There is a huge amount of activity in the online video space and it is growing by an order of magnitude every quarter. Some people believe that video viewership will be the primary driver behind the next expansion of technology, resulting from a massive pull from consumers driving the rollout of fibre, the development of faster microprocessors, improvements in wi-fi.
According to Pew Internet:
The desire to share a viewing experience with others has already been a powerful force in seeding the online video market. Fully 57% of online video viewers share links to the videos they find online with others. Young adults are the most “contagious carriers” in the viral spread of online video. Two in three (67%) video viewers ages 18-29 send others links to videos they find online, compared with just half of video viewers ages 30 and older.
Video viewers who actively exploit the participatory features of online video – such as rating content, posting feedback or uploading video – makeup the motivated minority of the online video audience. Again, young adults are the most active participants in this realm.
Here is where it gets interesting: What really drives the virality of videos? Is it the activities of the “motivated minority” who provide ratings, post feedback and provide the content via uploads or is the amount of feedback and the ratings an indication of the potential for a video to “go viral”?
We are still at an embryonic stage in building credible and useful metrics about social video.
One of the reasons for this is that there are a number of different classes of user generated content (UGC) that you find on sites like YouTube.
While there may be a certain amount of totally user created content that is created from the ground up by the uploader, I believe that an enormous amount of the content is really User Mediated Content (UMG). That is: content that is captured from traditional broadcast media and edited and uploaded or vision that is edited to an audio soundtrack like a popular song.
In both these latter cases we find that there are often many instances of the same or similar material being posted multiple times by multiple people.
So being able to establish some useful data on even the number of raw views of a video regardless of establishing the number of positive or negative comments and the ratings can be a major challenge.
Whether you are a consumer like me doing research on video generally or a brand manager with a specific goal, it is relatively easy to go to YouTube (or others) and run a search. But the amount of data that you glean just makes you realize that you are facing the labours of Hercules to get the information that you need.
There are some tools that are starting to emerge that are geared to the class of creator that produces and posts truly user generated content. I would class TubeMogul as one of the more useful in this category. It gives you the ability to get data on the amount of times that a video has been viewed, over what period and what the volume of comments/ratings etc have been.
I tried using it a few weeks ago to monitor Toyota videos for their Kluger model – purely as an academic exercise.
Over the last week TubeMogul has been very capably measuring the activity of the videos that I selected, and at one level it is quite interesting: I now can tell that of the videos that I selected several are getting in the region of 20 views a day on some days.
If I was the producer of these videos, this sort of information would be very interesting and quite possibly very useful, particularly the feature that allows the overlaying of multiple data sets for videos from the same producer.
But what I think that is revealed by what TubeMogul does, is that the tools for metrics reporting in the online social video space need to be very specifically targeted at a user group. And there are a lot of groups with quite divergent needs.
TubeMogul definitely fulfils the needs of the true social video creator.
No one currently provides a set of tools that are geared to professional content owners who currently are probably not making media purchasing decisions about video online because they can’t determine what the true value is.
The corporate market needs to be able to get information that delivers insights so that purchase decisions, strategy decisions, tactical decisions can all be made.
That means that high quality information has to be gathered about the kinds of videos that are User Mediated Content rather than User Created Content
Here are some of the things that would certainly interest me as a CEO or a VP of Marketing:
1. How long does it take for a video designed to “go viral” to actually build up a level of activity that will cause a determinable increase in qualified leads or sales?
2. How many instances of “my video” are there on line?
3. Do the comments and the ratings reflect the virality of the video?
4. Do videos made by consumers have more relevance than the TVC’s that migrate to the web or vice versa?
5. Are there videos online that criticize or are likely to build a negative impression of my product or brand by virtue of the content in the video?
These are some of the early questions I would like to be able to answer…. How about you?