THE ART OF POINTLESS LIVE STREAMING
It’s 16:54 and I finish work in an hour and 6 minutes, I’m sat here watching JOE.co.uk’s live stream featuring one of their reporters giving away free money on the streets of London. Armed with 20 £1 coins, he spent almost 25 minutes approaching strangers with the line “would you like some free money?” — some accept, most ignore. And the word that doesn’t spring to mind is captivating, right? But it’s exactly what it is.
This ‘pointless’ content is fun, light hearted and creates suspense… over and over and over again. And that’s the secret to a quality live stream.
The stream saw over five and a half thousand people, myself included, watching on a Monday afternoon during working hours, with hundreds of comments and thousands of reactions.
(UPDATE: 20 hours later, it’s been viewed over 200,000 times).
This art of pointless live streaming is changing how we consume content. It’s replacing the conventional Saturday night entertainment on ITV — in an unexpected and on-demand offering.
No schedules, trailers or advertising during the lead up to this. A fast thinking idea in the JOE office to change up a £20 note and see if people would take it.
Live stream pioneers BuzzFeed have crafted the recipe for a captivating fun live stream. Their stream where employees put rubber bands around a watermelon to see if it would explode saw tens-of-thousands of viewers engaged and eager for the videos climax.
But what does this mean for content on social? should brand and publishers ditch high production values, planning and strategy to make bizarre, somewhat-pointless content? No.
There’s a place for both. The beauty of when something goes viral is because there is no structure or framework for it’s success. Last week I wrote a post on Casey Neistat’s viral video “The $21,000 first class airplane seat”. This video wasn’t trying to be viral, it was part of his daily vlogging series — receiving over 21.5 million views, making it his most popular video. Whereas his video during the hype of PokemonGO titled “Pokémon Go IN REAL LIFE” was made specifically made in an attempt to ‘go viral‘. Yet it received fewer than 5 million views. A count not too far from his regular daily videos.
