YouTube trends report #1

by asi

A short blogversation last week about virals has prompted my curiosity to dig into YouTube and to carry out a systematic content analysis of the most viewed videos in an attempt to get under the skin of the viral phenomena. Put differently, I wanted to get a better grasp of what makes people tick when it comes to viral content with a strong emphasis on user generated content.

Analysing this great variety of content turned out to be very insightful, so from now on I’m hoping to produce and blog YouTube trends’ reports on a regular basis.  As a benchmark, I will start with the All Time Most Viewed videos, but future reports will be based on Most Viewed This Month – a more dynamic and interesting chart to my view. (Although youtube users are doubled every couple of months or so, I assume that most new user will check the All Time Most Viewed and thus keep the chart to a large extant inert).

To start with some figures, the all times #1 has been viewed 28,643,691 times to date. Closing this list #100 has been viewed 1,543,402 times. 

Between these two can be found:


58 user generated content (I consider UGC as non commercial material that has been edited/produced/acted/directed/mashed-up etc by YouTube users – thorough analysis of this bit to follow)

31 music videos, of which 20 are fairly contemporary and 11 are a variety of cheesy nostalgic ridicule hilarious spoof videos.  [*there is some artificial division here as some videos within this list can be considered as UGC. For now I’ll leave it here]

4 commercial ads – amazing achievement for Sony Bravia Balls (#34 with 3,466,011 views), but not least for Crispin Porter + Bogusky as all other three (!) commecials on the Top100 are the brilliant VW Pimp My Auto executions. Apparently we no longer need a TV to watch great TV ads…

3 commercial virals (at least that I was able to detect: 2 identical Nike-Ronaldinio and one for Nintendo)

2 movie trailers

2 Asian candid camera shows

What I find most interesting is to try to understand the DNA of user generated content in this age of mass creativity were every 15 years old can be director, actor and executive producer and let me tell you, there’s some great talent out there!

Of the 58 UGCs there are:

13 home videos – these are “recycled” materials that range from funny home videos like baby shagging his doll, comic football, real-life frogger, to sports spectaculars and one crazy dog that made me scratch the floor with laughter…
Overall there is no surplus of original creativity in this category, but we’re never tired laughing at human misery…

13 talent/skill videos – apparently we appreciate talent – usual or unusual – espacially dance related stuff with 5 different videos (e.g1, e.g2 ,e.g3) including the all times #1 ‘history of dance’ among them. Thats 5% (!) of all videos and its actually more when you consider all dance music videos as well as this nostalgic jam.  Additionally there is physical talent like this urban ninja, and other weird quasi-practical skills like peeling hot potato in one go, or taking your clothes off in 10 seconds…

19 young & talented - this is the most interesting area for me. From one-time lip synching appearance to consistent high quality ‘webisodes’, there are some extremely talented youngsters doing quite amazing things. Indeed some are just daft but two noticeable are Brooke Allison – (remember this name !) – She is damn good and I expect to see her on MTV very soon. She only has this one on the top 100 but more on the monthly chart (more on her in my next report).
Other exciting young directors are the Smosh team with 3 (!) videos on the all time most viewed list including #2.
More interesting stuff in this category include the MySpace spoofs 1 and 2 as well as a new entry that takes the piss of Zidane’s moment of madness – only 3 days and already #79).

13 other – for all the rest uncategorised stuff. Most noticeable is Zidane’s moment of madness that reached #56 in only four days , video-game mash-ups, future technology, and one horrendous historic moment.

That’s it for now. I will soon blog more up-to-date YouTube monitor stuff and try to explore more in depth the different categories of viral content. I will try in the future to explore common themes  across categories -  things like what makes us laugh, what makes a classic and, what kind of marketing content are we willing to interact with, and, as YouTube matures – how easy it is to manipulate the system…

*please comment if you have any tips or suggestions on how to improve these reports.