internet.
Blendtec’s example shows how a company can benefit from a creative idea, executed
in an entertaining fashion. There is nothing particularly informative or educational
about the “Will It Blend?” spots, but they are fun to watch. And as YouTube contin-
ues to prove, videos that are fun to watch get watched—a lot.
Figure 5.2 shows another example, for Norton Internet Security
(www.youtube.com/user/norton/). It’s a short one, just 12 seconds long, that pits
80’s metal band Dokken against a chicken. (It’s funnier to watch than it is to
describe.) The point is, it’s an interesting concept, a quick joke, and it gets the point
across about Norton’s security software.
