If you haven’t heard of him yet, that’s because he hadn’t verbally accosted the darling of the vlogging world yet. Ze Frank, host of “The Show,” Rocketboomed himself into an authentic charts-and-graphs nerd fight with Andrew Baron. There, now you’ve heard of him.
That’s because, as scientists recently confirmed, Mondays are made up of tiny particles known as grumpitons, or, as they are known in the vernacular, “general pissiness” (in other circles they are called thetans).
Amanda Congdon’s public unbooming was scheduled for a Monday, but July 4th holiday travel caused delays as well as holiday hangover grumpiton buildup (commonly referred to as “the gout”).
Ze Frank’s Monday show was conceived from the same side of the bed where Rocketboom viewer numbers were steadily and incessantly craw-chapping, sending general pissiness levels through the roof. The focus was on tips for starting a vlog and how to convince advertisers to sponsor your show. Ze Frank recommends inflating your numbers, just like Rocketboom.
“Now all you have to do is become popular,” said Ze Frank in his deadpan instructional video voice. “The great thing about the web is that there is no universal mechanism to track and verify statistics. If you want to be popular just go ahead and say you’re popular. I call it Rocketbooming.”
Using Alexa numbers, Ze Frank illustrated that “The Show” attracted 30,000 viewers, which was significantly more than Rocketboom. Rocketboom claims to reach as many as 350,000 viewers daily, a number Ze Frank disputes.
“If you want to be popular just stick to your own background statistics and BS, and people will start paying attention,” he said.
Or, he should have added, publicly slam a more successful vlog. See, here’s a whole article about it already.
Baron didn’t take the Alexa graph lying down:
As a result of Ze’s outspoken concerns, I got a call today from Marshall Kirkpatrick from Techcrunch who wanted to go over all of my stats. He was pretty skeptical at first but I gave him logins for the various servers and spent an hour on the phone going over everything.
He confirmed my numbers.
Baron attributes Ze Frank’s relative lack of success to his Web 1.0 ways:
As Ze has been doing online video for a very long time, but he uses 1.0 means of distributing his showand he only started to identify with “videoblogging” once videoblogging defined him. In otherwords, Ze is brilliantly interactive with his not-safe-for-work-or-school audience, but has not done much, relitively speaking, in pioneering the space that we are both defined by now and he has not been much of a contributor to lifting up others in terms of sharing his ideas for how to make all of this work.
Translation: Ze Frank doesn’t play nice with others. For this crime, the Rodney King of bloggers, Chris Brogan thinks that the glassy early stages of vlogging could do without the rock throwing.
Are there really conversations going on out there where any of us are having to defend our ad opportunities by throwing other shows under the bus? Are we now in a gladiator economy?
I know it’s election time, but do we have to emulate Democrat meltdowns within our tiny little community?
Wow. I didn’t know the Democrats were in on this too. A supportive commentator at Ze Frank’s blog writes, “38DD. And that’s no rocketboom.” While that has nothing to do with this, it’s more interesting than the phrase “gladiator economy.”
Interestingly, neither Baron while defending himself, nor Brogan mentions that Alexa numbers are hardly a basis for comparing hard data. This is the same webmaster-dominated toolbar that incorrectly found YouTube had surpassed MySpace in daily visits and that Matt Cutts’ blog was as popular as Ask.com.
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