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YouTube trends report #1

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.

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Comments 15

  1. Andrea Weckerle wrote:

    Very interesting and I look forward to future posts on this. Good info for someone interested in joinng the mix.

    Posted 14 Jul 2006 at 8:39 pm
  2. ozgur alaz wrote:

    Great report Asi
    i’ll digg it

    Posted 15 Jul 2006 at 12:12 am
  3. Marianne Richmond wrote:

    Really useful info…thanks for sharing it!
    Marianne

    Posted 16 Jul 2006 at 3:20 am
  4. butt wrote:

    Odd that you consider two identical clips from Napoleon Dynamite to be user-generated content. This is stolen content of the worst kind. copyright is infringed and no one does anything to stop it. Ugh.

    Posted 19 Jul 2006 at 12:35 pm
  5. Stan Lee wrote:

    Nice work Asi. I’ve used some of your stats on my Brand DNA blog.

    Posted 20 Jul 2006 at 3:26 pm
  6. Dan wrote:

    Great stuff.
    What was your second film trailer? I could only find Scary Movie.
    also, the live action Simpsons was a viral for Sky TV in the UK

    Posted 20 Jul 2006 at 6:30 pm
  7. Asi wrote:

    Thanks you all very much. I’m grateful and overwhelmed by all the links and traffic and reactions.

    I promise to keep up the trends report - next one coming very soon.

    please comment on improvements - what else would you like to see there?

    keep up the great work!
    best
    Asi.

    Posted 20 Jul 2006 at 6:50 pm
  8. Hopesome wrote:

    有几点想法 ：

    娱乐和广告的界限正在消弭。如果你是商家，应该考虑把广告放到网络上——如果一部广告片可以被观看几百万次，为什么不？（参见前文把广告制成Podcast VS 把Podcast当成广告 ）
    网络就是好莱坞，在播客中将涌现出众多的新星—–这是一个群星闪耀的时代
    用户创造的内容占过半热门节目，这只是一个开始。用户创造内容意味着内容市场将是无限的
    “最热门节目”掩盖了一些细分市场的热门节目——在无限的频道中，每个频道，你都可以看到“最热门的节目”

    Posted 21 Jul 2006 at 7:41 am
  9. Asi wrote:

    wow, i wish i could read that…

    can somebody translate please?

    cheers

    A.

    Posted 21 Jul 2006 at 10:17 am
  10. James wrote:

    Excellent info and very timely. We are currently producing Gary Brolsma’s return video in conjunction with YouTube (New Numa). I appreciate the time it took you (albeit you probably had a blast!) to gather all of these observations.

    -James
    NewNuma.com

    Posted 21 Jul 2006 at 2:47 pm
  11. Daniel R wrote:

    Asi,

    Great post and, in general, a great blog.

    What would be interesting is to understand what is the ratio between YouTube users who uploaded videos versus those that simply use the service.

    And on top of that, what percentage of active YouTube users (who add content) upload the most popular content?

    Posted 23 Jul 2006 at 8:00 pm
  12. udy wrote:

    Well, enough with the analysis, mate. Let me challenge you. Let’s see if you can come up with something that we can do and will put us there. I’ll do the editing. Let’s see if we can do that, what do you say?

    Posted 26 Jul 2006 at 8:15 pm
  13. Mother's Little Helper wrote:

    The not-so-good-yet-here-it-is translation:

    I have a few thoughts:

    1. The boundaries between entertainment and advertising are currently disappearing. If you’re a businessman, you should consider putting commercial ads on-line - if an advertising film can be viewed milions of times, why not [do so]? (See also the previous post “Turning ads into podcast VS turning podcasts into ads” http://hopesome.com/archives/679.html).
    2. The net is just like Hollywood, in podcasting an incredible number of stars are born “It’s a generation of sparkling stars” http://hopesome.com/archives/344.html
    3. User generated content makes up more than half of the popular “programs” [youtube - most viewed], and this is just the beginning. User generated content makes the “content market” limitless.
    4. “most popular programs” [youtube - most viewed] cover a part of the popular “commercial content” [commercial virals, commercial ads etc.] - in the limitless [number of] channels, in every channel, you can notice any type of “most popular programs”.

    Hope this helps! I’m not sure of the last sentence - guess my Chinese and English skills still lack… I think what he means is that if commercial ads are good, they also can be watched like any other video, and if they’re really good - they can become trendy making it to the “most popular video” list.

    Best wishes from a Polish guest ;)

    Posted 28 Jul 2006 at 10:49 am
  14. Amichai Shalev wrote:

    great idea, if you need any help please contact me. due to my work i’m visiting youtube couple of times a day, depend what kind of a day im having

    Posted 03 Aug 2006 at 2:28 pm
  15. wholesale ipod shuffle wrote:

    good idea,sound interesting!

    Posted 09 Aug 2006 at 8:33 am

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