April 17, 2007

Over Half a Million Viewers for Anaheim Ballet YouTube Video

In what I think is a wonderful development that shows that there is a huge, enthusiastic audience for ballet, one of the Anaheim Ballet's YouTube videos has now been viewed 670,000 times.

Here's the video titled "Dancers":

On Saturday Evan Rosenberg, the producer of the Anaheim Ballet video series, emailed me saying that one of their videos was featured on YouTube's home page. I took this screen shot on Saturday that shows that at the time, the "Dancers" video had been viewed 3,736 times. Click for larger image:

Obviously placement on YouTube's home page makes a huge difference and without that positioning, the Anaheim Ballet's video would have never gotten such a large audience. So should we write-off this incredible traffic for a ballet video because of YouTube's huge audience?

Definitely not. Look at the numbers for the other videos on the YouTube home page, and then toward the bottom of the page click "See More Featured Videos." You'll notice that the views for the Anaheim Ballet video are significantly higher than almost all of the other featured videos.

So I think it's fair to say that both the non-dancing and dancing public was intrigued by this video. On top of that, this video has 796 comments - just about all very favorable. And 2,491 users have made this video a favorite.

One of the reasons for the success of this ballet video and the others in this series is because of the approach that was taken in producing these clips. They're fun, engaging, accessible and intentionally anti-elitist. Here's what I first wrote about these videos in March.

I'm always reading these depressing stories about the state of ballet and modern dance, the difficulty of raising money and the obstacles to building audiences - all real challenges. But at the same time, I think that it's time for all involved in the concert dance community - dance companies, presenters, associations, funders and writers to break out of their traditional view of the dance world and start looking at the future of dance in new ways.

The Internet offers compelling ways to reach out to huge audiences, to generate revenue in new ways and, overall, to help dancers and dance companies to be financially successful and sustainable. (I'll continue to write about specific ways that dancers and dance companies can generate revenue directly and indirectly by leveraging the Internet.)

But, I believe, that there is a real need for more experimentation and risk-taking on the part of everybody involved in dance. Which Internet initiatives work and don't work? What are low-cost online marketing projects that dancers can pursue now that have a high probability of success? And how can dancers and dance companies from around the world share their online experiences - both the good and the bad - with others?

Many questions and challenges ahead. But one thing is certain: There are a lot of people who are enthusiastic about dance - even ballet as the Anaheim Ballet has shown. The question is how can this Internet audience be tapped into in successful and profitable ways.

Posted by Doug Fox on April 17, 2007 7:25 AM

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