YouTube, the video-sharing Web destination that has become a hit with viewers but has yet to find its business model with advertisers, staged its first live event over the weekend with a real-world gathering of its viral video stars.

The two-hour event, held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, was streamed live over a branded channel at www.youtube.com/live. Billed on the YouTube blog as “a celebration of the vibrant communities that exist on the site”, the event included a slew of performers who have become well-known on the video aggregator site for their garage-made clips, along with other established figures from the movie and music industries whose careers and sales have reached new heights thanks to YouTube.

For example, Obama Girl Amber Lee Ettinger was there, representing one of the first manifestations of YouTube’s power to engage and energize the youth vote for the presidential race in June 2007 (and also to get people looking at a pretty girl on video.) Also present was William James Adams Jr., better known as will.i.am, front man for the Black Eyed Peas. He mashed up quotes from an Obama speech after the New Hampshire primary into a song “Yes We Can” that was turned into a video and posted to YouTube in January 2008. It’s received more than 14 million views since then.

Some of the performers at YouTube Live owe their entire futures to the video site. Dutch singer Esmee Denters got her start after posted homemade Webcam videos of herself singing cover versions of popular songs back in 2006; she’s recently signed a record deal with the music label owned by Justin Timberlake.

Other celebrities at the event were making the crossover from old media to new. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the hosts of the Discovery Channel program “Mythbusters”, were there to give a live demonstration of Leonardo 2.0, a robot cannon that fires paint at a canvas to create in one huge burst a reasonable facsimile of the Mona Lisa. Leonardo has been viewed more than 6 million times on YouTube.

And there were plenty of the celeb-oddities for which YouTube is perhaps best known: Tay Zonday, who made “Chocolate Rain” a 30-million view YouTube hit in 2007, and “Chad Vader,” the supposed brother of the Star Wars Sith lord whose videos depict his struggles as a supermarket day-shift manager.

And there was Tom Dickson, Blendtec CEO and star of the incredibly popular online destructo-series “Will It Blend?” He reenacted his patented grinding a broomstick in a blender act for the folks. You can catch a video glimpse of Dickson, now the poster boy for viral video. dancing backstage in his white lab coat to Katy Perry’s rendition of “Hot ‘N cold” here.

It was probably the largest live streamed event in Web history, but it’s hard to judge just how many people watched via their computers. One source [[http://www.mogulus.com/blog/?p=778]] used snapshots of traffic coming from the show’s streaming platform provider just before YouTube Live went live and at its peak and used those to conclude that 750,000 streams were served. But since each viewer received multiple streams during the show, the actual number of viewers might be as small as 175,000.

That’s still probably the largest audience ever for a Web-only event, but it’s pretty tiny compared to the millions in the audience for an average broadcast TV show. And of course measuring the peak audience doesn’t get at the numbers who might have logged in and then quickly out again.

YouTube hasn’t released figures about the number of live viewers for the event, but in a press release afterwards said that videos from the show have generated an additional 2.5 million views on the site.

Nevertheless, it was perhaps an early sign that the video site, which after all did not exist three years ago, is becoming a center of online power and may in time be a venue for truly big live event viewing.

The question many bloggers had after the event was whether this kind of appointment fits comfortably with the way most people now use YouTube: as a repository for short clips they can consume whenever they want.

“YouTube is on-demand,” Paul Glazowski wrote on the site Mashable.com just before the streaming began. “That’s its shtick. Its joie de vivre. Introducing a live feature or a whiz-band event live at this point seems more like an anomaly than something the company will realize popularize in its own space to great effect.”

The thing is, though, YouTube could benefit from persuading viewers to watch something longer than a two-minute clip. It’s hard to integrate ads into a short video bite; studies have shown that viewers get more frustrated having to sit through a 60- or even a 30-second pre-roll ad when the content they’re searching for is relatively short.

On site, YouTube Live was also the occasion for a number of brand promotions from sponsors. Game maker Activision set up game kiosks at the Fort Mason Center to promote the Guitar Hero World Tour, launched this fall. Flip Video provided the audience with branded camcorders to videotape the proceedings and upload stations that let them post the videos they took at the show to YouTube while they were still there.

And official event airline Virgin America hooked into the YouTube Live promotional possibilities by running a beta test of its new in-flight Wi-Fi service, streaming the show to passengers on one of its Airbus jets 35,000 feet above San Francisco and sending a stream of Los Angeles DJ Jesse Lozano from the plane to the SF audience.

At the moment, only that one Virgin plane is Wi-Fi enabled. The airline will circulate it around its U.S. routes over the Thanksgiving holiday to surprise passengers with online Web access.

YouTube, the video-sharing Web destination that has become a hit with viewers but has yet to find its business model with advertisers, staged its first live event over the weekend with a real-world gathering of its viral video stars.

The two-hour event, held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, was streamed live over a branded channel at www.youtube.com/live. Billed on the YouTube blog as “a celebration of the vibrant communities that exist on the site”, the event included a slew of performers who have become well-known on the video aggregator site for their garage-made clips, along with other established figures from the movie and music industries whose careers and sales have reached new heights thanks to YouTube.

For example, Obama Girl Amber Lee Ettinger was there, representing one of the first manifestations of YouTube’s power to engage and energize the youth vote for the presidential race in June 2007 (and also to get people looking at a pretty girl on video.) Also present was William James Adams Jr., better known as will.i.am, front man for the Black Eyed Peas. He mashed up quotes from an Obama speech after the New Hampshire primary into a song “Yes We Can” that was turned into a video and posted to YouTube in January 2008. It’s received more than 14 million views since then.

Some of the performers at YouTube Live owe their entire futures to the video site. Dutch singer Esmee Denters got her start after posted homemade Webcam videos of herself singing cover versions of popular songs back in 2006; she’s recently signed a record deal with the music label owned by Justin Timberlake.

Other celebrities at the event were making the crossover from old media to new. Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the hosts of the Discovery Channel program “Mythbusters”, were there to give a live demonstration of Leonardo 2.0, a robot cannon that fires paint at a canvas to create in one huge burst a reasonable facsimile of the Mona Lisa. Leonardo has been viewed more than 6 million times on YouTube.

And there were plenty of the celeb-oddities for which YouTube is perhaps best known: Tay Zonday, who made “Chocolate Rain” a 30-million view YouTube hit in 2007, and “Chad Vader,” the supposed brother of the Star Wars Sith lord whose videos depict his struggles as a supermarket day-shift manager.

And there was Tom Dickson, Blendtec CEO and star of the incredibly popular online destructo-series “Will It Blend?” He reenacted his patented grinding a broomstick in a blender act for the folks. You can catch a video glimpse of Dickson, now the poster boy for viral video. dancing backstage in his white lab coat to Katy Perry’s rendition of “Hot ‘N cold” here.

It was probably the largest live streamed event in Web history, but it’s hard to judge just how many people watched via their computers. One source [[http://www.mogulus.com/blog/?p=778]] used snapshots of traffic coming from the show’s streaming platform provider just before YouTube Live went live and at its peak and used those to conclude that 750,000 streams were served. But since each viewer received multiple streams during the show, the actual number of viewers might be as small as 175,000.

That’s still probably the largest audience ever for a Web-only event, but it’s pretty tiny compared to the millions in the audience for an average broadcast TV show. And of course measuring the peak audience doesn’t get at the numbers who might have logged in and then quickly out again.

YouTube hasn’t released figures about the number of live viewers for the event, but in a press release afterwards said that videos from the show have generated an additional 2.5 million views on the site.

Nevertheless, it was perhaps an early sign that the video site, which after all did not exist three years ago, is becoming a center of online power and may in time be a venue for truly big live event viewing.

The question many bloggers had after the event was whether this kind of appointment fits comfortably with the way most people now use YouTube: as a repository for short clips they can consume whenever they want.

“YouTube is on-demand,” Paul Glazowski wrote on the site Mashable.com just before the streaming began. “That’s its shtick. Its joie de vivre. Introducing a live feature or a whiz-band event live at this point seems more like an anomaly than something the company will realize popularize in its own space to great effect.”

The thing is, though, YouTube could benefit from persuading viewers to watch something longer than a two-minute clip. It’s hard to integrate ads into a short video bite; studies have shown that viewers get more frustrated having to sit through a 60- or even a 30-second pre-roll ad when the content they’re searching for is relatively short.

On site, YouTube Live was also the occasion for a number of brand promotions from sponsors. Game maker Activision set up game kiosks at the Fort Mason Center to promote the Guitar Hero World Tour, launched this fall. Flip Video provided the audience with branded camcorders to videotape the proceedings and upload stations that let them post the videos they took at the show to YouTube while they were still there.

And official event airline Virgin America hooked into the YouTube Live promotional possibilities by running a beta test of its new in-flight Wi-Fi service, streaming the show to passengers on one of its Airbus jets 35,000 feet above San Francisco and sending a stream of Los Angeles DJ Jesse Lozano from the plane to the SF audience.

At the moment, only that one Virgin plane is Wi-Fi enabled. The airline will circulate it around its U.S. routes over the Thanksgiving holiday to surprise passengers with online Web access.