Saturday, December 20, 2008

Website idea 12: Hitler video meme site


If you are a regular Youtube user you have hardly missed the recent "Hitler video remix" meme. It all got started when someone took Hitler's worst rage burst scene from the movie "der Untergang - the Downfall". They then added the new English subtitles for the German dialogue , suggesting that instead of Hitler realising the war is lost, his outburst was because his Xbox Live account was shut down because of cheating. The clip was hilarious and has already resulted hundreds (?) of similar clips, the reason for an outburst ranging from unwanted Superbowl results to Hitler realising Santa Claus does not exist.

Strike while the iron is hot. Start a site dedicated to these videos. The site should meet at least following requirements:
  • Ability to rate videos so when can separate masterworks from crappy videos (which, unfortunately, most of these are). There is a popularity listing on Youtube too but it doesn't work too well, as it lists also old propaganda movies etc. Also the ability for visitors to comment videos .
  • Editor's pick section, where you can present new promising videos and old classics.
  • Top ten list on the main page.
  • Ability to easily add new subtitles. I'm sure there are thousands of great ideas for new subtitles but not enough knowledge or time to put them to practice. The easiest way would be adding a sufficient number of text input boxes, accompanied by the original line (and tone of it). You could then make Youtube videos of the best of them.
  • History of the meme (for journalists and bloggers to read and link).

How to get visitors to your site? One good way to get started is a product a number of your own videos. Just remember to provide each video with a text "VISIT WWW.RAGINGHITLER.COM FOR MORE VIDEOS". If you can't figure out good ideas by yourself, ask your friends and on Internet forums, or use the imagination of visitors of your site as mentioned above. I have also some suggestions:
  • Hitler is made redundant because of worsening economical situation
  • Hitler became the latest victim of the Nigerian email scams
  • The staff of the bunker found Hitler's secret Toblerone chocolate bar cache and consumed it all
  • Stalin rejected Hitler's friend request on Facebook
  • Hard drive of Hitler's laptop broke up and no one never took a back-up
  • The generals took a joyride with Hitler's Mercedes without permission and crashed it
  • Hitler gets a parking ticket
  • Hitler wished for a new iPod for a Christmas present but got a pink Creative Zen instead
  • Hitler tries in vain to establish WLAN network between his desktop PC, Xbox 360, DSL modem and Eva's MacBook
  • Mussolini keeps sending irritating application requests to Hitler on Facebook

6 Comments:

Anonymous said...

It's still a work in progress but I am working on this website, http://hitlerme.me.

What do you reckon / any feedback?

Cheers, Dave.

Teemu said...

It seems pretty good already. At least I got some pretty good laughter from the very first video I saw there. :) The url is also quite clever. Anyway, here is some suggestions to consider:

* How about a logo? It would make a site still more credible looking (yeah, I know, I'm working on my own). For example, something like this: http://www.customonlinesigns.com/images/u/0ed6194f0c904abe8f28bbd37e84ee9f-800.png

* The site looks pretty ok but how about adding some additional color, for example red. So many sites are just blue and white.

* Could you find enough space to put an intro text and videos to same level? That would make immediately clear to everyone, even those with relatively small browser window, that your site is about video remixes and there is one on the front page ready for watching. The initial impression is so important.

* I would definetly put some navigation next to the video. I mean like an arrows you can use to go to next / previous video.

* A link to http://badass-website-ideas.blogspot.com/ would be cool :P

Teemu said...

Thanks for a mail! Let's keep the conversation here, anyway. :) Your new layout looks better to me. However, I would add some contrast. So, I would make the green rounded bars darker and change the text on them to white and preferably bold. At the moment they are bit hard to read.

Initially I was surprised about the blog format but when I think about it it's not a bad idea. For some reason, my Firefox renders the first video to wrong place.

Now you just need a lots and lots of visititors. I think one good approach is to make videos by yourself and then make it clear on the video that there is a site filled with similar stuff. You can also ask video ideas on forums, you can even get visitors simultaneously if moderators allow you to link to your site (you can ask it on your post and tell them that if they don't like the link please remove just it, not the entire post).

And thanks for the backlink, I appreaciate it a lot. :)

Anonymous said...

How weird, I randomly came across this site/article just now and I made a site like this last year (2008-05-31) http://www.hitlertv.com/

Fed it some traffic but apart from a mention in a forum somewhere it didn't go anywhere, not even a single digg click.

Granted, it doesn't have all the features you mention but as funny as the videos are it's too limited as a website concept.

Teemu said...

Thanks for your comment! Too bad to hear it didn't succeed. But it's always hard to launch a website, so we can't know for sure was the problem really a concept. Maybe with a bigger "marketing muscels", for example by doing several own videos it might have succeeded. Hard to say.

Allen said...

I share the same views. Liked your blog very much.

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