We’ve all heard the saying, “Good news travels fast.” Nowadays the saying should be, “Good content travels even faster.” Check out some of the 500+ sites that have linked to Vital Skate in just the last 30 days.

Active
Birdhouse
Black Label
Bones Wheels
City Skateboards
Consolidated
Crimson
Darkstar
Dekline
Deluxe
Element
Emerica
Etnies
Lakai
Powell
SBC Skateboards
Skate Daily
Slap
Split
Strange Notes
Tum Yeto
Volcom

Wow. That’s pretty impressive. Because Vital Skate is a ”˜neutral’ content site, we get links from lots of great sites. For example, a pro interview on Vital Skate could potentially get links from all the pro’s sponsors: board, truck, wheel, shoe, and clothing.

We’d like to thank to all the brands that have spread the word  about Vital Skate’s content and helped us build such a broad audience.

Levi’s recently launched the Red Tab Awards on Vital BMX. Similar to an “online Oscars,” the RTA’s allow user-submitted videos to be nominated by Vital users. The Levi’s team will then pick the winning videos from the Top 30 nominated videos.

The idea of the contest was to harness the power of the Vital BMX community and give users a way to interact with the Levi’s brand. In addition, the contest builds off of the video theme Levi’s  has on Vital BMX  with the Clip of the Week and video player sponsorship. To date, the Red Tab Awards have been a huge  success  with over 5,000 nominations  since the contest went live 10 days ago.

For more about the contest and to see the Top 30 nominated videos, click here.

Anyone who is still skeptical of the value of user-generated content needs to watch this video. 15-year-old Todd Meyn from Australia uploaded a video of himself to Vital BMX and immediately generated huge buzz. People were blown away to see such amazing riding from someone they had never heard off. In fact, his was the most popular video on the site for a couple weeks last month, getting more views than our professionally-created content, and being talked about and linked to by several other BMX sites.

While a user-generated video may not have great production quality, it can more than make up for that with compelling content that would otherwise never be seen.

Check out Todd Meyn’s video here.

The already-phenomenal popularity of online video is certain to continue growing as picture quality improves. For a glimpse of where things will be in a few years, check out this demo site that Akamai and Verizon have created to showcase HD web video (make sure you have a fast connection and a relatively new/powerful computer).

Akamai sells content delivery to publishers, while Verizon is investing $23-billion to build a fiber optic network to give households superfast connections. Companies like them will insure that there is enough bandwidth to deliver gigantic HD video files. On the desktop side, Intel just announced a new chip specifically aimed at processing video files faster while also consuming less power.

About 75% of the time visitors spent on Vital BMX and Vital Skate is with videos, so I’m certainly excited about technology that will make this an even better experience for our audience.

Related link from NYTimes.com: Web Videos Stealing TV Viewers, and Marketers