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50% of YouTube Views Come in First 6 Days

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Our friends at TubeMogul have an interesting graphic out today that shows that 50% of all YouTube video views occur within the first 6 days of publication.  That’s what happens when nearly 24 hours of new video are uploaded to the site every minute.  TubeMogul suggests that this means you should be uploading content on a regular basis – to always be resetting that cycle for your viewership.

But what about the other 50% of the traffic? And, which traffic is more valuable? The first 50% or the second 50%?  I think it depends.

If you’re a big brand like Toyota or the NBA then that early traffic is probably the most critical.  It’s your brand awareness, viral seeding moment where you get the widest reach and most momentum in any spreadability that’s going to occur around the content.  At SXSW a YouTube representative said that half of viral traffic for a video in the first 48 hours occurs as a result of the video being embeded.

But, if you’re a small business it might be that the last 50% – the long tail – of your video traffic is more important.  That’s because the second half represents people that had to work to find you. They were looking for you specifically or for information about a problem you’re solving.  And while the views are slow and steady it may be that they are the most engaged and higher converting views when compared to the “head” traffic.

Consider Google Adwords.  If you buy the top position in AdWords you certainly get the lion’s share of traffic. But that traffic is often less targeted and lower converting than positions 2-6.  Why? Because with more traffic comes more unqualified people.  But the people who actually read through the ads and find exactly what they’re looking for, while fewer in number, tend to convert at a much higher rate.

I believe that’s an appropriate paradigm to consider when looking at the “back half” of video views on YouTube – particularly for small businesses using video as a lead or customer acquisition tool.

What do you think?

via CHART OF THE DAY: The Half-Life Of A YouTube Video Is 6 Days.

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Stop Praying for Viral Video

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Beyond Viral book by Kevin Nalts McNalty

If you work in the online video space for more than 30-seconds you’re bound to get asked this question, “How do I make a viral video?”  Spend more than 30 days in the industry and you’ll feel like Brett Wilson, CEO of TubeMogul feels about the phrase viral video:

There are a few buzzwords that irk me. First is “viral video.” A viral video is a rare and beautiful thing, but we know that only about .33 percent of videos on YouTube have over a million views, and there are a lot that are effective that have far fewer views (53 percent of videos on YouTube have less than 500 views). People throw around this term carelessly to describe any video made for the web. Let’s just use the term web video. I was cheering when Rob Davis from Ogilvy said the same thing on stage this week at the Brightcove Video Monetization Summit in NY.

He’s not the only one.  Kevin “Nalts” McNalty is currently writing a book on online video called, appropriately, Beyond Viral, which we hope comes out sooner than later.

And to add two more to the growing crowd of those with a distaste for the words viral video, check out Mike Arauz’s presentation (slides + audio) from SXSW ’10, Web Video Thunderdome, where he lobbies instead for the term “spreadable” or “shareable” videos.

Oh, and of course you can add one more name to the petition to stop praying for viral video – me.