Should YouTube Views Be Used To Determine How Popular A Video Is In Ghana?

After the 4th Syte Music Video Awards, controversial musician, Wanlov came out publicly to vent his spleen on the organisers of the annual awards.

Ever since the awards, I have been asking myself: What makes any video popular if not how many views the video gets on YouTube? I was one of the few people who shared Wanlov’s stand before he even came out strongly to register his displeasure on his sister’s behalf.

What was Wanlov’s problem with the organisers?

This is it and as simple as this. According to him even though Deborah Vanessa (his biological sister) released his ‘Uncle Obama’ music video on the same day EL released his ‘Kaalu’ video, she failed to get nominations in the award whiles the latter picked the Most Popular Music Video.

At the time of his rant, as many as 636,151 views have been recorded for the ‘Uncle Obama’ video as against 82,283 views for EL’s ‘Kaalu’ video. Even D-Black’s ‘Vera’ which was in the same category with EL has about 377,465.

By the above views, clearly EL’s ‘Kaalu’ video has no business being adjudged as the Most Popular Video in Ghana for 2012 unless the organisers had different criteria than the ‘mere’ views on YouTube.

You do not need to have a good or popular song to win a video award. The two songs don’t send any tangible or important message to the patrons out as they are just ordinary songs with meaningless lyrics.

There is honesty in Wanlov’s rants for the simple reason is that, when ‘Uncle Obama’ video was released, it went viral on the internet to the extent of many accusing the singer of being paid to compose the song for President Obama.

The popularity of the video offered her the opportunity to be interviewed and featured on CNN.

I would probably be living on another planet if I fail to notice the substance and relevance of the YouTube video channel.

If YouTube views of videos are not important when awarding most popular music videos, then what do we base our criteria on? You can not tell me the organizers used the number of times a video was aired on TV-since the more you pay, the more air time you can buy for your video.

Should YouTube views be used to determine how popular a video is? If NO, how can the popularity of videos be determined in Ghana for ‘popular’ music video awards?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2HSo3yywDU

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uqrnxMp9-A