YAVS

(Yet Another Video Site)

In the past 18 months or less, sites hosting video clips, more often than not based on Web 2.0 underpinings, have sprouted up like dandelions in the spring. The clip below relates YAVS, but this one with an interesting twist: you vote to keep what you consider to be the “best” in front of the queue. From an innovation aspect, is this sufficient to make this site a success? After reading about Will Ferrell’s new web site, and viewing “LandLord” below, please take the poll to the right->

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Update: as of this morning (4/19/07), Landlord has received over two million hits and has been uploaded to YouTube where the video above was scarfed from. 

“Comedian Will Ferrell and partner Adam McKay quietly launched their newest contribution to the pool of ever-growing video sites last week, called FunnyorDie.com, which allows users to upload their own comedy videos to the site to be voted on by other viewers. FunnyorDie functions more or less like the other video sites already in existence, except with one key difference: the votes determine whether the videos stay on the main site, where they are categorized, or whether they get banished to “The Crypt.”

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The venture is the brainchild of the two comics, McKay told the Los Angeles Times (subscription). “It’s just us. That’s the fun—this isn’t brought to you by GE or Viacom or whoever,” he said. However, the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital has partnered with the project to help launch the site, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Sequoia has provided funding for a number of successful ventures, not the least of which including YouTube, Google, Yahoo!, and Apple.

The site’s focus is to give viewers the power to vote videos up or down, with the worst ones being relegated to a tiny dungeon where bad comedy goes to die. It also introduces a bit of friendly competition into the act of uploading your own video, as users compete to make the funniest movie and be validated (or shamed) by the voting community.

“I want my money, b*tch!” That’s a phrase you don’t often hear coming out of the mouths of two-year-old girls, but it happens in a video called The Landlord that has been posted to FunnyorDie by Ferrell’s and McKay themselves upon launching the site last week. The video is done in true no-budget, home video style, starring the two friends and McKay’s two-year-old daughter Pearl as the landlord. Since the uploading of the video, it has racked up over 2.8 million views (the number went up by a full 250,000 during the writing of this article alone) and no doubt played a big part in helping to spread the word about the new site. The video was even uploaded to YouTube for a period of time this week, but was eventually removed—it appears as if Ferrell and McKay’s content is being kept exclusively to FunnyorDie.

Like YouTube, videos on FunnyorDie can be linked or embedded as Flash videos on websites, blogs, MySpace pages, and more. Viewers can comment on the videos and e-mail them to friends—and, of course, vote. Unlike YouTube, however, there doesn’t seem to be a simple way to subscribe to any particular user’s videos yet, although users can add specific videos to a list of favorites and add other users to a friends list. There are currently no ads on FunnyorDie, but that could potentially change in the future.

Few other sites would be able to launch and gain such viral popularity within a week, but Ferrell’s popularity and the new twist in viewer participation have helped the site gain traction quicker than most. Whether FunnyorDie will be able to maintain that popularity over the long haul will be the real question, and competitors will be keeping an eye on the service over the next several months to see whether they need to step it up a notch with some celebrity sponsorship of their own.” From here: