The Stage

Virtual insanity: the Susan Boyle phenomenon

Published Friday 1 May 2009 at 17:35 by Mark Shenton

Mark Shenton reflects on what the Susan Boyle phenomenon means for light entertainment and the net’s part in making the Britain’s Got Talent entrant a global star faster than at any time in history

Peggy Sawyer may have been implored in 42nd Street to go out a youngster and come back a star, but that was only on a fictitious theatre stage.

For Susan Boyle, who dreamed a dream of being a professional singer who was as successful as Elaine Paige, something else has happened - as everyone knows by now, she has gone out an oldster (at nearly 48) and come back a global superstar, who has become instantly more famous worldwide in two short weeks than Paige (who recently marked the 40th anniversary of her West End debut) has ever been.

All thanks, of course, to Boyle’s brief audition clip on the first programme of a new series of Britain’s Got Talent - while the original broadcast may have gone out to a viewership of 10.5 million, that clip alone has, in the space of just a fortnight, been viewed more than 46 million times on YouTube alone (as of Monday morning this week) and is still climbing.

But it is not just on YouTube, of course, that it is available. Visible Measures - an independent third-party measurement company for video publishers, advertisers and viral marketers - had tracked videos of Boyle from YouTube, MySpace and other video-sharing sites, and after just a week, found that she had generated over 85.2 million views up to then. By comparison, President Obama’s victory speech on election night had generated 18.5 million views.

As Visible Measures put it in a blog entry on its site: “There have been moments in the history of viral video when it seems as if the whole world unites around one phenomenon. Evolution of Dance is one. Bush’s infamous battle with an Iraqi journalist’s shoes is another. For the past week, we’ve been marvelling at the popularity of the latest star of viral video - the unassuming, unexpectedly talented Susan Boyle of Britain’s Got Talent.”

And as it points out: “The runaway viral video success of Boyle’s performance is yet another indicator that the online video industry is incredibly dynamic, rich with opportunity, chock-full of data and a veritable gold mine of undiscovered insights.”

But is it really a virus or something else? As another media commentator Henry Jenkins (co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies group) suggests: “There’s a lot of talk about things going ‘viral’ online. But ‘viral’ suggests that someone has created a virus and that people are unknowingly transmitting it, as if they had no choice but to carry the virus. But that’s not really what’s going on with Susan Boyle. What we’re really seeing with Boyle in a very powerful way is the power of ‘spreadability’. Consumers in their own online communities are making conscious choices to spread her around online.”

The result, as The Washington Post put it, is that “the sleepless internet is her round the clock stage and the 47-year-old who has said she’s never heard of YouTube is the web’s hottest entertainer”. But it is the speed of the uptake that has astonished commentators - by comparison, it took five months for another Britain’s Got Talent phenomenon, opera singer Paul Potts, to hit 30 million views. As Max Clifford has said: “The Paul Potts thing took time. It happened here and then it spread gradually over a few weeks. This has happened in a few days.”

The Washington Post adds: “To media observers, the speed and scope of Boyle’s online ubiquity is a testament that the marriage between old media (her performance first aired on British television) and new media (it then made its way to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook) is broadening the reach of all media, from one channel to another, from person to person.”

It was on Twitter, of course, that Ashton Kutcher and his wife Demi Moore posted tweets about Boyle’s performance - and drove yet more traffic to view the clip (and even generated a story in The Times about their twittering).

Those new media channels have become much both more mainstream and ubiquitous in the past couple of years, and one feeds the other. Boyle has already even been mentioned in an episode of South Park - Kyle’s little brother Ike decides to run away from home and join a pirate crew in Somalia, and leaves a note for his parents saying he is leaving rather than listen to one more person talking to him about that Susan Boyle performance of Les Miserables.

Boyle’s story has been the perfect tale for the internet age, too, in packing such a broad range of emotion into a short time frame. The Los Angeles Times has reported: “A full range of emotion - first humour, then shock, followed by warm appreciation and perhaps a dollop of self-reproof for anyone who dares to judge others principally by their appearance - can be extracted from Boyle’s seven-minute clip. And that is what makes her story perfect for the internet, where short clips rule.”

No star could ever have been created faster or reached such a global audience before. But the fact is that it has taken everyone by surprise, not least the broadcaster ITV and YouTube itself, who failed to reach a deal in which ‘pre-roll’ advertising could be sold against clips of Boyle. Ben McOwen Wilson, ITV’s director of online content, has told The Times: “We don’t want to be part of YouTube’s standard terms and conditions, because content like Susan Boyle is unique.”

But while that unique opportunity to sell ads against it is currently being lost as a result, there’s a bigger battle at stake, as Dan Sabbagh has pointed out in The Times, where the boundary between a broadcaster and the video-sharing website falls “will help to determine the commercial future of television over the internet” and establish a template for “how advertisements will be displayed, how many and what terms will be acceptable”.

Meanwhile, in the middle of it all, a new template for instant stardom has also been created and it’s not just ITV who wants to capitalise on her commercially. Already Paige has suggested collaboration: “It seems her performance has captured the hearts of everyone who saw it, me included. It looks like I have competition. Perhaps we should record a duet?”.

Hugh Jackman has suggested the same thing, posting a tweet on Twitter: “Where is Susan Boyle? I am ready for a duet”. And Les Miserables is even using the new-found interest in its score to promote itself afresh, as the ads are now proclaiming, “Dream the dream nightly”.

Simon Cowell is already preparing her solo album debut and has told The New York Times: “We will ship between three million and five million copies of a Susan Boyle album. Paul Potts sold five million. I think there’s a chance we could double that.”

With the world following her every move now - her visit last week to a local hairdressers to tame her hair (and eyebrows) was reported as a transformation “from granny to glammy” - there is plenty of mileage in the story yet.