I love stats. Well, good, fun, informative stats that is. Check out the video below that I caught from a Mashable post.

Among the more fascinating statistics in The Economist’s Fall 2009 “Did You Know?” video on media convergence include that 40 million people have been rick-rolled, 95% of all downloaded songs last year weren’t paid for, there are 2 million TVs in bathrooms in the U.S., and 90% of some 200 billion emails sent per day are spam.

When you can take stats like those listed above, and drop them into a fun and entertaining video… you’ve got gold Jerry, Gold!

What did you think of this video? Good stuff, eh? Now… what kind of simple video like this can YOU make? I know you can do the research and find good stats. Then you simply have to find a video editor to put it together for you. Search your local colleges for a video department and find a student who has some time and who wouldn’t mind a few extra hundred bucks. Or look on Craigslist. Believe me, there are tons of people out there now looking for extra work.

When you make your video… post about it here. I’d love to see it.

Ever see that video of that kid on YouTube who was all doped up from his dentist appointment? It’s funny, yes. Well guess what? His dad is now $25k richer from that video via the YouTube Partner Program which allows video owners to share in the wealth of advertisements. Watch this report.

If you haven’t gotten your hands on a cheap Flip cam yet, what are you waiting for? Then get over to the Online Video Toolkit and learn how to use it.

Then all you have to do is film yourself or your kid or your wife or your dog or whomever… doing something funny and you could be rich! :) Ok, it’s probably harder than that, but you get the point, right?

$25k for a video he made in 1 minute? Not a bad ROI. I’m a YouTube partner and I earn very small amounts from my videos because I make videos that don’t really get viewed that much. I think my most viewed video is just over 50k views and that’s because it was a funny political video. Most of my videos get a few thousand views at most.

If you can make fun, viral videos you can earn some bucks. Try it.

You’re not going to find a better example of a viral type video built specifically to drive an action than this one.

Go watch this now and come back.

Notice how smart this was done? A powerful, emotional story, told without voice, in music and images.

Also notice how smart the call to actions are at the end of the video? They don’t interrupt. They are relevant. They help you easily share it.

This video will go viral because it’s that good. And frankly, this is something you could make over at www.Animoto.com for free.

Use emotions and tell stories.

So today, for me, another first. I got to hang out and interview the person with the most viewed video on YouTube… EVER! Yep, that’s Judson Laipply (@judsonlaipply on Twitter), the guy who performed the Evolution of Dance video that has been seen, at the time of this blog post, over 120 MILLION times. Wow. If you haven’t seen it, check it out here.

Lucky for me, Judson was speaking today at the Online Marketing Summit here in Cleveland, OH. (Which, by the way, is an awesome event. Look for one coming near you soon).

So I found myself sitting in the front row for his lunchtime talk today to learn about his success and well, to watch him dance. So first, here’s him doing the dance today. And yes, he does the dance at the end of every speaking gig.

After the event I was able to spend 15-minutes or so talking with Judson about the business of viral, and Web fame and the corporate world’s lack of creativity when it comes to doing something remarkable. Here’s part 1 of that interview.

Here’s part 2.

I hope you enjoy hearing from Judson as much as I did. Here’s a guy who “just did it”. He had an idea and thought it might be cool and just went for it. Now that’s someone who I can relate with.

I found his presentation and his success story fascinating and inspirational. Visit Judson’s site at MightAsWellDance.com.

Take a look at this video. It’s nothing special. A woman who sells trees and plants in her backyard posted this home made video on YouTube of her touring around her yard showing you what she has to offer.

Go ahead, just watch it. All she did was link this off of her Craigslist page.

Man, that video completely sucked right? Wrong!

I love that video. Why? Because it’s real. Because if I was in the market for a new cherry tree and had the choice between going to this woman’s backyard down the road from me and Home Depot… I’d MUCH rather go to her.

See, I’ve been saying this for years… It has NOTHING to do with the quality of the video. It doesn’t have to be scripted, or with multiple shots, or done with big fancy equipment. It just doesn’t.

I simply has to be real, and solve a problem.

Anyone can do this. Get a Flip cam (BuytheFlip.com) and point it at yourself or your products and click the record button. Then upload it to YouTube and you’re done.

Bad videos suck… In a good way.

Again, anyone can do this. You HAVE to do this. Check out my free Online Video Toolkit to learn how to make Web videos.

Thank you to Robert Crabtree for pointing me to this video and sharing his story with me.

The other day I did a video interview with Bill Vick of XtremeRecruiting.tv.

On Skype. And it was recorded. Pretty darn neat if you ask me.

Here’s the interview.

How do you do this? You use Skype.com, which is free. Then you download a piece of software called Call Recorder from Ecamm.com. ($15). I should mention this is Mac only. Anyone know how to do this on a PC?

When you start Skype, you tell it to record the conversation and well, it does! That’s it. Pretty darn neat way of doing video interviews.

One of the best things you can do in video that you can’t do in text, or even audio, is explain things. You know, like a tutorial. Guy Kawasaki has a great article about tutorials here.

This week I sat through eight hours of companies pitching themselves to a panel of experts at SXSW. It was a challenging experience because the companies had two minutes to explain what they do, and very few could. Indeed, in most cases the first question that the panelists asked was, “What exactly do you do again?” The same thing happens hundreds of thousands of times every day as people visit company websites. How many websites pass this simple test: “People can understand what the company does in two minutes or less”?

One of the video tutorials he talks about is this one below.

Here’s another tutorial video below that talks about the credit crisis.

You should watch for two reasons. 1. Because it’s a good video that explains how the USA got into this financial mess, and 2. Because it shows an effective way to explain something in visual form.

Of course, Lee over at CommonCraft.com is the master of these types of videos as well. Here’s a video on investing in what they call “plain English”.

These types of tutorial videos are an extremely effective way of getting your point across about a complex issue. Try it.

I should point out that making these types of videos is not easy. Many of them require effects that need to be done by a professional video editor or animator. It’s not going to be cheap to get this done. Contact me if you need a resource.

What’s the #1 question you have about creating, editing or marketing Web video? I’m asking you to tell me because I’m trying to decide how to focus the 2.0 version of OnlineVideoToolkit.com. Yep, I’m upgrading it, and it will still be free! Thousands of people have enjoyed it so far and now it’s time to help thousands more!

So, go here and ask me the question you most want to know about Web video. I’ll answer your questions live on the preview call next Friday. If you can’t make the call, don’t worry, I’ll send you the recording if you sign up.

What’s the #1 question you have about creating, editing or marketing Web video? Ask me right now.

I use Tubemogul to upload videos all of the web. My friend Steve coined this term on our online video podcast as promiscuous posting. Pretty clever, eh?

So is this spam? Does Google consider this spam? And should you continue to do this? Should I? What’s the long and short term strategy for me and you? I talk about it in this video. I’m very interesting in your opinions and thoughts.

Click To Play

That’s what Jason Glickman from Tremor Media, the largest online video network tells me at the end of this podcast. I think you can do it with much less, but I believe Jason means on his network.

Tremormedia sells ads on videos by the millions and millions (in other words, not the long tail). So if you’re looking for an inside look into the online video advertising network business (non User generated content videos), this is the podcast for you.

We also talk about the IAB standards for video advertising and how as the standards become more adopted the buying will grow higher and higher. Also, should videos shot as commercials for businesses be put on the businesses websites? I bring up the fact that people want less ads in the future and Jason responds.

Finally, Jason gives some tips for video creators about how to build videos to attract advertisers.