Music videos are so popular on Google’s (GOOG) video site, in fact, that YouTube had to break its most watched list into two lists–music videos and everything else. If it hadn’t, then people like you and me, who have only a vague idea who Pitbull and Keri Hilson are, would have been totally baffled.

Speaking of baffling, you’ll note that two of the 10 videos below aren’t actually from YouTube at all, but from France’s DailyMotion. For whatever reason–at this point I’ve basically given up trying to figure out the vagaries of YouTube’s rights and clearances–YouTube still isn’t letting people embed the Susan Boyle clip. And U.S. viewers, at least, can’t watch the Hilson clip at all. Go figure.

Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):

1. Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent (120+ million views)

2. David After Dentist (37+ million views)

3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views)

4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views)

5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views)

Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global):

1. Pitbull “I Know You Want Me” (82+ million views)

2. Miley Cyrus “The Climb” (64+ million views)

3. Miley Cyrus “Party in the U.S.A.” (54+ million views)

4. The Lonely Island “I’m on a Boat” (48+ million views)

5. Keri Hilson “Knock You Down” (35+ million views)

The Sony (SNE) album, titled “I Dreamed a Dream,” goes on sale on Nov. 23. Ms. Boyle sang the song by the same name on “Britain’s Got Talent,” and the video of her unexpectedly strong performance made her a world-wide phenomenon after it landed on video-sharing sites like YouTube.

Amazon announced the pre-order milestone Wednesday, noting that her advance sales have exceeded those for such stars as Norah Jones, U2, Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay. It also created a “store” for Ms. Boyle that includes her breakthrough clip in addition to a link to buy the $10 album.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Oh, who doesn’t just love, love, love the two latest viral videos to hit the Web?

One, called “United Breaks Guitars,” is a very funny music video about an experience singer Dave Carroll had when the airline murdered his guitar and then refused to say sorry.

It has had close to 4.7 million views on YouTube.

The other, even better, is a joyful wedding dance of Minnesotans Jill and Kevin, along with their many grooms and bridesmaids, all of whom hilariously boogeyed down the aisle.

Current count: 17.1 million views.

While that’s all well and good, like a lot of these kinds of viral phenoms, neither is likely to go the distance in economic rewards.

While Google (GOOG), owner of YouTube, has been making noise about the wedding video causing a spike in sales of Chris Brown’s “Forever,” which is the music the wedding party shimmies to, this kind of one-off is not really a sustainable way to make video a true financial windfall.

And herein lies the problem–the Internet is most excellent at surfacing and distributing these delightful videos, but it still is not so good at revealing an organized, massive way they will all pay off.

That’s because much of it relies on buzz, which is simply unguessable.

And, even though more advertising efforts are being aimed at premium content on sites like Hulu, the revenue still remains much smaller than costs.

Consider the Susan Boyle sensation, which can doubtlessly be called 2009′s Web powerhouse. The video of her astonishing rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical “Les Miserables” on the television show, “Britain’s Got Talent,” was a huge hit.

So far, the show’s YouTube post alone has 75.2 million views, but–due to a number of reasons–it did not make such sensational amounts of money.

Obviously, as consumers shift more and more time to watching Internet video, advertising allocations will be shifted too.

And, with media moguls like News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch making copious noise about charging for content, it’s likely the most popular videos might begin to get some lucrative gating at some point.

But for delightful hits like the wedding dance or “United Breaks Guitars,” it will be interesting to see if they ever become more than watercooler wonders.

In any case, please enjoy the videos gratis!

Jill & Kevin:

United Breaks Guitars:

Susan Boyle:

The Scottish woman who went from unknown to become the Internet’s most watched video failed to win first place in the final of the television show, “Britain’s Got Talent” this past weekend.

Instead, a noisy dance troupe called Diversity won, putting Boyle in second place.

Boyle’s chances had been diminishing over the past week, since the British tabloids have been piling on and tarnishing her fairytale reputation, reporting on odd public outbursts by her due to the pressure of her instant stardom online and off.

Their nickname for her: SuBo.

And, sadly, there are now reports that Boyle has been taken to a mental facility to get some rest and relaxation.

In any case, there’s no question Boyle’s been a treat to watch online and she deserves that time to recover from impact of the media frenzy around her.

It’s likely she’ll be singing again publicly soon–but, until then, here is her performance in the finale (and below it is Diversity, the winner):

Here are the two answers to the key questions you might have about Susan Boyle’s return appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent” last night: Yes and yes.

As in: Did the Scottish singing (and Web) sensation nail it again? And, does she look better?

Indeed, except for her proclivity to pick purplish songs from crowd-pleasing, but mediocre musicals (which matched her aubergine frock)–this time “Memory” from “Cats”–Boyle was a huge hit offline and online in the semi-finals of the television show.

She quickly made it into the finals, which is no surprise, of course, and which are set to take place next Saturday.

Here is the video of Boyle singing that overripe song quite elegantly, as well as her post-song interview:

The Internet sensation that is Susan Boyle just keeps getting better.

The Daily Record in Scotland uncovered a 10-year-old recording that the 47-year-old woman made for a charity CD.

Singing the classic blues ballad, “Cry Me a River,” Boyle more than proves she has the range of the truly gifted artist (not to mention emotional depths that seem endless here) she displayed recently on the television show, “Britain’s Got Talent,” with an astonishing rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical “Les Miserables.”

She has since become a viral hit on the Internet for her performance, with the online video of it now hitting 30 million views (doubled last week).

Here is the video of Boyle singing “Cry Me a River”:

BoomTown got the ball rolling by making a visit to Twitter HQ bearing pies. During a video tour of the premises, Biz Stone discussed rock stars and booze, and spilled the secret of the strange green deer. Later, co-founders Stone and Evan Williams were customarily nonspecific in a conversation about their revenue plans, and BoomTown was a little bit horrified to have become one of Ashton Kutcher’s million-plus followers–maybe even the one that put him over the top in his race with CNN to hit the seven-figure mark. Still on the celebrity tip (but off the Twitter one), BoomTown took a moment to appreciate the self-deprecatory stylings of Lindsay Lohan’s eHarmony spoof and to embed the video on AllThingsD.com. Finally, was there anyone this week who missed Susan Boyle’s virtually instant stardom on “Britain’s Got Talent” via Google’s (GOOG) YouTube? BT took a look at the journey the story has taken from television to Internet, back to television and back to Internet again.

Back to Twitter, MediaMemo took a look at its amazing growth as a service and as a phenomenon–the “hockey stick,” as one early investor describes the company’s trajectory so far. MM also looked at a study from the USC neuroscience group that says despite all the hype–or maybe even because of it–the human brain just isn’t built to digest information at Twitter’s pace. In the world of cable this week, just as folks were wondering whether Congress will stop the cable companies from charging by the byte, Time Warner Cable (TWX), one of the key players in the drama, backed away from its plans to do so. MediaMemo followed that story as well.

In this week’s Personal Technology column, Walt Mossberg took a look at the latest version of Apple’s (AAPL) MobileMe, and while he found it to be a big improvement over the product launch from last summer, it’s not without limitations. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions from readers about displaying emergency contact numbers on a locked cellphone and the security of running Windows software on the Mac. And in Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at Gwabbit, a program built to mine emails for contact info.

More next week.

Susan Boyle’s sensational television singing performance jumped from that medium to become a viral Internet hit, fueling more television that is, of course, headed to the Internet again.

Who says old and new media can’t work together?

For example, one of many online now, here’s the 47-year-old Scottish woman–who bowled over everyone watching the TV show, “Britain’s Got Talent,” with an astonishing rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical “Les Miserables”–in an interview on “The Early Show” on CBS (CBS) yesterday morning.

Try to ignore the cloying discomfort of the interviewers, who don’t know what to make of the antimedia stylings of Boyle, who can nonetheless sing like nothing else.

She does just that in the first clip, aiming to please dopey CBS talking heads in a song she is going to have to sing a zillion times from now on.

And then, in the second, she got to chat via phone with Broadway legend Patty LuPone, who first sang “I Dreamed a Dream.”

Of course, LuPone watched Boyle’s rendition via Google (GOOG) video service YouTube, and Boyle was genuinely thrilled to be talking to LuPone.

The YouTube official version of the original TV performance is now at 15.6 million views.

Here are the CBS videos:

Watch CBS Videos Online

Watch CBS Videos Online

Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle is indeed all she is cracked up to be.

But her virality on the Internet is not, even though she has–in fact–become an Internet sensation.

Though the performance of the unemployed 47-year-old woman–dressed in a dowdy frock, wowing the judges on the television show, “Britain’s Got Talent,” with an astonishing rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical “Les Miserables”–has been viewed many millions of times now and growing, it’s not easy to move it around on the Web.

It should be.

And that’s too bad for those left slack-jawed by her obvious talent, including the notorious crab-apple judge, Simon Cowell, who also judges for the similar U.S. show “American Idol.”

Her performance got a huge boost from those who heard about it and watched it on the Internet, especially on the huge Google (GOOG) video service, YouTube.

But anyone who wants to do anything more than send a link to the video of Boyle singing on YouTube, most specifically, embedding it in posts, is out of luck.

That feature has been fully disabled on every YouTube version of the clip I looked at, with the note, “Embedding disabled by request.”

It’s ironic that YouTube gets intense copyright religion right when the video of a singing human angel goes viral.

So most people are watching the show’s seven-minute clip of Boyle on its official YouTube channel, which has gotten 11.4 million views so far.

But, thankfully, YouTube is not the only choice out there.

I finally grabbed one from DailyMotion, which has a ton of embeddable ones, such as the one below:

Actually, it is always time for a dancing dog video.

That’s especially true before boarding the Southwest Airlines bus to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas later today and, thankfully, leaving behind the Steve-Is-Dead meme (but did you know if you spin an iPod wheel backwards, you can hear…).

So here is a good one from the most recent season of the U.K. television show, “Britain’s Got Talent.”

In the finals, of course, were Kate and Gin, a 16-year-old student and her dancing border collie, an endearing pair who became an offline and online sensation earlier this year.