We released this research to AdAge a few months back, but now that it’s securely behind their pay-wall I wanted to share the results publicly for the first time. Taking a sample of 50 top professionally-produced, episodic Web series, including short-form shows from top TV networks and new media studios, we broke down total cross-site views for the first eight episodes of each of these shows. The results? Building an audience past episode one is extremely difficult for this genre, as 64.31% of audiences never return to watch episode two, on average. Given the fickle attention span of the typical online video viewer, perhaps this isn’t surprising.
Ever-hilarious, Nalts puts this twist on some demographics reporting we shared with him. Obviously, we’re flattered by the mention (and in his birthday video, no less!)!
Recently, we were asked what the top music labels are on YouTube in terms of cumulative views. The question is more complex than we initially assumed, since most labels (i.e. Universal Music Group) often post duplicate videos in separate YouTube channels, including the label’s parent channel (youtube.com/universalmusicgroup), a musician-specific channel (i.e. youtube.com/ladygaga) and sub-labels (i.e. youtube.com/islandrecords). After much work compiling a comprehensive list, we queried across all channels and came up with the following cumulative numbers:
Universal Music Group: 6,273,585,160 views
Sony BMG: 4,820,117,362 views
Warner Music Group: 1,088,095,077 views*
Hollywood Records: 1,017,394,039 views
EMI/Parlophone/Capitol: 702,152,316 views
* Almost all Warner Music Group videos were removed on 12/27 due to an ongoing contract dispute.
Also, it’s worth noting that a significant portion of overall music video views come from pirated versions, mashups and other unofficial clips. For instance, 60.53% of all views of Avril Lavigne videos come from unofficial versions.
We are proud to count many nonprofits and government agencies among our clients, in addition to media companies, marketing agencies and others in the corporate world. One of our favorites: The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, an information center that facilitates “nonprofit grantwriting, advocacy, planning and decision-making in post-Katrina New Orleans.”
Recently, GNOCDC was featured on CNN, and saw a subsequent spike in traffic. PR-wise, this seems like a dream come true, but it came with a catch: the audience dropoff for the informational video featured on their homepage was far more severe post-CNN mention, suggesting that viewers referred by CNN are less valuable as leads. Here are the numbers:
Then look no further than Seth Macfarlane’s “Cavalcade of Comedy” on YouTube. According to our demographics reporting, 83.39% of its viewers are male, with 62.68% between the ages of 15 and 24 (details below). Given this, Burger King as a sponsor makes a lot of sense (but does Priceline?).
Of course, if you really are an advertiser, be sure to check out TubeMogul Marketplace, which now counts over 3500 profiles of video producers, complete with viewership statistics and contact info.
For our latest research, we set out with a simple question: how do people discover videos online? To answer, we used TubeMogul InPlay to record what sites viewers are coming from for a sample of 35.5 million streams on six top video sites.
The results? The most common way viewers find a video (45.13% of all views our sample) is intuitive: going to a video site and running a search or clicking around the featured or related videos. In terms of sites referring video views, no single source dominates, with a variegated long tail of mostly blogs sourcing 80.88% of all referred traffic in our sample. Google is the top individual site referring video views at a modest 7.19% of all referred video traffic.
While unlocking a formula for making videos go viral has long been the “El Dorado” of the online marketing world, perhaps this research gives us some clues: reach out to bloggers and optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it ranks highly on intra-video site plugs.
Last week, the White House set up a YouTube channel to host official videos, and the first few videos are racking up an impressive number of views. In terms of demographics, Obama’s early audience slants younger (37.11% is 19 or under), and 16.98% more female than YouTube in general (below).
We are proud to announce our partnership and integration with Webcastr.com. Webcastr prides itself on selecting and featuring the very best of internet TV, a daunting task considering the glut of content online–and they do a great job. To distribute your videos to Webcastr, register on the special link in the “More” section next to Webcastr on any video’s “Launch” page, then enter your new username/password and fire away.
