Today’s guest post is from Thomas Ballantyne. Tom and I know each other from marketing tradeshows and conferences. Imagine my surprise when monitoring search results for “black friday” I saw his site come up. This time it wasn’t in relation to the shopping day though, it was to my current nemesis in monitoring for people talking about Black Friday…what’s being called “the worst song ever” Rebecca Black – Friday.

Rob Woods

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Black Friday is the most anticipated shopping day of the year. Sales galore. Big Savings. It’s a shopper’s dream. However, the problem with Black Friday is that it only happens once a year. It’s like waiting all year for Thanksgiving because the two happen right after each other. What if we could experience Black Friday every Friday?

On February 10, 2011, Ark Music Factory posted a YouTube video that would help redefine the viral industry forever. No other music video has drawn as much attention and ire as Rebecca Black’s “Friday” single. Unfortunately, the lyrics to the video itself to the tone of her singing is, as a good friend of mine put it on Twitter, “like nails down a chalkboard and knives into my eyes.”

The song graces you with creative and original lyrics such as “Yesterday was Thursday. Today is Friday…Tomorrow is Saturday and Sunday comes afterwards.” That is followed up by the brilliance of “Fun, fun, fun, fun!” Simply amazing!

It has been mentioned and scoffed at by almost every radio station across the country. While Letterman cracked a joke, Leno actually had Rebecca on as a guest. Sports commentators are evening weighing in, playing sound bites throughout their programs.

Last Friday, Bulwark Exterminating posted that “Friday” had 47,706,751 views on the official YouTube channel, with 706,886 “dislikes” and 83,491 “likes”. Forty four days after originally being posted, “Friday” received an average of 1.08 million views per day.

At the time of me typing this sentence, 72 hours later, the video has 60,997,359 million hits on YouTube, 1,083,638 “dislikes” and 130,129 “likes”. In three days, the average has risen to about 1.2 million views per day, and comments are still literally being posted at more than one per second. The pace is astonishing.

Here’s what all the commotion is about…

I must apologize if you have seen this video before, which some will argue is once too many, but repetitive viewing is necessary for the sake of discussion.

What’s the reality of such a highly viewed, but disliked, video?

Although iTunes does not publicly release the sales numbers of their downloads, “Friday” currently sits at #28, ahead of songs by The Black Eyed Peas, Katy Perry and fellow YouTube sensation Justin Bieber. Sorry Biebs, Rebecca’s got you beat.

Forbes and Billboard differ in their estimation of just how many times “Friday” has been downloaded, but most estimate that it has been downloaded well over 2 millions times. As iTunes pays the publisher 70 cents on the dollar, Ark Music Factory, who produced the song, as presumably cashed in over $1 million.

With 60 million views on YouTube, Ark Music is also cashing in on paid advertisements. As a pest control company on our scorpion video, we average about $.71 per thousand views. For us, this is enough to pay for fountain drinks at the gas station down the road. If we calculate that her video even earns $.50 per thousand views, Arm Music is still banking over $30,000. That will be enough to buy Rebecca a car when she turns 16 three years from now, and she won’t even have to decide where to sit.

It is hard to know how many royalties she is earning, since Ark Music Factory produced and released the video. Since she is the one putting herself up on a pedestal for every American, minus 83,000 of them, to take shots at, we certainly hope she is getting the vast majority of those checks. Annoying voice or not, she is taking this all the way to the bank. Horrific lyrics or not, we are the ones filling up her bedazzled pockets.

Now we can enjoy Black Friday not just once a year, but 52 times a year. And what better way is there to celebrate the real Black Friday by listening to Rebecca Black’s “Friday”?

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Thanks, Tom!

Cheers,

Rob.