Lonelygirl15

(I posted this because miles & greg commented on the graph, which i had uploaded on the radio show tonight .. this all developed from some analysis we've been doing on anchor cove the past few days) ...

As of posting this, smosh (currently the #2 all-time most subscribed at youtube) has 82,492 subscribers -- compared to 91,281 for lonelygirl15. That is a difference of 8,789 subscribers. Smosh has been steadily catching up over the last 2 months or so. (I suspect sometimes whether all of smosh's subscribers are legitimate, but have no hard evidence of cheating right now. Frankly, it appears that every 12 year old male on youtube loves smosh.)

The youtube stars blog maintains some cool archive information on subscriber growth which shows how smosh has been catching up on lg15. Here's a chart i made from the information the other day which goes through April 1:



So, on Sept 11 (the day before Jess was "outed"), Lg15 had 39% more subscribers than smosh. By Dec 10, lg15 had almost double the subscriber numbers of smosh. But, starting around the end of jan 2007, smosh slowly started to catch up, gaining subscribers at a rate consistently faster than the other top channels.

Feb 11, the difference in subscribers was 29,097.
March 11: 23,688
April 1: 16326
April 10: 8789

In one 23 hour period yesterday, smosh gained 1300 subscribers on lg15. And its not like #3 and #4 are also closing the gap. #3 miarose, has only 54,000 or so subscribers. #4, CBS, has about 51,000.

It is true that Smosh won the youtube awards for best comedy. Maybe some of the new viewers are coming from that. But the mainstream press has noted that smosh just really isn't that funny:

Boston Herald (March 28, 2007)

Best Comedy: “Smosh Short 2” by Smosh - Apparently, YouTube is devoid of comedy. Two teens from California created this, and well, we don’t care how they do it in California.

Glen Falls, NY Post Star (March 27, 2007):

YouTube viewers selected seven "winners" for the inaugural YouTube Video Awards recently. For results, go to www.youtube.com/ytawards. "Smosh Short 2: Stranded" video by Smosh won best comedy when it clearly did not deserve a nomination. It just wasn't funny. Videos "Mixed Nuts" and "Completely Uncalled For" which finished in second and third, were clearly more comical.

Australian PC Authority (March 28, 2007)

Like any awards show, YouTube's were not without controversy. At least one winning video drew the ire of readers and led some to question the competition's legitimacy.

Smosh Short 2: Stranded, the winner of the 'best comedy' award, was swamped with negative comments. Some users even went as far as to accuse the creators of stuffing ballots and paying YouTube for the award.

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The last smosh video (the haircut one) was featured by youtube earlier this week. Lg15 has NEVER been featured, though a number of spinoff videos have (i.e., TheHill88, twice, and Dee's Lonelygirl song).

Is this part of an insidious plot by youtube? I don't know. But youtube does love to get press. Smashing made the following astute observation at anchor cove about this the other day:

"Because I'm sure the YouTube editors follow the rankings closer than anyone, I have to wonder that Smosh maybe was featured at this particular moment in time because YouTube saw that they were on pace to overtake LG as number one most subscribed and want to hurry that up, to seal the deal as it were, to create news of a new number one and get people talking about it both on and off YouTube. I don't think they even care that it's smosh. If it were brookers in the number 2 spot at this point, I bet they'd feature one of her videos. This is all speculation of course, but there's no question that Smosh is receiving favorable treatment, and there's no way in hell it's because their latest video is currently one of the most entertaining of the literally millions of videos on the site."

what do you think? is there any chance these subscriber numbers are being jacked up somehow? It wouldn't even have to be smosh themselves behind it, but just rabid fans with a breechip on their shoulders. Hyemew has also pointed out that smosh videos gets comments that are overwhelmingly postive, unlike ANYBODY else on youtube. It's just fishy to me. And if it keeps being fishy like this, smosh may overtake lg15 as early as next week.

Smosh? Really? That popular?
I didn't know.
Am I completely hiding in a cave here? I mean, I thought the Mortal Kombat video was funny, but I didn't realize they had such a following.

Hyemew has also pointed out that smosh videos gets comments that are overwhelmingly postive, unlike ANYBODY else on youtube

I've recieved death threats on one of my videos.

Oh, I watched the smosh video of the guy pretending to being lost on a beach, eating sand, etc. ... then the camera pans back and it is a crowded area. I thought, eh? not that funny, but it's okay.

I'm not that familiar with it. If there is a certain demographic that is subscribing, maybe it has pop reference ties into that group (video games, music, skateboarding, something like that)... so it gets posted on related forums or something.

Those kinds of subscriber numbers are not so high that some sort of semi-automated or coordinated process would be impossible to set up to create email accounts, sign up for YouTube, subscribe. But I think YouTube mgmt would be able to figure that out pretty quickly if they bothered to look at the database.

i blame the pokemon vid.

Bwuh? But the Pokemon vid is like....


...bleh.

I thought the MK video was kinda cool. But I've seen their other videos and they don't top it, they're not that funny.

Barats and Bereta are funnier.

I've never heard of Smosh. Then again I don't really frequent YT much, anymore.

the MK video is the bomb...but the rest of them kind of blow. It's mediocre.

Milo, have you contacted the YouTube staff for a comment?

I know that 2 months or so ago MiaRose was "outed" (Don't know if it's true) by someone who believed she, or her fans, were cheating on YouTube. This person or persons who believed she was cheating tracked her subscriber list and noticed that thousands of them were accounts that had signed up and subscribed to her and ONLY her. Empty accounts that watched ZERO videos.

Has anyone looked to see if Smosh has any subscribers like this? I'm just curious.

i looked through a couple of their subscribers and I've seen a couple of them like that, but not many. No more then 100 I would say, honestly

Hmm weird. I saw their videos featured on the main page but they never looked interesting to me. Then again I'm not a teenager anymore

Killthesmiley wrote:Milo, have you contacted the YouTube staff for a comment?

i have not. its possible smosh's gains are legitimate, but it still seems strange to me. it quite likely i'm way out of touch with what 12 year old boys like on youtube. i'm kinda hoping someone unearths evidence on cheating, as there are a few youtubers that try to expose cheaters regularly. we'll see.

on miaarose (currently #3 all time most subscribed), that was a big controversy too. later it was found out that she was featured on the signup page (new accounts get options of a few channels to subscribe to when they signup) for something like a week because youtube had made some mistake with her account (she is miaarose, and they had tried to feature miarose or something like that). that would provide a lot of new subscribers with "0" videos viewed. however, her growth in subscribers was truly blindingly fast - she only joined youtube on dec. 29, 06.

Libra wrote:I know that 2 months or so ago MiaRose was "outed" (Don't know if it's true) by someone who believed she, or her fans, were cheating on YouTube. This person or persons who believed she was cheating tracked her subscriber list and noticed that thousands of them were accounts that had signed up and subscribed to her and ONLY her. Empty accounts that watched ZERO videos.

Has anyone looked to see if Smosh has any subscribers like this? I'm just curious.

I never bothered looking at smosh vids subscribers, but I used to watch lonelygirl15's profile and refresh every 20 seconds to watch the channel view numbers go up to the point where I'd have to just focus on the last three digits. I also noted that complaint in a thread on here about youtube taking so long to update the views on brees videos as I noticed that myself, but I wrote down the number currently viewed on her profile vid that autoplays and I noted the channel view numbers and then came back later on and compared the difference of the channel views and the number of vid views were 25% because of the number of channel views which can be raise by using youcheater. Now smosh does not have that privilege to raise video views with each channel view because his does not autoplay.

I'll go ahead and save my post in case it gets deleted. If it gets deleted, it would be unfair because if we complain about on youtuber who is getting lots of subscribers and weigh the things that could possibly be youtubes fault, then I will add my bit of evidence that I'm too pissed off to reveal, but I've saved it and I'll continue to save it because the bree fans here seem to be focused on others' but don't mind about bree because people who complain about bree getting favoritism are outed as jealous people and people who can't get over the fact that she's still plugging on with more interesting videos which is bullshit. Of course I bring it up in a video and I'm outed as a psycho with serious deep seated issues, but I do have the facts and whnever I'm not so pissed out of my mind that I can't present it, I'll be able to prove with the mindset of someone who is no longer angry and when people are ready to listen.

QtheC wrote:Oh, I watched the smosh video of the guy pretending to being lost on a beach, eating sand, etc. ... then the camera pans back and it is a crowded area. I thought, eh? not that funny, but it's okay.

I'm not that familiar with it. If there is a certain demographic that is subscribing, maybe it has pop reference ties into that group (video games, music, skateboarding, something like that)... so it gets posted on related forums or something.

Those kinds of subscriber numbers are not so high that some sort of semi-automated or coordinated process would be impossible to set up to create email accounts, sign up for YouTube, subscribe. But I think YouTube mgmt would be able to figure that out pretty quickly if they bothered to look at the database.

If you are a true fan of lonelygirl15 and you suggest to youtube to look at the database, you won't be helping bree unless youtube has some agreement with youtube as was noted before that youtube can't afford to lose bree.

As for smosh, he started a big contest the how (not) to contest that had awards that were big enough to suggest that he had connections and he did a very good job with the contest. Logitec sponsored the contest and it all was for promotion of logitec.

JamieGilmour wrote:I never bothered looking at smosh vids subscribers, but I used to watch lonelygirl15's profile and refresh every 20 seconds to watch the channel view numbers go up to the point where I'd have to just focus on the last three digits. I also noted that complaint in a thread on here about youtube taking so long to update the views on brees videos as I noticed that myself, but I wrote down the number currently viewed on her profile vid that autoplays and I noted the channel view numbers and then came back later on and compared the difference of the channel views and the number of vid views were 25% because of the number of channel views which can be raise by using youcheater.

I'll go ahead and save my post in case it gets deleted. If it gets deleted, it would be unfair because if we complain about on youtuber who is getting lots of subscribers and weigh the things that could possibly be youtubes fault, then I will add my bit of evidence that I'm too pissed off to reveal, but I've saved it and I'll continue to save it because the bree fans here seem to be focused on others' but don't mind about bree because people who complain about bree getting favoritism are outed as jealous people and people who can't get over the fact that she's still plugging on with more interesting videos which is bullshit. Of course I bring it up in a video and I'm outed as a psycho with serious deep seated issues, but I do have the facts and whnever I'm not so pissed out of my mind that I can't present it, I'll be able to prove with the mindset of someone who is no longer angry and when people are ready to listen.

i see no reason this should be deleted, and in fact, i can't imagine any of our mods deleting a post like this. the apparently lg15-only autoplay option on the channel is an advantage, if no one else truly has it.

Now smosh does not have that privilege to raise video views with each channel view because his does not autoplay.

we all know there are tons of ways to cheat on youtube of course. greenteagirlie showed most recently how easy it is to use fake subscribers and autorefreshers to get way up in the charts.

since i've yet to find anybody who really loves smosh other than in smosh comment threads, i guess i'm just WAY outside their demographic.

since i've yet to find anybody who really loves smosh other than in smosh comment threads, i guess i'm just WAY outside their demographic.

I have respect for Smosh, but I'm not a fan and I only watched the vid that rose to the top of youtube the other day and I thought it was boring at first, but any video with editing skills, I like. I never bothered commenting or reading the comments. My idea is usually that any video that gets to the top of youtube will generally get nothing but bad comments that all basically say the same thing as die or something like that. People who actually participate in making vids on youtube aren't usually focused on making comments. I'm not making sense, but all i wanted to say was clear until I started typing and the clear picture is gone so I'll send this and finish eating as I stare at the screen. lol