By many counts, over 300 million online videos are streamed daily. It’s hard to believe that YouTube was only started in January of 2005 given the incredible global consumer demand. While the models for monetization of these video streams really haven’t been figured out yet, the market is generally optimistic.
We at TubeMogul believe that better viewership data will help enable advertising models in this space. Through the development of our cross-site aggregated analytics tool, we have discovered that there is a fundamental problem that must be addressed for the online video industry to thrive financially – the lack of standards around what counts as a “view.”
How an online video site records a view for their online videos varies greatly from site to site. We conducted research to test such differences across eight of the top video sites (results can be seen in this report). While one site may count a view every time the play button is clicked, another might only count finishes. Further complicating the issue is how sites calculate views on embedded videos, page refreshes, and views from the same IP address. Therefore, an advertiser looking to use viewership data to allocate ad inventory or place viral videos has no comparative ability at this point in time. This lack of standardization has stymied business model growth for online video sites, content producers, and advertisers, and will continue to hamstring the industry until standards are in place.
We feel that it is incumbent on the leading video websites to come together to discuss and agree upon measurement standards. TubeMogul is prepared to host an event to get the dialogue started. Please contact me if you are a principal or senior executive at one of the top video sharing sites and are interested in participating in the standards effort – mark@tubemogul.com.
There isn’t much that we can add to the Obama Girl discussion (just go here, here, here, here, here…), so we’ll add pictures. We have too much of a crush on Obama Girl to say anything meaningful and objective, anyway. Here are a few charts that will track the progress of her videos. The blue line is total, green is YouTube, and red is Revver.
With that, here are Daily Views followed by Cumulative Views:
We’ve been watching the promotional videos on the front page of YouTube recently, and noticed that L’Oreal and Sierra Mist are often arranged side by side, or at least are regularly displayed in the promotional section together. Taking a look at a chart comparing the two, you can see that they are pretty tightly correlated.
L’Oreal vs. Sierra Mist
This is interesting to us, because it shows that the two promotions have about the same chance of exposure, yet the L’Oreal videos are getting a lot more impressions. What explains it? We looked at the number of videos, when they were put up, and which received comments and ratings, and we also evaluated the production value. When we check out the details behind the videos, we see that L’Oreal has only two videos (both put up on 5/30), and one makes up the bulk of the viewership, comments, and ratings (82% of the views vs. 18% for the less popular video). The popular video is user generated content, and has rough production quality.
L’oreal Total and Individual Videos
82%, 18%
L’Oreal Comments
L’Oreal Ratings
Sierra Mist has four videos up, and two of them are close in popularity (52% and 41% of views), but not nearly as popular as the popular user generated L’Oreal video. In addition, the production quality is much higher for the Sierra Mist videos. This supports what others have been saying around the web (read Alan Schulman’s article, “As Web Video Becomes More Low-Fi, Maybe Your Pre-Rolls Should, Too“): you can’t simply take your high quality 30 second ads and cut them down for the online medium. And though Schulman is referring to the pre-roll, his recommendation can be applied outside of the individual video: Your viral video should match the quality of the surrounding content. If it’s surrounded by user generated content, low-fi is probably called for.
Here’s an update on the removed video from YouTube: One of our TubeMogul users found the old clip at chbn.com (posted the same date, 5/12, as the first one on YouTube) and ran that video side by side with the new video on YouTube. The two turn out to be exactly the same. With nothing edited, and title and tags appearing to be the same, we don’t know what happened here… maybe it was just a simple YouTube misadventure like an accidental deletion. Or maybe they were testing whether a “re-release” would capture more views going forward than leaving up the same video posted earlier. This may go down as an unsolved mystery.
I spoke with Josh Levy at Tech President, who noticed that Hillary Clinton’s cumulative views on YouTube dropped today (6/6) from yesterday – how could that be (great catch and good question, Josh)? If you’re following the TubeMogul charts tracking the 2008 presidential campaign on Tech President or through your own free account at TubeMogul, you might be asking the same question.
I went through all of the YouTube videos we have ever tracked on Hillary Clinton and found 37 different videos. That’s fine, but then I noticed that she only has 36 videos up on YouTube today. My mind raced (for me, anyway); is the Clinton campaign removing a mention of some topic on which they want to reposition Hillary? Obviously this wouldn’t be on the same level as being the Sandy Berger move of online video, but it does raise questions.
After looking through the videos, I found that there had been two different videos for “Message from Bill Clinton” supporting his wife, one added on 5/12 (previously at this address) and one added on 6/4, and the one posted in May has been removed (Note, this does NOT refer to the video titled “A Special Message from Bill Clinton” uploaded on 3/23). The deletion of the 5/12 video has caused the drop in cumulative YouTube views that we see for Hillary’s profile, hillaryclintondotcom.
Was anything in the first video that has been edited from the second? Were there inaccuracies or anything else that they would have wanted to change? Why was this removed for another video of the same name, thumbnail, and tags? If anyone has insight on this, please comment.
By popular demand, we’ve put together a little instructional video for our users who aren’t sure if they’re getting the most out of the TubeMogul tools. We’ll continue to add videos like these (with hopefully higher quality production) as we add more features to our tools. Enjoy! And if you still need help, shoot us an email at comments@tubemogul.com.
Sex sells, especially on the internet (it’s the dirty secret that drives new technology), and in case anyone needed a reminder, No Good TV is unabashedly using this strategy to blow away traditional television’s online video viewership. No Good TV, or NGTV, produces uncensored celebrity and entertainment programming. Chalk full of F-bombs and bombshell babes, NGTV interviews rarely break from the path of sexual topics, references, or innuendo. And like the limited menu at In-and-Out Burger, NGTV’s singular focus serves them well (and its viewers, depending on your point of view).
NGTV.com officially announced beta launch on May 1st, and they have employed a multi-channel strategy with distribution beyond just their own site (which is commended by Daisy Whitney for its great UI). Not surprisingly, they’re largest viewership is through YouTube. What is surprising is to what extent they are getting noticed. With seven new videos last week, No Good TV CRUSHED the viewership of NBC and CBS on YouTube, even combined.
This marks a pretty interesting moment for explicit language and content. While no one is arguing that such content is new to the internet, this is the first time it’s being called programming. The blend of entertainment news with risqué content and foul language brings the grit to the masses and does it just at the time when you can find most any traditional television programming on the internet. It’s funny that just a few years after the FCC clampdown post-Super Bowl boob snafu, we’re in a world where more people are consuming content outside the FCC’s purview.
