Most well-adjusted adults get tired of YouTube after a couple of months. The biggest problem is the overused social engineering trick of putting boobs and sex in the thumbnail of some random crappy video you and your jerkwad friends made last night, probably while you were high. There are more than a few folks that have figured out how to leverage boobs for legitimate purposes, however. These shows are getting literally tens of millions of views, which is impressive, even by Super Bowl standards.

"2 Hot Girls in the Shower" is one of my favorites. Hot thumbnails of two ostensibly naked lesbians and provocative titles get the initial click, but the actual episodes are very professional, with humorous writing, good acting and solid production values. More importantly, they do the joke and get out in about a minute. Perfect! The series has also picked up inline advertising, which is great...

For the timid and squeamish out there: this is G-rated material all the way, maybe PG. The comments they get from viewers can be idiotically vulgar, but the show itself has no nudity at all, no violence and only very mild language. Come on! Don't be a prude: click the clip above! (I promise to always warn you about anything even approaching bad language and nudity.)

"Hot for Words" is more manipulative and has about ten times the audience as a result. The real premise of the show is a hot young linguistics grad student explaining various quirks of the English language. It's cute and you might actually learn something new, but to be honest, the writing, acting and editing is uneven at best. Still, they do a nice job with the lighting, shooting and audio, so this isn't just random crap thrown together and dumped on the Net. And the show's attracted 2.5 million pairs of eyeballs on YouTube alone. Here's a recent example:

movieLOL/iPower's various series all exploit the sexy thumbnail and provocative title trick which masks real, original, legitimate content. The episode below "Sexy Horny Lifestyle on TV," has shots of a Spanish television production crew and gives you an idea of what goes on in one of their twice-weekly productions. This series has gotten about 20 million views so far. It's uneven and not entirely professional, but they tackle fun topics like the World of Warcraft and more serious fair, like suicide and censorship. Warning: No nudity, but lots of random, gratuitous swearing and sexual references. Also, I didn't watch the whole thing - too long, boring.

Unfortunately, the trend here is that the most manipulative, vulgar, rambling and least professional program is also the most popular. "2 Hot Girls in the Shower" is actually very professional, right down to the beautiful ring lighting in the actress' eyes, but with only a quarter million views, it's also the least watched of these three shows. So it would be nice to say that the cream always rises to the top, but, ultimately, sex still sells.

References:
* 2 Hot Girls in the Shower
* Hot For Words
* iPower.movieLOL
* LA Times: Belgian YouTubers who know how to 'game' the system