Archive for the 'Youtube' Category
Who sent the massive traffic to the Barney Frank YouTube video?
Personal Democracy forum has an interesting breakdown of the referrals that led to the video of Barney Frank arguing with a crazy heckler. Though major news sites like Huffington Post drove about 200,000 referrals, individual accounts on sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter drove the majority of the million+ views to the video
Your more “professional” journalistic sites also put up big viewing numbers, for sure. The Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan’s blog, and Wonkette combined for about 200,000 referrals. But views from social media sources built on people-to-people sharing — primarily Facebook, with 95,000 views, but Digg and Reddit too — outnumber those from “news” sources in the end. Social media, according to YouTube, contributed about 229,000 views to the Frank video.
According to YouTube, here’s the breakdown of that data:
How I got 39,000 views on a month-old documentary trailer in just a week
One of the things I specialize in is getting video content to spread online. Last week I came across a YouTube trailer for a documentary called It Might Get Loud, and I wanted to see how much I could increase its view count after sending out only a few emails. I picked this trailer for three reasons:
1. It had already been uploaded on YouTube for about a month and so it no longer had the value of being new.
2. It was for a relatively small-release documentary, so it likely didn’t have a large marketing budget or widespread mainstream appeal.
3. There were many other competing versions of the same trailer on YouTube, the Apple website and the movie’s official website. This way I could keep track of how quickly other versions of the trailer were spreading without my help.
The version of the trailer I chose had 76,790 views a week ago when I started the experiment. It had been on the web for 27 days so in total averaged about 2,800 views a day. I began by spending a few hours seeding out the video to communities I thought would be receptive to it. One of the talents I have is using analytic search tools to identify specific micro niches of influential bloggers that are most likely to write about the content I’m pushing.
Within days, the trailer made it onto the Huffington Post and then less than 24 hours later on the front page of Digg. When I began the experiment, links and embeds on Twitter and in the blogosphere were about equally spread out across several versions of the trailer, but within four or five days, links to the trailer I was pushing far outnumbered all the others:
By the end of the week I had the trailer up to 115,397 views, an increase of 38,607. The views-per-day count jumped up from 2,800 views a day to 5,515 views a day.
As a point of comparison, this version of the trailer had 36,346 views when I began my outreach, and by the end of the week was only up to 40,470 views, an increase of 4,124. Like all the other versions of the trailer on YouTube I was tracking, it actually had a decrease in the daily views, likely because it had already been on the web for so long.
This was a relatively niche small-release documentary and the trailer was a month old. Think of what I could do with your trailer or video if I had it on the day it launches.
The perils of predicting the profitability of internet companies
You get squabbles over whether Craigslist will bring in $100 million or $300 million this year. You get debates over whether Facebook is, in fact, profitable. And you even have wildly different estimations, some of which claim that YouTube is losing massive amounts of money while others estimate that it’s actually pulling in a profit.
YouTube is much closer to breaking even than widely thought, says a firm with intimate knowledge of global infrastructure costs. A widely publicized Credit Suisse report that said Google would lose $470 million on the site this year neglected to account for factors such as peering traffic, wholesale bandwidth deals and cheap data center locations. Where the bank said YouTube’s costs will amount to $711 million in 2009, RampRate, a San Francisco-based company that advises large companies on IT infrastructure, says the actual cost is $415 million
