Parrotheader.com

Not that I've uploaded a lot of YouTube videos or anything. Most of my videos were intended for embedding purposes for sharing with family and friends, so I knew they weren't going to get a lot of views. But I was curious to see what sort of content I could upload that would get a decent amount of attention.

The subject I chose to test with was one that I noticed appealed to a lot of people for nostalgia purposes. As a parent with a young child I've now logged many an hour in the living room while Sesame Street is on the television. While I don't usually watch whole episodes, the show always intercuts older segments which sometimes catch my attention as they'll often go back as far as my own childhood years. Occasionally I'd see a segment that would jog my memory and make me jump on YouTube just to see if it was there. Anybody else remember this extremely funky tune?

I was floored by the volume of Sesame Street videos on YouTube (currently 10,000+.) Obviously there was a lot more demand than I expected. The problem suddenly became finding something that wasn't already on YouTube. As Laney was watching an episode one day, a segment featuring an older song (clearly from the Frank Oz years) came on and buried itself into my subconscious. Much to my chagrin, I was still singing it in my head the next morning (the chorus was so catchy in a broadway sort of way.) I figured I'd see if it was anywhere else on the web. Amazingly, it wasn't (at least not a decent copy.) So I decided to record the episode on my computer the next time it came on.

I uploaded the segment a couple months ago. It already has over 6,000 views. I realize that's small potatoes compared to a ton of other videos. But considering it's just a relatively obscure segment (and I'm not an established YouTube'r with a large following) I thought that was fairly decent since the people viewing it most likely had to be seeking out this specific video via a search at YouTube or Google. This also reinforces the notion that a huge chunk of YouTube's most popular content is copyrighted material (although in this case PBS obviously doesn't mind given how many of their videos are on YouTube.)

And for the record, here's the video. It's a segment featuring the song "Bert's Blanket."