Nintendo has an interesting spot up on their Experience Wii YouTube channel. It doesn’t seem that special at first, but give it 30 seconds – it’s pretty surprising.

How do they do it? Well without getting too geeky on you…

If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find a normal YouTube channel below Nintendo’s fake YouTube interface. They’ve recreated a mock YouTube interface in a huge flash animation nested in an iframe 1500 pixels tall (all the way down to where the normal channel stuff starts). Some of the links and buttons work (e.g. links to other Nintendo videos, subscription button, playback controls), but they’re all done manually – none of the fake YouTube elements draw on the real YouTube. The view count, for example, seems to be stuck at 2,752,987 (but even if it moved, Nintendo would be the one keeping track).

Can you do this on your own partner channel?

Unlikely. It seems that Nintendo has been granted special privileges for this one. Normal YouTube channels are restricted to a banner measuring 875px by 150px. If you dig into the code, those banners are in a div whose class is “profile-banner-box”. But that div doesn’t appear anywhere on the Experience Wii channel, instead replaced by the 875px by 1500px iframe & flash video.

Frankly, I’m a little surprised YouTube was ok with it. While the gag is clever and lighthearted, most sites like YouTube have pretty strict rules about imitation. Strictly speaking, the ad deceives users – even once the joke is obvious, most users would still believe that the viewcount is a real viewcount, the related videos are true YouTube-generated related videos, etc.

But props to YouTube for overlooking what ultimately isn’t that big a deal and letting Nintendo have some fun.

-Nick