The Battle for Web Views: NBA vs. NCAA Tournament
March Madness is over, and now that the dust has settled, it’s interesting to go back and see how this year’s tourney fared in the way of web video presence, especially in comparison to the NBA. We took a look at the aggregate of videos published on YouTube by CBS for the NCAA Tournament vs. those published by the NBA.
As one might expect, the hype of the tourney created a few major peaks of interest in online video views. One could simply conclude that the two large peaks for the tournament naturally occur from the weekly dose of tourney madness. But if you look at which videos make up the bulk of viewership (after all, there are a full menu of videos -182 - for just 3 weeks of viewing), you find that just two videos are responsible for the two large spikes.
Both are the highlights recaps that are done in conjunction with the R&B artists, Nuttin’ But Stringz, and their song titled, Thunder. There was a huge spike the first time it was released as part of the highlights on 3/20 (nearly 550K views). You can see that the highlight reel from 3/27 is the other notable spike (390K views), though reduced from the first weekend’s highlights.
Which brings us to the point that even in the world of CBS and NCAA Tournament action clips, content is king. Online video is as much a hits business as record sales, only online video has a much shorter shelf life.
To support this thought, we looked at what drove the jump in NBA viewership on 3/23 and 3/24. Here it comes down to two videos again; one on each day. The first, and larger spike is a result of a Kobe Bryant video (124K views) and the second is an Allen Iverson video (107K views). The message must be a scary one for big media – even though it’s all professionally done, it’s not just about putting up all your content, it’s making the hits and keeping them coming. And this is difficult in the world of online video because a game, or sitcom, or news piece has to be reduced to a poignant, 30 second clip.
If anyone has any interesting charts we should dig into on the blog, let us know!
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