The Mythology of YouTube

If we want to know why (and how) a video goes viral, the top 5 most watched YouTube videos are a potential place to start.

This past year was the first time YouTube took official note of the top 5, so the older lists are a little challenging to reconstruct:

In 2009, (excluding music videos which turn out to have the absolute highest numbers) that's
1. Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent (120+ million views, 7:08)
2. David After Dentist (37+ million views, 1:59)
3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views, 5:10)
4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views, 1:49)
5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views, 1:01)

And in 2008:
1. Charlie Bit My Finger (~110 million views, 0:56)
2. Evolution of Dance (109+ million views, 6:00)
3. Achmed the Dead Terrorist (~80 million views, 9:48)
4. Jizz in My Pants (~20 million views, 2:33)
5. Britain's Got Talent's Connie Talbot (~20 million views, 4:57)

Finally in 2007:
1. Battle in the Kruger (22+ million views, 8:24)
2. South Carolina Miss Teen USA (20+ million views, 0:48)
3. Chris Crocker Defends Britney Spears (14+ million views, 2:43)
4. Esmee Denters sings Justin Timberlake (13+ million views, 2:42)
5. Tay Zonday sings Chocolate Rain (12+ million views, 4:53)


What sticks out?

Sources
User generated (7)
TV clip (7)
Advertising (1)

Clearly advertisers haven't broken the secret code to viral video success.

Content
Music-related (7)
Intended to be Funny (4)
Other (4)

With music videos capturing the absolute highest numbers, American Idol/Britain's Got Talent dominating traditional media, and music being featured in the majority of other top viewed videos, it stands to reason that viewers find music compelling.

Length
0-2 minutes (5)
2-4 minutes (3)
4-6 minutes (3)
6-8 minutes (2)
8-10 minutes (2)

YouTube caps upload length at 10 minutes, and the number of top viewed videos does decline the higher the run time is, but there are videos in every category. Thus, a video doesn't have to be short to be popular.

View Counts
2007 (12-22 million)
2008 (20-110 million)
2009 (27 to 120 million)

As YouTube's popularity has grown, so too have the view counts of the most popular videos, though there were fewer break out hits of 2009. Hard to tell if view counts rise because there are simply more viewers, or if a video actually has to work harder to break the top 5.

Gender
Men (6)
Women (4)
Groups (5)

Not statistically significant differences.

But there's a problem with this kind of analysis. Like we learned in problem framing, you can't just look at the positive cases, you also need to look at the negative cases. In short, YouTube is filled with crap that never gets seen. Much of it is funny, features music, and stays short, yet never gets a view count past 3 digits. So what gives?

The research I've done in Theatres on YouTube arrived at the same conclusion. And Tech Crunch recently found that the average YouTube video will

• Get 500 views
• 25% of those will happen in the first 4 days
• Only the first 30-60 seconds will be watched
• 55% of videos are discovered (the remaining 45% users were actively searching for)
  

But I tend to think the leap from 500 to 5 million is based on how you promote the video. Are you tweeting a bit.ly link out to your thousands of followers? Is the video embedded on your facebook page? Is the video well-tagged and clearly named on YouTube?

Unfortunately, there's little indication that high view counts translate to higher sales, though this webinar is pretty rad.

Until we can measure it better, it's even harder to predict success. But with Video SEO finally coming of age, maybe we'll finally figure out how to track how videos go viral so we can better hypothesize why.

And with the rise of non profits on YouTube, maybe it'll actually start to matter.