EightBlack.

Consumer driven content is on its way. Big time.

And video as a medium is only just the tip of the iceberg.

Take Gidol, a clever play on Google Video and the TV “idol” phenomenon.

According to Gidol’s “About Us” section, they state;

Gidol is a new online competition for the many talented (and not so talented) people out there who have been waiting for their moment of fame. The competition places publicly submitted videos from Google Video in a head-to-head knockout tournament of 4 heats and 2 semi finals leading up to the grand final when a winner is announced.

Popularity is judged by the public who vote for their favourite video - and you can vote once a day for the Gidol you want to win. Votes are tallied at the end of the competition and the video with the highest number of votes will be named the winner. Winners not only receive prizes for their efforts, but are also inducted into the Gidol Hall of Fame.

The site is fantastic.

For one, it’s been embraced by Google itself, which shows that Google is smart enough to recognise affiliate deals when it sees it.

It also knows (as well as its site owner) that due to the site’s growing global popularity, it’s an ideal venue for its burgeoning adsense advertising medium.

More importantly, the site is run by a Queensland based University student, Ben Petro and even more impressive is the fact that the site only emerged last month.

Traffic to date is in excess of a million visitors. Winning contestants have similar traffic stats to their own sites. And growing.

Melbourne newspaper, The Age reports:

So far, Gidol has had a million visitors, who vote on the submitted home-made music videos. In the Gidol Hall of Fame — their big winners — are a pair of cute young Dutch girls, Pomme and Kelly, both 15, who simply stare down the barrel of their lounge room webcam in Amsterdam and pretend to sing Aretha Franklin’s Respect. (that’s them at the top of this post)

The girls’ own website got 500,000 hits in two months. They’ve graced the front page of Dutch newspapers and were quizzed by the Los Angeles Times.

Then there’s the hilarious — and very knowing — Back Dormitory Boys, from China, doing As Long As You Love Me by the Back Street Boys. They are three young Asian guys in matching orange adidas tracksuits belting out the tune from a Shanghai bedroom, but mocking its excruciating earnestness at the same time.

They’ve been hired by Pepsi as the faces of a new advertising campaign — and herein lies the key. Gidol is more than a fun internet craze. It’s a prime example of what the experts call “consumer-generated content”, where ordinary folk either usurp the big corporations and advertising agencies or are used by them to spread a more believable, spin-free message.

I love where this is heading.

And I applaud Google for supporting the site, rather than coming down heavy.

Dont believe in raw, un-edited, consumer driven content?

Think again.

And take your hat off to Ben Petro, founder and creator of Google Idol.

He’s just made the HR file at the world’s top technology company.

PS. Want more content re the future of video and the internet? Check out Ken McCarthy’s blog.

Subscribe to more posts like this

Related Posts:

Add to | | | View blog reactions

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 29th, 2006 at 8:36 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.