Here are  few other random things I want to mention:

If you’re here for Crash the SuperBowl info, we’ll be running a whole bunch of posts about the contest over the next 2 1/2 months. Next week we’ll even be featuring an interview with one of the 2011 CTSB finalists.  And of course, we’ll post the Top 5 videos (along with reviews and analysis) as soon as Doritos makes the results public.

Next I want to say Thanks to all the filmmakers out there that sent in the links to their Doritos entries.  I’ve decided to extend my “free mini-review offer” for a few more days.  So far, I’ve crtiqued more than 100 submissions and I am pretty sure that at least one or two of the videos I’ve seen will wind up making the finals.  If you’d still like to get a mini-review of your ad, please post the link in the comment section of this article:  videocontestnews.com/2011/11/21/we-want-to-see-your-crash-the-super-bowl-entries/

As I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to do the impossible this month.  I’m trying to watch at least a few seconds of every, single Crash the Super Bowl entry.  (By the way, there were just under 5,000 submissions this year.)  My goal is to compile a list of the 50 or so best submissions.  The list will be posted on December 14th.

If you’re a new reader, I just want to mention that Video Contest News is a year-round operation.  We run two or three posts a week about different contests.  If you’re having a problem with a contest, let us know!  Companies hate bad publicity and a single article about a crappy contest can sometimes inspire the sponsors to fix whatever has gone wrong.  Or hey, you can even let us know if you have some good news to report!  We post a lot of winning entries so if you’ve recently won a nice contest prize, I want to hear about it.  You can reach me here:  VideoContestNews@gmail.com.

Finally, if you like you can only stand to read 140 characters of video contest news at a time, follow us on twitter here.  This month we’ll be “following back” all of our new followers!

Follow us...to the gates of hell!

For a good long time I looked at Twitter with disgust and trepidation. Micro-blogging? Feh! I’m too much of a big-mouth to limit my outbursts to just 140 characters! But it finally hit me that starting a Twitter page for VCN would actually make a lot of sense. I come across tons of links and stories and stuff that are interesting but I just don’t have time to blog about all of them. So thanks to our new Twitter page I can post all that stuff and save the “big” news stories for the blog.

But the best thing about the Twitter page is that I can use it to promote new contests. I get requests all the time from companies asking me if I would blog about their contest and encourage people to enter. There are several other sites out there that already do a great job of listing new contests so I’ve basically stopped announcing them here. But here’s the thing….when these contest organizers e-mail me, it’s usually because they are starting to get desperate for videos. In most cases, their contest has already been running for weeks or months but they haven’t been getting many (or any) entries.  With their deadline just around the corner the organizers make a last minute attempt to scrounge up some submissions.  So when you see a contest being promoted on our Twitter page, it probably means it’s in desperate need of decent entries!

So, Twitter time has finally come.  Here’s the link to our feed:  http://twitter.com/Beardy_VCN Follow us, won’t you?  And since I understand that everyone on the Internet is an attention whore, I promise VCN will follow any one who starts following us during the month of January.  Oh and if you ever see anything you think I should tweet about, lemme know at videocontestnews@gmail.com.

Our Editor: Beardy McContest Winner

I know what you’re thinking; “Video Contest News?  WTF is this supposed to be?  Aren’t there a ton of websites out there that list video contests already?”  Well yes…yes there are.  That’s why we ain’t doing that.  You might find an occasional listing here but those will only be for contests that are begging to be entered and won by someone with a tiny sliver of talent.  For the most part, this website will be dedicated to providing something that is lacking on the web; commentary and news about video contests.

These days it seems like every marketing guy and their momma is trying to entice us Joe Handycams into shooting ads for their company.  There’s a lot of cash and a ton of prizes waiting to be won in online video contests and if you have even a smidge of writing, shooting or editing skills, all that awesome stuff could be yours!

But you’re a busy guy/gal/contest winning robot.  There are roughly 103,628 (editor’s estimate) video contests open at any time so how are you supposed to stay on top of them all?   How many times have you wondered what video eventually went on to win what contest?  A million?  And how many times have you wondered why the heck a contest was being run so crappily?  A billion maybe!?  Well wonder no more.  Not only will we be posting results but we’ll also be digging up news about how and why video contests are being run the way they are.  So you guys focus on winning ‘em and we’ll cover the aftermath of your glorious victories and/or pathetic defeats!

In the meantime, if you have some video contest news that you think we should be covering, drop us a line at VideoContestNews@gmail.com.