There is a reasonably good chance you have heard of the song “Friday” by 13-year-old Rebecca Black. It recently became a viral hit that everyone seems to cringe over in gleeful unison. Since the integrity of this blog is at stake, I will refrain from embedding the actual video production.
But as ReelSEO points out, it seems like something dubious is going on.
The video is on Ark Music Factory’s channel, not Rebecca Black’s. That’s a little suspect to me right off the bat. The reported story is that Black’s parents paid $2,000 to Ark to have the video produced. And maybe part of the $2,000 goes to cover basic distribution–placing the video on Ark’s channel. But you would think the finished video would be something given to Black, to do with as she pleases. Instead, it’s loaded on the production companies’ channel.
How was this video production picked by the Internet as the one video we were all going to mock last week? This video popped up on a bunch of content-discovery sites on the same freaking day. Granted, it’s possible that a video could spread that fast, but it’s pretty rare. To spread all over the web on the same day… within hours of each other? Almost never.
Do you have any idea how many awful songs by teenagers there are on YouTube from production companies? What are the odds that this one song would be picked up by so many curating sites in such a short span of time? I’ve recently talked about how long the odds are that any specific video even gets a shot at finding an audience.
Ark’s website has banner ads to buy their artists’ songs on iTunes. Why? Could it be because Ark is the one actually making the bulk of the money off the downloads? There are more ads to buy Ark artists’ songs than there is legitimate content on the site.
