In an ISDC presentation Saturday afternoon, Ryan Wilson of the X Prize Foundation described some innovative marketing efforts the organization is planning to promote this October’s X Prize Cup in New Mexico. In the next few weeks, he said, they play to start releasing a series of 30-40 “viral videos”: clips one to two minutes long promoting the event and some of the companies that plan to participate in it. The videos will be uploaded to sites like Google Video and YouTube, where the X Prize people hope people will see them and tell their friends about them, encouraging them to either attend the event or watching the webcast. On that last point, Wilson said that the foundation’s goal is to make the X Prize Cup the “top live streaming event of 2006″. The SpaceShipOne X Prize flights in 2004, he noted, attracted 2.7 million viewers, making it one of the largest online video audiences in history. At the show itself, he said that they’re planning on 20,000 people attending, up from the roughly 12,000 who went to the 2005 event.
They and everyone else in the world have discovered viral videos. Wired published a how-to this month. There are ten million videos out there soon to be fifty million. X Prize Cup has great production quality, but will that just put it in the top fifty thousand? The days of the dancing baby and zik-zak are gone.