Some people requested I post these online, so here are the slides we presented at Personal Democracy Forum on the “Online Video: Lessons from the Obama ‘Idea Factory’ and 2008 Campaign” panel. Despite being handed serious A/V issues (at a panel on video in Lincoln Center, no less!), Steve Grove from YouTube moderated a helluva panel and it was an honor to meet him, Max Harper (the video production genius behind the Obama campaign), Jacob Soboroff of “Why Tuesday?” and many others.
Video bloggers posting how-to cosmetics videos are increasingly dominating YouTube’s leaderboards. The videos usually revolve around getting a celebrity’s “look” (i.e. Lady Ga Ga’s “misty look”), and the video descriptions are often packed with links to buy cosmetics from a variety of affiliate retailers (i.e. beautychoice.com, which sagely created affiliate program for this specific purpose).
Just the top three video bloggers of this ilk (here, here, here) averaged 482,013 views per day over the past 90 days, totaling an astounding 36,643,502 views.
For the girls, this must be a sweet deal, since they are getting revenue from two sources–YouTube (via its Partner Program), and cosmetics retailers, which view this as a great form of advertising.
Full-length shows are not popular on YouTube, despite heavy promotion of the site’s new “Shows” section. In all, YouTube has 3,215 full-length TV episodes, but only averages 7,407.9 views per episode.
Michael Learmonth over at AdAge included some of these figures in his recent piece on YouTube’s future, but I thought I would share the full graph. Basically, we took the top 100 all-time most-viewed “mid-tail” or “new media studio” content creators (i.e. Next New Networks, Howcast Studios, The Wall Street Journal’s videos etc.) and looked at their viewership growth. The results? Over the past six months, publishers saw their daily average views grow by an average of 4.98% per month. Although there have been several recent failures in the space (60Frames, ManiaTV), overall the sector is growing in terms of viewership.
They have a large, cosmopolitan audience, making them one of the best ways to reach France, continental Europe and beyond. According to early data from TubeMogul InPlay, 42.19% of DailyMotion’s streams take place in France, 12.96% in the U.S. (although this promises to grow) and the rest comprising a pretty evenly-split model U.N., including impressive numbers from Turkey, Italy, Germany and more.
They are pushing the boundaries of innovation in online video as early-adopters of HTML 5. According to a colleague in engineering, they built one of the slickest public betas around this new “open video” format.
They have an extensive catalog of professionally-produced content, including deals to stream full-length episodes of the Daily Show, for instance.
They are the fifth-most embedded video player online
They let anyone track rich viewership and audience statistics like viewed-minutes, audience geography and much more via TubeMogul InPlay.
Our friends (and TubeMogul users) at Fog City Wrestling were kind enough to have us on their TV show. Our plug happens after the opening credits, about half-way into the video below. Prior to this, my only glimpse of wrestling culture was watching “The Wrestler” starring Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei. These guys are like that, bringing a passion, athleticism and sense of theatrics that you have to be there to see.
Interesting tidbit: videos from YouTube sponsors get 33.64% of the number of comments that a typical video with the same view count would fetch, on average. Perhaps this is intuitive on some level since ads are inherently less engaging than actual content, but it might help explain why sponsors often tap YouTube celebrities to plug their products, in addition to buying ad units on YouTube. According to our data from elsewhere, videos in the top quartile in terms of comments retain viewers an average of 9.25% longer than other videos.
