AT&T is sponsoring an online series titled “Lost In America” (not to be confused with the excellent 1985 Albert Brooks movie of the same name). The show is produced by Tremor Media and features prominent video blogger (and TubeMogul user) iJustine and Karen Nguyen.
As the election enters its final phase, we thought this data might be worth sharing before it enters the ash-heap of history.
Compared with YouTube in general, viewers that comment on the candidates’ official videos slant disproportionately male (72% for Obama, 78% for McCain, compared with 56% YouTube-wide) and older (heavily gen-x). Overall, Obama has slim leads among females and the 20-24 age bracket.
John McCain:
Barack Obama:
If you will be in the Los Angeles area on (update: original date cancelled; reschedule date to be announced), you might want to check out the Online Video for Organizational Communications event at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), where our own Mark Rotblat will be speaking.
iPressroom promises that “conference attendees will learn the nuts and bolts of online video production, meet top producers of original online video news programming, and participate in a discussion about what makes online videos go viral.”
Register here.
Sphere: Related ContentRecently, we developed TubeMogul InPlay, which allows us to track data far beyond the traditional metric of online video “views,” including how much of a video is actually watched, what the most popular segments of a video are, when a viewer clicks away and much more. While we anticipate releasing more macro-level research as we expand InPlay’s reach, we thought we would share some preliminary results from our beta testing with popular video site Viddler.com.
For the week ending October 10th, we took the top 100 most-viewed and top 100 most-commented videos from Viddler’s leaderboard and measured audience dropoff for each video (that is, second-by-second, the number of viewers that clicked away or kept watching as the video played).
Although both categories of video see audience dropoff over time, the most-commented videos are better at holding viewers, retaining an average of 9.25% more of their audience as time elapses. Interestingly, for top-viewed videos, overall audience size usually peaks at 20% into each video, meaning that many viewers are fast-forwarding part-way before the stream even starts.
Several factors limit the potential for extrapolation to the online video world at large: the small sample size, the fact that only streams from Viddler were tested, and that the data is not historical, but rather a one-time snapshot.
Meet Me In the Graveyard, described by its creators as a show “about a girl in an insane asylum and a guy in a halfway house falling in love over the internet,” recently signed a deal with Warner Brothers and can now be viewed on WB.com. We’ve long been fans of the show and are psyched to see another TubeMogul user’s success!
Sphere: Related Content
A small feature to add, but a useful one: all users can now change a video’s thumbnail after the video launches–perfect for keeping your video fresh or correcting a drunken thumbnail selection.
While he is down in the polls now, it appears that John McCain’s supporters were disillusioned on YouTube much sooner. McCain’s average video rating (i.e. users give this video “4.2 stars out of 5″) has been steadily declining over time, taking a precipitous fall in the beginning of September, perhaps coinciding with his selection of Sarah Palin and uptick of visceral attack ads.
Barack Obama’s dominance in online video views is a cliche by now, but the overall figures mask the fact that John McCain packs more punch per video, especially recently. I pulled this for AdAge, but was sufficiently amazed that I thought I would re-post here.
McCain and Obama’s average views per video from their official YouTube channels for the month of September: