Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

80,000. It sounds impressive. It’s the capacity of the Stade de France in Paris – home to the French national soccer team. I mention that mainly for my love of soccer and to reference Zinedine Zidane once again in one of my blog posts. 80,000 is also the number of CD’s sold by the Spice Girls in Poland, for their album Spice World (Despi mentioned them in this post). And finally, one of the longest dinosaurs, the Apatosaurus, is estimated to have weighed close to 80,000 lbs.

Slow blog day at IMA? You bet. Is it difficult to find facts about 80,000? Yep. But – this is going somewhere. IMA’s YouTube Channel will hit 80,000 views any day now, and I’m slightly torn about that. I’m convinced that those views have consisted of people truly interested in art. Feedback for our videos has been overwhelmingly positive, so in that respect, wow – thousands of people have experienced art from IMA’s collection, heard directly from artists, or discovered an interesting performance. We want more of these people and will continue to provide these experiences.

When IMA’s marketing and new media departments created the YouTube account in the summer of 2006, there were really no expectations. It was an experiment, a place for our content and free bandwidth. 18 months later and we all view it differently. We produce art content. We are focused on the stories artwork, an artist or exhibition can tell. And we really care about our viewers. If you search some of the most popular videos on YouTube, you are unlikely to find anything related to art or museums. 80,000 is impressive, especially for art content, but I really wish that number was higher.

How does an art museum compete in the YouTube arena? Should we be happy with our numbers, or is it realistic to expect more viewers, subscribers, friends, family, video comments, responses? I don’t know the answer to that. But I am certain we can’t compete with videos like Incredible Cuteness Overload.

Yes it’s cute. This one video has over 800,000 hits (not 80,000). We could produce something like this on squirrels. The IMA has lots of cute squirrels running around the campus – but don’t expect Incredible Cuteness Overload II from us any time soon. We will continue revealing stories about art or providing a realistic glimpse into the inner workings of an art museum. But we do want more of you to watch our videos. I’m just not quite sure how to do that.

So – 80,000, what do you think? Am I greedy for wanting more? Should we be pulling out all the stops to increase our viewers? And, I guess more importantly, would you want to watch a video on IMA’s cutest squirrel?

• Tags: 80000, Apatosaurus, Art, ima, Incredible Cuteness Overload, Indianapolis Museum of Art, It's My Art, museum, New Media, Rabbit, squirrels, Stade de France, youtube, zinedine zidane
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.