For our latest study here at TubeMogul, we took a sample of 200,000 videos deployed by us and compared average views across video sites and categories.
The results? In comparing sites, the data is unequivocal: YouTube consistently gets more average views per video than any other site, regardless of category. Since YouTube pits the largest catalogue of content against the largest audience, this result was far from certain (and surprising to us). It’s worth noting that while YouTube dominates the averages, a video producer could still almost double their audience by distributing to additional video sites.
Breaking down average views by category also yielded some interesting results. “Autos,” for instance, is the category with the most average views per video. Also, MySpace only ranks fourth in the music category, behind YouTube, Yahoo! and Veoh. MORE HERE.
About a month ago, we launched a “Top 40″ list of the users getting the most views from videos deployed by us (an admittedly biased list, but an interesting one). We will be releasing an updated list shortly, but it’s worth pondering: what is the key to their success? Great content, for one. An additional insight came after we released our recent research on “Online Video’s Short Shelf Life.” A blogger savvily pointed out that most successful content creators already understood that online video fans have a short attention span, and thus put out a high quantity of videos.
Curious if that was actually the case, I tested it using our Top 40 list, and found it to be largely true. In the month of June, Chris Pirillo (#2 on our list), deployed 803 videos. Similarly, mojosupreme (#6) put out about 691. Further on down the list, Vlaze media (#35), put out a decidedly humbler 74 videos, and Sony (#40) deployed 32–and so on.
The data shows the brilliance of this. Since average online video viewership tends to peak on day three, putting out videos often allows producers to constantly ride the highest point of the wave. While individual videos rise and fall fast, a given producer can always have a steady audience.
RealTVfilms is awesome. Why do we say so? Their stellar interviews, for one. Also, they recently did us the honor of sliding our logo into the middle of the “Dark Knight” trailer in their coverage of the film (below).
