YouTube Hits! – a week or so in

YouTube Hits! is the new online video and radio show hybrid, that SCA launched across its 55 stations nationwide over a week ago.

Michael Beveridge and Marty Smiley front the show with it squarely aimed at the under 30 set.

We caught up with SCA hit Network Group CD Dave Cameron for a quick wrap on how it’s going, how it came about and we find out who is Annoyingly brilliant. Brilliantly annoying.

RT: Over a week down with YouTube Hits… what’s the traffic been like?

Dave Cameron: Very good! The average YouTube to subscriber ratio is 1 subscriber per 1000 views. Right now we are gaining 1 subscriber per 70 views, which is pretty crazy. Our tweets have also reached nearly half a million impressions which shows how engaged the community is already after 1 week.

RT: How long ago did you start working on creating the show?

DC:  It was the brainchild of our own Blake Phillips who had the vision mid last year, and from there we connected quickly with the YouTube Australian and International teams who loved it.

From there we developed it together as a joint venture. So it’s been about 9 months in development from concept to on-air.

We started building the online studio where we record the nightly visuals about 2 months ago.

My honest opinion is this show concept is really probably the most ground breaking content going on in the whole Australian radio industry right now. Plus there’s a huge under 25 audience that we are now talking to, than typically haven’t grown up being traditional radio owners or listeners. We’re now going to where they are, rather than hoping they’ll come to us.

RT: If you haven’t listened to the show on a hit Station, how is it all working….  Are the guys are doing the breaks On-Air and then you are slicing and dicing the vision to serve to YouTube?

DC:  We record the whole show nightly, both for radio and vision for Youtube. It has around a 2 hour post production turnaround while we edit a radio version and a slightly different online version of the show with 2 different teams. The Youtube editing process is deliberately a lot ‘jumpier and random’ to suit that medium. We’re very fussy about appealing to the YouTube masses and not just giving them traditional radio.

RT: Do you need to find the right balance between stuff that works On-Air versus the visual side?

DC:  Sure, it’s still a music based show so the backbone of the show suits both platforms. The content segments we shoot always have a very strong visual creative element to them to make sure it’s visually stimulating, and obviously we need to work hard to make sure it’s explained well to our radio audience.

RT: Two words to describe Michael

DC:  Annoyingly brilliant. Brilliantly annoying.

RT: And Marty?

DC:  Passionate. Musically credible.

RT: That’s a wrap, what’s Youtube Hits! main point of difference in the space?

DC:  It’s a show that’s doing radio differently for a younger generation than anything else right now, and the association with YouTube provides us exclusive data that is hugely valuable.

We have cherry picked a couple of vid’s from YouTube hits! That showcases some of the show content. You can see more on the YouTube hits! channel here.

The Bug Blow:

“Inspired by the Japanese game show segment of two girls blowing a tube with a cockroach, we have invented the “Bug Blow Challenge”. 

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Thoughts In The Shower – Michael & Marty

“Sometimes the greatest things come from a little think in the shower…”

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How To Tie Dye Levi’s With Tyde Levi

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The Whisper Challenge 

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