Playboy picks six YouTube bunnies. Interweb yawns.

Playboy's online casting call is over.

But as Michael at Silicon Alley Insider wrote a couple of months ago, it never seemed to quite take off in the first place.

Of the 80+ entries displayed on Playboy's YouTube page, none of them got more than a few thousand views -- nothing close to the hundreds of thousands or millions you need to make a splash these days. 

You'd think that 80 half-naked girls would do well on YouTube, but maybe with all the free porn out there these days, half-naked just ain't what it used to be.

Still, the six gals that were selected from the pool got to fly to the Playboy Mansion to participate in a photoshoot, the 100% naked results of which will be available on Playboy's for-pay site.   

Whether the contest generated a lot of attention or not, it seems like Playboy may have found an efficient way to recruit bunnies.

Sure beats gathering hundreds of beautiful, scantily clad women together in one overcrowded room ...

Comments

[MSGiro]

I'm yawning at this quick to judge lack of real analysis commentary here. Do the math. Between both of Holly Madison's videos and the 80 submissions you have a rough estimate of 1.5 million views. Holly's videos, at most, may have cost Playboy $2000 to produce, create the YouTube page and upload the videos. The immediate impact is brand awareness from the various press reports and blog postings regarding this plus the video views. Conservatively speaking between all of that Playboy is looking at around 2-3 million views of this campaign across the "Interweb". For $2000, heck $25,000, that's a huge ROI in brand awareness alone. Long term, the money that Playboy makes off of the finalists and winner will probably be 10,000 times greater than the initial investment. If I walked into a client's office and guaranteed this level of success they'd probably ask to adopt me.

My one critique of this campaign, if any, is that they didn't continue to utilize cheap and efficient tools to heavily promote this, such as their Facebook page, Twitter, MySpace, etc. A little bit of effort there could have created a smash hit opposed to the hit that it is.

[Chris Duncan]

"Long term, the money that Playboy makes off of the finalists and winner will probably be 10,000 times greater than the initial investment."

Do you realize that 10,000 times $2000 is $20,000,000 ? That's a lot of Cyber Club memberships.