Videomeme: Video

August 15, 2007

New Video Sharing Features

Check out the new 'Share this video' link at the bottom left of the player.

Posted at 09:59 PM in Video, Viral Marketing | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 13, 2007

Introducing The Book

No. 6 in the chart today and yesterday, but only 40,000 views so far, we predict this is going to get bigger.

*Update*

The original video was blogged over 600 times and did I think hit a million views before it got pulled. I've changed the embed code to a reposted version of the video, which is currently on about 60,000 views.

Posted at 06:03 PM in Video | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 12, 2007

Chart Widget

We've just launched a chart widget so you can embed today's top 20 videos in the sidebar of your blog (see right) or in a post like this one (below).

It's dynamic, so there'll be fresh stuff in every day. Please tell us which blogging platforms support this...and which ones don't!!!

Source: Viral Video Chart

Posted at 01:30 PM in Video, Viral Marketing, Viral Video Chart | Permalink | Comments (1)

February 10, 2007

Not All Views Are Equal

From an interview with Scott Kirsner, of the newly opened up Variety.

Variety: What are the challenges of measuring the popularity of videos across multiple sites? Is a view on MySpace really the same thing as a view on Revver or YouTube?

VVC: No, different sites count a video as being viewed at different points in the viewing cycle, and of course some sites still don't publish view data at all. It's precisely because of the difficulty of verifying and normalising view data that we don't use view data as the basis for our video charts. We collect our own data, measuring the number of people embedding and linking to videos on their own blogs and personal websites. This buzz metric lets us publish a list of the most popular videos that's unaffected by definitional discrepancies, view-fraud or marketing expenditure.

Variety: Do you feel that most sites' data about the number of times a video is viewed is pretty reliable?

VVC: No, absolutely not. With many video sites, you can simply open up the page with your video on it and set your browser to automatically refresh the page. This is a really simple way to inflate viewing figures, requiring almost no specialist knowledge. We estimate that at least 200,000 videos a day are currently being uploaded to video sharing sites. Getting your video noticed amongst this ocean of content is hard. So the prize for getting your video onto the homepages or most viewed lists of MySpace or YouTube is huge, and the incentive to game these sites really strong.

To combat this, some video sites are beginning to use third parties to verify view figures, particularly in cases where a marketing agency has paid to have their video campaign placed and promoted on the site.

Variety: What about compiling an accurate number of views for a video that may be posted on multiple sites, by multiple people?

VVC: That's hard. We have tools to help us detect the same video on multiple sites (or on the same site, posted by different people) and we aggregate figures where this happens. Some of the video sites are working on audio and visual 'fingerprinting' but these techniques are being developed chiefly to detect copyright-infringing clips. They haven't yet been proven to work at Internet-scale and don't address some of the subtler issues of content identity that we're concerned with. From our point of view, a longer clip or a differently edited clip may be materially different content but fingerprinting techniques, which are based on sampling, are not designed to care about these issues, because they're not particularly salient to the enforcement of intellectual property rights.

Variety: It seems like we don't really know much about how much video content is being viewed on sites like NBC.com or BBC.co.uk or ABC.com, do we? Those sites don't seem to present the number of views they deliver, for a show like "Lost," for example, as public information....

VVC: This is something we'd like to work on, but it will require greater co-operation from the sites themselves. We'd be delighted to talk to any large media outlet that delivers a significant number of video streams.

Variety: Are there other problems or barriers that still exist, in terms of measuring which video content people are watching?

VVC: Sure. There are other well-known deceptive practices designed to increase viewing figures. Many videos are misleadingly titled. And there's an increasing tendency to manipulate the thumbnail image produced for the video by briefly inserting an unrelated still image halfway into the video. Images of bare skin tend to work pretty well. And deceptive practices aside, legitimate, paid-for marketing activities are increasingly being used to drive traffic to commercially produced video content that's hosted on YouTube or MySpace. So it's incredibly difficult to get a real measure of what, in a grass roots, organic sense is truly popular just from viewing figures alone.

Posted at 10:02 PM in Video, Viral Marketing, Viral Video Chart | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 30, 2007

YouTube Shares The Love

Video posted by JeffJarvis - via NewTeeVee and thedailyreel. Nalts predicted this days ago, of course.

Nalts' 7 theories why YouTube decided to pay creators is worth a read, too, but my favourite quote is from NewTeeVee's, Liz Gannes. "You do need ads in order to share ad revenue" she notes snarkily, "so perhaps that’s why rewarding creators was a non-starter until now." Indeed.

Posted at 02:39 PM in Video, YouTube | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 28, 2006

What Should I Watch Next?

What have TiVo, Tioti and TVGuide got in common with the video meme trackers just launched by Megite and Tailrank? Sure, they all add, reveal or exploit social connectivity around video content, but they do it for the same reason. They're all trying to help you answer this question: What should I watch next?

This, I think, is the really hard, valuable-to-solve problem in video right now. Note, first, what this isn't. It's not a search problem. For sure, plenty of people are asking Google where to find the Timberlake SNL skit. But you're looking for this clip because someone - a friend, blogger or journalist - has already excited your interest. So you watch it. What do you watch next? One of the reasons that YouTube grew so fast is that it was much better at answering this question than anyone else. Even though Google Video belatedly added social features like rating, tagging and embedding, it failed to understand that none of these features actually touched the question of what you ought to be watching next. Google Video is still incredibly bad at answering this question. Go look. it's still acting like it's a search problem, when it isn't.

As Pete Cashmore notes, however, YouTube's ranking system is pretty broken right now. None of the ranking metrics - views, ratings, comments - are particularly good at helping you discover new content that you'll like. And, as YouTube's star has risen, it's become increasing susceptible to gaming, ranging from cheap and cheerful spambots inflating view figures to sophisticated, paid-for marketing tactics like those used to elevate the Rocky Balboa trailer to attention. I've spoken to plenty of people whose trust has been lost as a result and who think, rightly or wrongly, that these days, you just buy your way into YouTube's feature lists.

A rash of alternative video voting communities have sprung up over the last twelve months, of which, Digg Video, VideoSift, Flurl and StumbleUpon Video are perhaps the biggest and / or best known. This type of site provides two advantages over YouTube's own ranking systems. First, it can aggregate videos across several sites. (An increasingly notional benefit, as the same video footage turns up on multiple sites). Second, it can potentially coalesce a more cohesive or homogenous community, at least at small scales. As long as you choose a community of like-minded individuals, it's quite likely they'll crowd-surface stuff that you'll like too. This is key and does at least get at the root of the problem here, which is that in order to answer your question 'What should I watch next?' at all well, the system has got to have some understanding of your taste, or at least an understanding of things that can be predictors for it. As the size of the voting community grows, of course, the likelihood that you'll agree with a simple majority decreases and as the importance of the site rises, so too does the risk of potentially distorting voting fraud.

This is one of the point's that Arrington makes about the new video memetrackers, which base their results on blog buzz; that they should be less susceptible to voting fraud. To some extent, this is right. It's harder to set up a fake blog than a fake user account, though only just. And the meme trackers mitigate the risk of fake blogs to the extent that they upweight more authoritative blogs, though at the cost of increased methodological opacity.

It's interesting to see some of the different approaches here and the results that they yield. Both Megite and Tailrank upweight for authority. Neither Technorati, nor our own site, Viral Video Chart, do. There's a lot of James Brown on all four sites today, but the distribution is quite different. Here's the number of James Brown videos in the top twenty on each of the four sites for 27 December 2006, three days after the big man died.

Technorati - 10 videos / 20
Viral Video Chart - 8 videos / 20
Tailrank - 5 videos / 20
Megite - 3 videos / 20

My hunch is that James Brown is being linked to a lot and that the democratic, one link / one vote nature of the top two sites here captures this demotic buzz quite well. In fact, on 26/12/2006, 12 of the top 20 videos (and, as Jeff Jarvis notes, 7 of the top 10) on Viral Video Chart were James Brown numbers. (Note also that we compile our chart over the previous 24 hours, so that's hundreds of bloggers posting James Brown videos on Christmas Day).

It's also interesting to compare the number of links that these sites are finding for the top James Brown clip. Here are the results.

Technorati - 143 links / 48 hours
Viral Video Chart - 82 links / 24 hours
Tailrank - 4 links / unknown time period
Megite - 3 links / unknown time period

This makes me suspect that Tailrank and Megite are covering significantly fewer blogs than Technorati and Viral Video Chart. Perhaps precisely because they are trying to cover the more authoritative ones. But then this does lead to the result that a link from just a handful of influential blogs is all that's needed to make their front page. Which of course feels much more like the good old days of editorial selection and much less like buzz-tracking.

More coverage on the launch of video verticals by Megite and Tailrank here, here, and here. Rex Dixon looks like he got the scoop on the Megite launch.

I haven't had much chance to think how the new services from Megite and Tailrank impact on what we're trying to do with the Viral Video Chart, but they do raise some obvious questions.

Should we put embedded videos on our chart pages? The reader would have to navigate less but it's harder to get an overview of what the top videos are.
Should we give more prominence to the conversation around the videos - e.g. should we publish excerpts from the linking blog posts next to the videos?
Should we downweight the less authoritative blogs? This would have an immediate impact on our chart, downgrading many of the MySpace videos.
What would be the best way to measure authority and weight blogs when ranking videos? Should we use inward links to measure influence like Technorati? Should we consider the reach of those blogs (which would, for instance, be closer to the way in which radio airplay is calculated and weighted when compiling the Billboard Hot 100)? Should we consider the amount of videos that bloggers link to, or how successful those bloggers are at picking 'winners'?
Most importantly of all, what can we do to help people who want to know what to watch next? Viral Video Chart can help a little at the moment, but really only a little. It will show you what the rest of the world, for better or worse is talking about right now / today / this week. But we don't make any attempt to find out what videos you've already seen. Nor to ascertain your taste.

The question of what I should watch next is primarily a question of taste. But none of the video memetrackers, us included, are tackling the taste issue head-on. It's implicit, perhaps, but only to the extent that there's a lazy, snooty and possibly incorrect assumption that the people who blog (or blog 'authoritatitavely') share my taste (in videos) more than the people who don't.

Posted at 08:49 PM in Video, Viral Video Chart | Permalink | Comments (6)

December 19, 2006

December 16, 2006

The Top 10 Viral Videos of 2006

This is the chart of charts: the most viral videos of 2006, across all categories and all major video sharing sites. Sure, everyone is producing top tens. Sure, you can cut the data any way you like. Or ask your friends. Or you can just list your favourites.

But these are the clips that have - objectively - been talked about the most online. We collected the top 5 instances of each piece of content and added up the number of links to and embeds of each unique video. You can get a more conventional view of all the charts here.

One of the interesting things you can see from the data below is the occasional breakdown of correlation between buzz and viewing behaviour. The Kerry clip has been linked to nearly 40,000 times - nearly twice as many as the next one down - yet viewed less than a million times. In contrast, the most viewed video of the year, Evolution of Dance, has been viewed a staggering 40m times, yet been linked to only a third as many times as the Kerry clip.

1. Kerry Belittles U.S. Troops | 38,710 links | 876,228 views