Today marked the first year of Obama Girl’s term of office as reigning queen of political comedy on the web, since “I’ve Got a Crush… on Obama” first showed up on YouTube June 13, 2007. 100 Videos later, after over 50 million views and countless press stories, Barely Political has the #1 Most Viewed Video on YouTube again today, with a new rival for Obama Girl: the Incredible McCain Girl.

I think it’s some of the best work the Barely Political team has done — which has now grown to include the great preditor Tom Small, the hilarious writer and performer Rusty Ward, the still-rocking core team of Ben Relles, Leah Kaufman, and Amber Lee Ettinger, and new guys Mark Douglas and David Feingold. But they haven’t just been churning out Obama Girl videos and creating an increasingly weird and hilarious mythology for the characters, including OG’s alter-ego, Super Obama Girl — they’re also developing a truly unique brand of political satire with a YouTube aesthetic, with videos like Hillary Wasn’t Lying About Bosnia (by NNN’s Justin Johnson), Political Sex Scandals (a great Douglas / Kaufman collab) and a NNN staff favorite, Stimulus Package, where a couple of ’90’s rap rejects (played brilliantly by Ward and Douglas) fantasize about what mack daddies they’ll be with their $600 (embedded below, after the jump). Congrats to Ben, Amber, and Leah on a killer year, and thanks to everyone who’s helped expose the world to Barely Political, video after video, especially the Next New Networks team, YouTube, MSNBC, CNN and FOX News.

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Have you ever watched Indy Mogul and thought to yourself, “Hey, this Erik guy is one sharp looking dude”? Well, you’re not the only one. Daisy Whitney from TV Week thinks so too. She’s compiled a list of The Hottest Male Web Hosts, and our very own Erik Beck is up against Eric Gunnar Rochow from Greenhouse. So if you’ve ever entertained those thoughts, now is the time to let those feelings rush forth. Vote Now! Polling ends Friday, May 2nd.

GO ERIK!

The latest from Next New Networks’ Jeaux Janovsky on the Channel Frederator Awards Blog:

I wanna go to the 2008 Channel Frederator Awards Site 2.0!!!

It’s Alive!!! Alive!!!
That’s right Fredheads. We’re rolling out the 2008 Channel Frederator Awards site fresh out the oven and onto the secret laboratory floor.

SPLAT!

It’s crawling around on it’s little stumps nicely for now, but soon our creature will be lumbering around terrorizing villagers in no time!

This is the site where you can keep tabs and be up to date on all our plans, nominees, categories, behind the scenes info right up until launch date!

Be one of the first to check out essays and art from our esteemed colleagues in Animation as they are delivered to us.

This is your chance to be the ultimate insider to the 2008 Channel Frederator Awards.

Yup. We’re proud parents.

With the new year craziness, I don’t think we’ve had a chance to properly roll out the welcome mat or celebrate this, but recently Corinne and Rob of ThreadBanger renown have made the big move from Florida to New York, following the trajectory of other awesomely talented people like Erik Beck, Justin Johnson, and Scott Moschella that we’ve managed to entice here, despite cold winters (well, not today), ridiculous rents, and near-constant giant monster attacks. We’re a little used to seeing Rob and Corinne around, since they’ve visited here probably more than any other producers, but the last few days it’s been great to run into them around the offices and realize they’re not leaving.

I can’t wait to see what kinds of great things happen with them sharing space with Indy Mogul and Channel Frederator, to name a couple networks (and maybe they’ll finally improve Derek D’s wardrobe on Fast Lane Daily), but until then, it’s as good a time as any to point out their awesome end of 2007 episode, where they counted down some of the amazing moments of their first almost-year. Though I might have to fight with some people on the forums for the biggest fan title, I’m really proud to be ThreadBanger’s first fan, if only because I got to see their first episode before anyone else (that I know of). Congratulations, Thread Heads, and welcome to the Big Apple. We’re so glad to have you here.

Tim Shey says, “Nice to start 08 with a bonafide hit. Big props to Amber, Ramon, Marc and the whole crew.” I say, Holy crap! BENNNNNN!!!!!!”

…:::UPDATE from BP’s Ben Relles:
“Ha! Would love to take credit but my my wife and I were having new relleses the day that video was made.

“All credit to Tom, Rusty, Boxser, Steve, Jared, and two spellbinding performances by Liam and Goldberg.”

YouTube says:
Honors for This Video:
#7 - Most Discussed (Today)
#4 - Most Discussed (Today) - Comedy
#35 - Most Discussed (This Week) - Comedy
#2 - Most Viewed (Today)
#1 - Most Viewed (Today) - Comedy
#20 - Most Viewed (This Week)
#4 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Comedy
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Germany
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Australia
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Canada
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - United Kingdom
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Ireland
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - New Zealand
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Spain
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Mexico
#2 - Recently Featured - Comedy - France
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Italy
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Japan
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Netherlands
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Poland
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Brazil
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Russia
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Hong Kong
#1 - Recently Featured - Comedy - Taiwan
#7 - Top Favorites (Today)
#4 - Top Favorites (Today) - Comedy
#50 - Top Favorites (This Week) - Comedy
#37 - Top Rated (Today)
#9 - Top Rated (Today) - Comedy
#23 - Top Rated (This Week) - Comedy

Steve Woolf (the sometimes BTS half of the Epic-FU neé Jetset team) wrote this smart and insightful post on their record breaking 3,000,000+ episode on the smashface productions blog:

A couple of weeks ago an EPIC-FU episode was featured on the home page of YouTube thanks to the generous selection of their editors. We expected to get a nice amount of views, but we never expected the episode to move past 3 million views when all was said and done. In fact, the episode is still compiling about 10-20,000 views per day as of the time of this writing.

We’re obviously very happy that the show is resonating with the largest community of web video aficionados on the Internet. It’s gives us a great sense of validation to know that we created a weekly show that can generate those kinds of numbers. Not easy to do these days.

What was especially interesting to us was to watch this video run away from all the other videos that were featured on YouTube at the same time as us. No other video crossed the million mark during the week we were featured. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about why that happened to try and understand the dynamics that affect viewership on popular video hosting sites.

For one thing, we’ve been producing regular content for a year and a half with JETSET and now EPIC-FU. So to some extent we can call the built-in audience a factor in the video’s explosive views. But we didn’t have a significantly greater number of YouTube subscribers than many other shows that have been featured and did not experience such a high number of views.

Another possible factor is that we always place a frame strategically in the exact middle of the upload so that when YouTube generates its preview thumbnail, prospective viewers are given a sense of the tone and personality of the show when reviewing the myriad choices for them to watch. However this image is quite small, and some videos that typically experience large view numbers have scantily clad women or mainstream celebrities as their preview image. Our preview image of this video is shown at left.

Then there’s the title of the video: taking no sh1t, internet love song, writer’s guild. A very typical title for us since we cover so much ground in each episode. It’s somewhat provocative, but is definitely less so than many other videos.

Finally we come to the content of the video. We touched on a number of politically charged stories that engendered a great deal of discussion in the comments under the video. In particular we said some things about the Writer’s Guild of America strike that is currently taking place. These statements seemed to provoke a really strong reaction from many viewers on both sides of the issue. Given the timing of the strike and the topical nature of the commentary in our video, this seems to be a strong factor in people watching the video and then passing it along to their friends to see, which is the really important factor in generating huge view numbers.

So without getting more scientific about it, it seems like we had a combination of factors that led to the breakout number of views. Good title, solid preview image, passionate existing fanbase, and provocative content. This is the kind of formula we strive to have in every show so that when the opportunity comes along to be promoted on a place like the YouTube home page, we are able to take maximum advantage of that exposure.

Are there any other major factors that I’ve missed? Why do you think this video has 4X the number of views of any other EPIC-FU video on YouTube?

Super Steve Woolf 

[Guest blogger! Today Josh Leo joins us from Ultra Kawaii — and we hope to see more of our network producers blogging here soon. — tim]

Ultra Kawaii, NNN’s cute pet network, is joining the growing lineup of online programming available on Tivo! Starting today, you can get you fill of some of the internet’s cutest animals right on your TV. Cuteness is something that everyone, everywhere can enjoy, so we are really happy to have this opportunity to reach a larger audience!

Not familliar with Ultra Kawaii? Well here is the quick run-down: “Kawaii” is Japanese for cute. But Ultra Kawaii is more than just a cute kitten here and there. It is a barrage of cuteness that doesn’t even give you time to breathe! On Ultra Kawaii, Dave and Myself try to distill cute moments caught on video down to a concentrated dose of Kawaii. We usually try to focus each video on a specific theme, this week is the very festive “Let’s Eat!” episode just in time for the American gorge-fest that is Thanksgiving! If your pet is dying to be a star, or if you have an idea for a theme for an episode, just let any of us at Ultra Kawaii know. We love viewer input and we hope that you enjoy the cute!

With so much going on, it’s hard to take a minute to stop and blog the moments along the way. However, we’ve got to congratulate Josh Marshall, TPM, and our team here at Veracifier, who are having their best week ever.

It all started when an eagle eyed member of the TPMtv team posted some video of John McCain not exactly chastising a questioner who called our possible next President an unflattering world. That video’s here, if you didn’t happen to catch it.

By that afternoon, the video was the top story on the front page of AOL and our channel had racked up about a million extra views — in one day — on both YouTube and our site. To date, there are now over 1600 comments on YouTube, over 15,000 comments on AOL, and the story keeps rolling.

Oh, and especially fun for all of us — all the attention made Veracifier the #1 most viewed channel on YouTube for the day:

What’s especially interesting is that this was video footage the entire media corps had access to; our lean operation with TPM pays a modest fee to get clean access to video footage such as this from some of the same providers who provide to C-SPAN. As we noticed once before with the Rose Garden Long Shot incident, often the key to good TV online is just about finding the right stuff at the right time, and making it more available than anyone else. Great job, Josh, Ben, Marc, and everyone else on Veracifier. (And thanks to David Levin at Brainstorm for the heads-up.)

Justin and the gang made an interstitial promo for Ultra Kawaii — our new cute pet videos network — and it was so fun, we had to put it out on its own. Embedded below, or check it out here.

Ultra Kawaii Promo, “So Cute it Hurts” from justin on Vimeo.

It’s hard for Americans to pronounce “Kawaii” right — as one of our viewers on Bebo recently noted, if you pronounce it wrong (”ka-WHY”), it means “scary,” and properly (”ka-wa-EEE”), it means “cute” — but as this promo shows, there’s a fine line between cute and terrifying.

Check out the site and Share the Kawaii!

Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith’s depiction of the Democratic candidates going at it like children with Tim Russert in middle just cracks me up.

as seen on Veracifier

02 November 2007
Obama Says Hil Plays the Victim, and all the Democrats Fight
By: Raleigh-Elizabeth Smith

Scene: An angered America momentarily eschews apathy for that interlude of quasi-interesting politics known as the “campaign season.” The sides polarize; neoconservatives debate their decently lousy options (a Mormon or a man that used to live with gay men) brandishing crosses and flags of Israel, left-wing liberals put their bleeding hearts aside to bicker over who’s is bigger after all. And all of it happens on T.V.

Enter stage right: Barack Obama, new and interesting Democratic candidate who is losing momentum in the polls to political heiress and former first lady, Hillary Clinton.

Enter stage right: Hillary Clinton, clad in a suitably-masculine suit, power heels, and poofy “I’m not a girl! I’m not!” hairdo, accompanied by her intern-loving husband.

Camera pans to Tim Russert, sitting in the front passenger seat of a Honda Odyssey (it’s fuel efficient!). While Dick Cheney drives full-speed ahead on a Middle Eastern highway, Russert plays mommy to the bickering, hair-pulling, finger-pointing children in the back. I mean, the Democratic candidates for President. Roll film.