On Vevo, \'Gangnam Style\' Is the Viral Video That Never Was

What was the year's most popular music video online?

The answer would seem obvious: “Gangnam Style” by the South Korean rapper-clown Psy, which in just a few months has racked up 942 million views, the most of any clip in YouTube's history, redefining the scale of a viral hit.

But the song is conspicuously absent from one year-end Top 10 list - the one produced by Vevo, a site that uses YouTube as its primary streaming platform and has tried to establish itself as the home of music videos online. Vevo's list is topped by Carly Rae Jepsen's “Call Me Maybe,” which has 358 million views and, at least until “Gangnam Style” came along, seemed about as viral as a video could be.

The reason has to do with Vevo's ownership, and how it gets the videos it plays. It is mostly owned by Sony and Universal, the two biggest record companies, and it does not have video licensing deals with every label. The biggest gap is the Warner Music Group, which includes superstars like Green Day and Bruno Mars. But there are also thousands of small labels and production companies that post videos on YouTube but lack deals with Vevo. The South Korean company that originally released “Gangnam Style” is one of them.

Once Psy got an American record deal through Universal Republic - and found an American manager in Scooter Braun, the social media mastermind behind Ms. Jepsen and Justin Bieber - “Gangnam Style” made it onto Vevo. But that did not help its year-end ranking on the site, where on Thursday afternoon its official play counter read, “0 views .” A spokeswoman for the company attributed that number to a technical error.

Vevo - which, in addition to Sony's and Universal's majority shares, is partly owned by Abu Dhabi Media - is in negotiations with YouTube over the licensing deals that will allow the service's videos to keep streaming through YouTube, which is owned by Google.

Digital Sales Up at Warner Music: At the Warner Music Group, sales of digital music were up over the last year, and “more than offset” the continuing decline in sales of CDs and other physical formats, the company reported on Thursday.

Warner had revenue just below $2.3 billion from its recorded music division for its fiscal year ended in September, down 3 percent from the year before. Within that total, income from digital music - from download stores like iTunes and streaming services like Spotify - was $864 million, up 13 percent for the year.

That digital music revenue made up for loss es from CDs, the company said: in the United States, digital sales represented 53.8 percent of the company's revenue in recorded music, the first time it was more than half for a full year. But other businesses, like licensing and income from so-called 360 contracts (which let the company earn money from artists' tours, merchandise and other deals), dragged the recorded music unit down.

Warner's music publishing division had a 4 percent decline in revenue for the year, to $524 million. Over all, the group's revenue was $2.8 billion, down 3 percent for the year. Its operating income was up 241 percent, to $109 million, and the company reported a net loss of $112 million, an improvement from its $205 million net loss the year before.

Warner was a publicly traded company from 2005 to 2011, when it was bought for $3.3 billion by Access Industries, a holding company controlled by the Russian-born investor Len Blavatnik. It continues to report its accounts, however, be cause of its public debt obligations.

Last.fm Scales Back: Last.fm, a music streaming service owned by CBS, is cutting back some of its features around the world “due to licensing restrictions,” the service announced.

In the United States, Britain and Germany, users can still listen to free music (with ads) through Last.fm's Web site. But its desktop application version, introduced this year, will now only be available by subscription, as the service has already done in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Brazil. The service will be discontinued in all other countries, with the changes taking effect next month, the company announced on Thursday.

Last.fm, founded in Britain in 2002, was a pioneer in social listening online, by keeping track of what songs users listened to (“scrobbling”) and making those lists available to other users. That feature is integrated with many other s treaming services, like Spotify and Rdio, and Last.fm was bought by CBS in 2007 for $280 million.

But in the United States, at least, the cost of music licenses has become a hotly debated issue, with Pandora Media, the leading Internet radio service, pushing for lower royalty rates.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Four Old Spice Ads Make YouTube\'s List of Most Popular Ads of 2012

The top advertisement of 2012 was from Nike, according to YouTube.

Billions of times during 2012, Americans did something voluntarily that they dislike doing when they don't have the choice: watch a commercial.

The YouTube division of Google has released its annual list of the Top 20 commercials watched on YouTube. As usual, the list, which came out Thursday morning, is an eclectic mix of spots, many from so-called event TV programs like the Super Bowl and others that began as online video clips.

Whatever the origin of the commercials, once again consumers demonstrated that they will gladly watch a commercial if it is their choice to do so.

The list, called the YouTu be 2012 Ads Leaderboard, underscores that point with the subheading, “Ads People Choose.”

The list was compiled, according to YouTube, using a combination of factors that signaled viewer choice, including number of views and the view rate, how much of the spot the viewers decided to watch.

Of the 20 commercials, Old Spice, sold by Procter & Gamble, had the most, four, followed by Nike and Volkswagen, with two apiece.

The automotive category dominated the Top 20, taking eight slots - nine if you count the Hot Wheels miniature cars sold by Mattel.

Among the commercials on the list that were first broadcast in February, during Super Bowl XLVI, were one of the two Volkswagen ads, along with spots for Honda, Audi, Toyota and Chevrolet. The much-discussed Chrysler commercial featuring Clint Eastwood, which appeared during halftime of the game, also made the list. (The other Volkswagen spot on the list was Super Bowl-related, serving as a teaser for the brand's Super Bowl commercial.)

“My Time Is Now,” a Nike soccer commercial for the 2012 European Football Championship, known as Euro 2012, was tops on the leader board, with almost 20.9 million views.

A Pepsi Max spot that began online, with the basketball star Kyrie Irving as an elderly “Uncle Drew,” was No. 2, with 17.8 million, followed by a Volkswagen Super Bowl teaser spot, with 17.7 million; a spot for the Samsung Galaxy S III sold by Samsung Mobile USA, with 16.9 million; and the Honda Super Bowl commercial, paying tribute to “Ferris Bueller's Day Off,” with 16.3 million.

Of the 20 commercials, the agency with the most creative work on the list was Wieden & Kennedy, with seven, for Nike, Chrysler and Old Spice.

Wieden & Kennedy tied with Starcom for the most media work; each had four spots on the list. (One of Starcom's four commercials, for Hot Wheels, was a shared media assignment with 360i.)

T he YouTube list is one of several coming out this week as part of the usual end-of-year reckoning for marketing, media and advertising.

The TiVo Research and Analytics subsidiary of TiVo issued a report on Thursday that sought to measure the effectiveness of six weeks' worth of commercials on broadcast television promoting the new series that the networks added to their lineups for the 2012-13 season.

The most effective promotional spots, according to TiVo, were for “Elementary,” an hourlong drama at 10 p.m. Eastern time Thursdays on CBS.

Based on data from the TiVo PowerWatch ratings service, gathered from a panel of 45,000 TiVo subscribers, “Elementary” achieved a promotion conversion score of 26.2 percent - that is, viewers watched three on-air spots and then tuned in for the premiere episode of the series.

Of the top five new series in terms of the TiVo promotion conversion rates, three - “Elementary”; No. 2, “Revolution,” on NBC; and No. 3, “Arrow,” on CW - have received orders for the full season.

No. 4 on the list, “The Mindy Project” on Fox, is awaiting word about whether it will be renewed. However, No. 5, “666 Park Avenue,” on ABC, has been canceled.

And two experts in the realm of what is known as viral video are releasing a list of the top 10 branded or sponsored viral videos of 2012. The list is subjective, based on what they consider qualities like authenticity, brevity and “humanity.”

The experts, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, are behind Eepybird, an early viral phenomenon that was centered on videos showing the explosive results of mixing Diet Coke and Mentos. The list is in conjunction with a new book they wrote, “The Viral Video Manifesto: Why Everything You Know Is Wrong and How to Do What Really Works.”

The t op video on the Grobe-Voltz list promoted the TNT cable channel in Belgium with surprise staging of dramatic events on city streets, based on the channel's theme, “Add more drama.”

No. 2 on their list was the now-familiar video sponsored by Red Bull that chronicled the supersonic free fall of Felix Baumgartner. The video is also a highlight of another look back at 2012 that came out this week, the Google Zeitgeist report.

Stuart Elliott has been the advertising columnist at The New York Times since 1991. Follow @stuartenyt on Twitter and sign up for In Advertising, his weekly e-mail newsletter.

For a New Generation, a New Literary Battle Over Jeffrey MacDonald\'s Guilt

Kathryn MacDonald, via Associated Press Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald in 1970, the year his wife and daughters were killed - murders he was ultimately convicted of carrying out.

Kathryn MacDonald, via Associated Press Dr. McDonald in 2007 at the Federal Corr ectional Institution in Cumberland, Md.

2:47 p.m. | Updated True crime fans, here comes another round in the literary battle over the guilt or innocence of Jeffrey MacDonald.

The author Joe McGinniss has announced that he is releasing “Final Vision: The Last Word on Jeffrey MacDonald” on the digital site Byliner for $2.99.

Dr. MacDonald, an Army doctor and a Green Beret, was convicted in 1979 of stabbing and clubbing to death his pregnant wife and two young daughters. He is serving three consecutive life sentences.

Mr. McGinniss, who wrote “The Selling of the President” about the marketing of Richard M. Nixon during the 1968 campaign, was given access to Dr. MacDonald's defense team. He ended up writing an account indicting him in the 1983 best-seller “Fatal Vision.” The book then became the basis of an NBC miniseries .

Dr. MacDonald sued Mr. McGinniss, saying he had been duped. He received some sympathy from the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, whose articles were published as the book “The Journalist and the Murderer” in 1990. The book begins, “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.”

In it, she argues that Mr. McGinniss morally compromised himself by pretending he thought Dr. MacDonald was innocent long after he believed him to be guilty. Mr. McGinniss wrote a rebuttal to her that was published in 2011.

This year, Dr. MacDonald also gained the support of the filmmaker and writer Errol Morris, who recently wrote “A Wilderness of Error,” which argues that the MacDonald case was a gross miscarriage of justice. Mr. Morris, who exonerated an accused murderer with his film “The Thin Blue Line,” blamed both the courts and Mr. McGinni ss for the unfair imprisonment of a man he deemed innocent.

The pugnacious Mr. McGinniss did not take the criticism sitting down. He fired off an angry message via Twitter to a New York Times critic, Dwight Garner, who praised Mr. Morris's book.

Now Mr. McGinniss's latest publication, released on Wednesday through Byliner, promises to respond to criticisms of his work and to prove that the doctor's guilt is “undeniable.”

On Thursday, The New York Times announced an agreement to co-publish e-book-length articles on Byliner.

Leslie Kaufman writes about the publishing industry. Follow @leslieNYT on Twitter.

The Breakfast Meeting: Debating Torture in \'Zero Dark Thirty,\' and a Food Blogger Breaks Out

“Zero Dark Thirty,” about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, won't open in movie theaters until Wednesday, but it is already dividing screening audiences for its depiction of torture by the United States, and its suggestion that brutal treatment may have produced useful early clues to catching Bin Laden, Scott Shane reports. A new Senate report on C.I.A. interrogations, which has been criticized by the Republican minority, has found that brutal treatment was not “a central component” in finding Bin Laden; the film's screenwriter, Mark Boal, explained that he was “to compress a program that lasted for years into a few short scenes.” Those scenes, he said, attempted “to reflect a very complex debate about torture that is still going on” and showed that brutal treatment produced both true and false information.

After en during Apple's own flawed map service, iPhone users on Thursday were able to download an app for Google Maps, which used to come installed on iPhones. The rare stumble by Apple as it attempted to supplant Google in an area it excels at offered both companies a chance to play for an advantage, Nick Wingfield writes. Would Google purposely withhold its app in order to weaken the iPhone and thus help smartphones that work on its own Android operating system? Would Apple delay the introduction of Google Maps in order to keep a hold on a critical, and potentially lucrative, feature of its phone? In the end, both sides saw the advantage in making the user's experience better, Mr. Wingfield writes.

• In his review of the new app, David Pogue calls it a “home run” and is blown away by the many new features that have been incorporated into the app, including Street View, which lets you see a picture of an address. He also praises its emphasis on walking directions and public transportation options, in addition to driving:

It's a lot of features. The big question: How well did Google cram them in without sinking the app with featuritis? This, it turns out, is the best news of all. The brand-new, completely rethought design is slick, simple and coherent. Google admits that it's even better than Google Maps for Android phones, which has accommodated its evolving feature set mainly by piling on menus.

There was more news from Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper holdings, Amy Chozick reports, including the decision of the editor of The Times of London, James Harding, to step down to clear the way for a new editor. Under the leadership of Mr. Harding, who is considered a golden boy of British journalism, the newspaper took a relatively unstinting stance against its parent company's handling of the hacking scandal, and speculation arose that this decision may have lead to his ouster.

• Also on Wednesday, it was revealed that Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Mr. Murdoch's News International who has been charged in the phone-hacking scandal, had received a $17.6 million severance package.

The French actor Gérard Depardieu was criticized by his country's government for moving to nearby Belgium, apparently seeking the warmth of a lower tax rate, Scott Sayare writes from Paris. The recently elected Socialist government has imposed a 75 percent marginal tax rate for incomes above 1 million euros, or $1.3 million. Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault linked Mr. Depardieu's move to the tax rate, saying in a TV interview that the decision was “rather pathetic,” adding “He's a great star, everyone loves him as an artist,” but that “to pay a tax is an act of solidarity, a patriotic act.”

Joe L. Allbritton, who built Allbritton Communications, which owns TV stations in Washington and a half-dozen other cities, died in Houston on Tuesday, Robert D. Hershey Jr. reports. His son, Robert, now heads the company and in 2007 founded Politico, the news Web site and newspaper devoted to politics.

In nine years of running a food blog, SmittenKitchen.com, Deb Perelman has built up a devoted following, Leslie Kaufman writes. They appreciate her conversational, self-deprecating writing style, and her coping with a cramped, urban kitchen, all of which can resonate with  young women learning to cook. In October, she took the next step, releasing a cookbook - and though she never trained as a chef or even worked in a restaurant, her “The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook” debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times's best-seller list for hardcover advi ce and miscellaneous. She has stayed in the Top 5 ever since, where she is accompanied by Ina Garten of “Barefoot Contessa” fame and the chef Thomas Keller.

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.