December 2012 – Media Culpa

Gangnam Style by PSY just reached 1 billion views

Seoul sensation PSY and his viral mega-hit Gangnam Style just reached 1 billion views on Youtube. That is the first time in history that a piece of visual content reaches that many views.

The K-pop video was uploaded on July 15 and quickly reached an international mass audience. It only took 51 days for the video to reach 100 million views, 5 days faster than Justin Bieber’s “Baby”, which took 56 days to reach that many views. “Baby” is currently the second most viewed video on Youtube with 813 million views.

If everyone that viewed the 4 min 13 seconds long video watched it to the end (which of course some didn’t) that would mean that we’ve spent 253 billion seconds on Gangnam Style, or 8,022 years.

If watched in sequence, you would have to start in the year 6010 BC and watch every single minute up til today to rack up the total time the video has been watched.

Pink quits Instagram and leaves 12 million followers

When Instagram announced new Terms of Service two days ago, the community of instagrammers reacted with nothing less than outrage. Among other things, users’ photos could appear in ads and the only way to opt out was to delete your account.

Among the more prominent Instagram users that reacted strongly were National Geographic and artist Pink. National Geographic stopped updating its account and posted this image:

The artist Pink went a step further and has actually deleted her entire account. Before she closed her account, she had more than 12 million followers. Now that’s quite a statement.

The flood of negative reactions forced Instagram to some crisis management and the company yesterday issued a clarification intended to respond to the worst criticism. But the damage is possibly already done. Many are reporting increased and renewed interest in Flickr, which just recently launched a new and updated Instagram-like app.

And Starmatic, a similar app that also lets you import your entire Instagram library, has seen a tremendous increase in import requests during the last 12 hours.

I love Instagram and I hope they will keep their promise to not sell user photos, so I won’t quit the service any time soon. But this could serve as a lesson to any major social network. It is not hard to copy the functionality of a social network, they are rarely unique or patented. I could switch entirely to Starmatic tomorrow if I wanted to. What I don’t want to lose is the network connections, there’s the real value. So when a large enough portion of a network decides to abandon a service, things can move pretty quickly. Hopefully Instagram has learned a lesson.

Instagram users to go private for one day in spam protest

Although Instagram has taken some measures to crack down on the increasing problem with spam, users are starting to become tired with the amount of fake accounts and comments about how to get more followers. In a response to the lack of action from Instagram, the community of instagrammers have decided to announce Dec 4 as the day many will turn their profiles to private. This protest is intended to send a message to Instagram that users are fed up with the situation, they just want to be able to share images without having to be approached by spammers.

Under the hashtag #onedaywithoutspam you can see protest images like these:

“Observing a day of protest against all the #spam on Dec. 4 by posting this and setting my profile to Private for 24 hours on that day. Please join in and hopefully #instagram will begin to take more serious steps to address this annoyance that is out of control.”

Whether this will have any effect on the spam problem remains to be seen.