Today, video platform Brightcove announced an expansive list of new affiliate service providers. Among them: TubeMogul InPlay, which can now be activated within minutes for any Brightcove user. The plugin tracks rich statistics like audience engagement, geographic region, viewer attention span and site performance — all in real-time.
Here is what Greg Baumann, Editor of TV Week and the Brightcove plugin’s first user, had to say: “TubeMogul InPlay statistics are infinitely useful. In an instant, I know how many new viewers we have, our salespeople know by geographic region where our most engaged viewers are and our technical team knows who is experiencing errors.”
Given that YouTube and most other video sites count a “view” regardless of how much of a video is actually watched, we often wondered: how much are people actually watching before they click away? To answer, we utilized TubeMogul InPlay to measure viewed-seconds for a sample of 188,055 videos, totaling 22,724,606 streams, on six of the top video sites for two weeks.
Most videos, it turns out, steadily lose viewers once “play” is clicked, with an average 10.39% of viewers clicking away after ten seconds and 53.56% leaving after one minute (below). More here.
The office is buzzing over our recent acquisition of Illumenix, an in-depth video metrics startup. Illumenix’s suite of patent-pending measurement tools, which can be set up in any flash player within minutes, are going to be wrapped up into something we are calling TubeMogul InPlay. If you host your own Flash video, here are some of the metrics we now offer:
Viewed-Minutes
Viewer Attention (i.e. when does a viewer click away?)
What else do we gain from the deal? The value of Illumenix’s brain-trust of executives and engineers can’t be overstated, and we are excited to have them working in our Emeryville, California offices. Here’s our first team photo, taken at our Halloween Party last week:
One of our chief investors, Howard Lindzon is a respected investment pundit, which makes it a joy to work in marketing at TubeMogul. Here he is on Fox’s “Street Meat” (ha ha, I said “street meat”):
We had this unused chart left over from our previous study, in which we took a sample of 10,000 videos deployed by TubeMogul that at least achieved 1,000 views in the first 90 days and looked at viewership over time. Here are the same 10,000 uploads, broken down by video category:
No doubt our users will have insights, but a few categories stuck out (or at least to me):
8% for “Science & Technology?” Wow.
Music videos log massive views, but only represent about 6% of our sample.
I feel vain posting this, but here is an interview I gave this morning with Talking Head TV that I promised I would post on our blog. Some questions, like “what makes a video go viral?” or “what is the kiss of death?” are questions that we get asked a lot and don’t fully know the answers to (if we did, we’d be very wealthy!). However, I talk about our new study, “Online Video’s Short Shelf Life,” which looks at macro-trends (most videos don’t randomly go viral, it turns out), which was recently featured in Mashable!, Alley Insider, GIGaom and elsewhere. One additional insight from the study that we hadn’t thought of is pointed out by HyveUp: intuitively recognizing video’s short shelf life, many of the most-viewed content creators “do not hesitate to launch 3 to 5 videos a day.” Indeed.
We recently categorized all of our users (which now number over 25,000). The categorization was undertaken at the request of several specialty video sites that we deploy videos to that have strict editorial standards (Howcast only wants how-to videos, Crackle professionally-produced content, YouTube everything under the sun, etc.). While the tiering was qualitative, it yielded some interesting quantitative insights:
Tier One (i.e. CBS Interactive, NextNewNetworks): 47% of all views; 3% of all users
Tier Two (i.e. popular vloggers, filmmakers, less-knowns but popular): 23% of all views; 20% of all users
Tier Three (i.e. promotional material–movie trailers, corporate-seeded viral videos): 13% of all views; 7% of all users
Tier Four (i.e. unknowns, family videos): 18% of all views; 70% of all users
Since this data is about TubeMogul users, there’s a clear selection bias here in favor of savvier content creators (i.e. networks, marketers), who are probably more likely to know about TubeMogul than the casual video uploader. In any case, interesting (we hope).
A year or so back, when TubeMogul was still three dudes in a Berkeley basement looking for a direction to take their nascent online video metrics business, Brett (our CEO) attended a “Top YouTubers” meetup in San Francisco. In attendance were mostly UGC (user-generated content) folks, and after talking to people, Brett realized that many of these video producers were more artists than they were seasoned businesspeople, and probably lacked the revenue necessary for advanced online video metrics. With that in mind, Brett and the founders opted to make TubeMogul’s basic product free. Who organized this life-changing meetup? Cory Williams of SMP Films, a YouTube Partner who, as Michael over at Alley Insider points out using TubeMogul’s data, dominated the viewership rankings last week with his “Choose Your Path” video series.
