Today we are approaching the answer to this question with an analysis of the demography of commenters on YouTube. For this, we have randomly picked 2,120 videos from YouTube, for which we found 36,459 comments. That’s an average of roughly 17 comments per video, but note that this number doesn’t mean much because the random 2,120 videos include ones that have no comments as well as ones with several thousands of comments. Since YouTube doesn’t actually expose more than 1,000 comments per video, we had to limit the analysis of the comments per video to 1,000.

Out of the 36,459 randomly picked comments that were analysed 21,464 were by male commenters, 9,914 by female commenters. The remaining 5,081 commenters did not expose their gender.

Gender of commenters on YouTube

Even if all the commenters that did not expose their gender were female (which is unlikely) – the clear majority of commenters are male.

Now let’s look at the age distribution. Out of the 36,459 randomly picked comments 26,668 provided their age. The distribution of ages is given in the next graph.

Age distribution of commenters on YouTube

The graph provides the exact age distribution as given by the commenters. Assuming they have all been truthful, we arrive at an average age of commenters of 27.59 years, i.e. the majority of commenters (namely 50.4%) are below 28 years of age.

Age distribution of commenters with 50% marked

Details of the distribution are found in this table:

Age distribution of commenters

Now, you will have noticed that out of the 36,459 randomly picked comments that were analysed, interestingly 326 declared to be over the age of 100 and the graph clearly spike for over 100 year-olds. We cannot easily make decisions about whether people have provided a misleading age or not, but for those over 100 it is a fair estimate to say that are incorrect. Since they create an unfair bias in the statistics, we also provide the analysis with ages above 100 removed.

Age distribution of commenters less than 100 years old

Now the average age of comment authors has come down to 26.6 and 52.93% of commenters are less than 27, 75% less than 36 years old.

The largest number of comments has been posted by 22 year old males (6.5%). As our initial gut feeling was the most commenters on YouTube are males between 15 and 25, this analysis has confirmed the gender and roughly the age group: the majority of commenters are between 13 and 27 years old.

We have no explanation for the weird shape of the graph which has a strong dip at 18 years and an unexpected peak at 29 years. This may well just be a problem with the small data set that we used, or there may be some fact to explain this. If you have any theories for these values, please leave a comment. We intend to undertake a broader analysis over more videos and comments in the future and may even be able to test your theories.

The video provides the best introduction:

Basically, you can now have your typist create a transcript of your video and then directly upload that to YouTube, which will use speech recognition to time-align the transcript and turn it into captions. That’s awesome! You can even download those captions and keep them for some other purpose, such as add them to your local archive of videos.

For some select partners, YouTube is even experimenting with a fully automated captioning system, where the transcript is created using speech recognition. Since we know the quality of Google voice from searches performed through Google searches on mobile phones, let’s be skeptical of the quality of the fully automated solution. But it is certainly a great start and we can certainly expect Google to continue making improvements to their speech recognition technology.

Promoted Videos feature a thumbnail image with three lines of text, and when clicked, will bring the user to watch a video or view a channel on YouTube. They are being specially pointed out on the YouTube front page, in search results, in popular video watch pages, and even across the AdSense network.

These videos are contextually targeted to Web pages. If as a Website publisher you decide to take part in AdSense, you’ll earn from these ads on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. People wanting to use promoted videos can now do so from the comfort of their known AdWords account, since YouTube have just launched this service for Australia.

This week, WMG and YouTube struck a deal that will give WMG a large chunk of the revenue created around their videos – which was the issue when they broke the deal in December 2008. The partnership covers the full Warner catalogue and includes user-generated content containing WMG acts.

This is great news for anyone wanting to publish video on YouTube and use music by artists under contract with WMG: over are the times of heavy WMG policing and removing of audio tracks that were deemed “infringing”. This is also very relevant to ad producers since WMG music is now implicitly licensed for publication on YouTube.

The deal gives WMG special rights: it will sell advertising around its videos on YouTube itself rather than leaving it to YouTube. YouTube will get a share. To that end, WMG will be given a special high-quality video player by YouTube with advertising capabilities that are not available on the standard player. WMG can thus clutter the video with a lot more advertising. I wonder what that will mean for embedding the music videos on other sites?

Also, YouTube’s Content ID technology will allow them to claim and monetise the audio tracks of UCG content. I wonder what effect that will have on the videos – will there be an overlay with a link through to iTunes or Amazon for purchasing the records? That might be the least intrusive. Or will there be large banners of WMG advertisers around them? Not sure how that is going to pan out, but we will certainly experience it.

It is said that it will take until the end of the year for all WMG music videos to return to YouTube, which includes the time it takes YouTube to implement the premium video player and the time to upload the videos in the high quality format.

However, UCG doesn’t have to wait any longer – go and enjoy the new-found freedom to use WMG music again on YouTube!

The complete stats are listed in the YouTube blog post about the YouTube Generation.

One important outcome is that people consider brands that advertise on YouTube to be more current, innovative and dynamic. And 3 in 5 users say YouTube influences their purchase decisions.

With the help of Australian video company Vquence, Senator Kate Lundy started a YouTube and a Vimeo channel in June this year as part of a new effort in using social networking technology – also known as Web 2.0 technology – to better communicate with her constituency.

Many of her federal colleagues have started using YouTube for publishing videos. The success of the Obama campaign has impressed many politicians and encouraged trying out the new approach – in particular to connect better with the younger generations. However, the majority of YouTube channels of Australian politicians are barely more than “Trophy channels” – they just republish TV appearances and best speeches from parliamentary recordings of the particular politician. But there is so much more to be done with video.

A YouTube channel that follows the Obama example needs to be part of a well thought out strategy. According to Maxwell Harper, Obama’s video strategist during the 2008 campaign, “Video is an investment and if you think about it really strategically it’ll pay for itself through the impact it has.”

Senator Lundy made her YouTube and Vimeo channels an integral part of a wider campaign to improve her own communication with citizens and to allow citizens to have more input into government decisions. Her twitter presence, her blogging site, as well as her consultative Public Sphere events are other parts of the picture that forms a complete, modern communication strategy for a politician.

The strategy is paying off. According to video metrics prepared by Vquence, the more than 50 videos posted since June have seen more than 3000 views by the beginning of August. More importantly, the time that people spend on her website has increased by 45% because of the videos. Clearly, visitors are finding the videos a valuable addition to her communication mix.

The videos that are showing the most impact are the vodcasts or video blogs. “Vodcasts are regularly produced short pieces of video that provide a focused message, similar to a blog post but in video format.” says Dr Silvia Pfeiffer, Vquence CEO. “Senator Lundy’s first three vodcasts have achieved more than 1000 views within the first month – more than any other videos on her channels. Clearly, people like the direct way in which the Senator tries to communicate with them.”

“One of the concerns often expressed when considering video amongst a range of Web 2.0 strategies is the perceived complexities of recording, posting and assessing the effectiveness.” Senator Lundy says. “I was aware of the success other politicians were having with their video and You Tube channels but had always presumed the need for resources would put video beyond me. The good news is it is indeed possible!”

“If you are not publishing video online, you are missing out on an opportunity.” states Dr Pfeiffer. ” YouTube is now the second biggest search engine on the Web and that means visitors are trying to find you there. If all they can find are fake channels about you or your brand, your reputation may suffer.”

Vquence is now helping Senator Lundy with video search engine optimisation, seeding, daily metrics, and quarterly comprehensive reporting. Senator Lundy and her team have become self-proficient in video production and are continuing to try out new production styles, trying to provide even more value to her constituency.

Senator Lundy YouTube Channel

In March, this feature was only available to non-profit partners. YouTube wrote about one particular instance of a non-profit partner who raised more than $10,000 in one day after including the hyperlink on their video and after YouTube featured it on their front page.

Now the Call to Action is available to all YouTube advertisers in the US. Unfortunately, we cannot access it yet in Australia.

On the list of top viewed YouTube videos of all time, Boyle’s top video is on position 22, Potts at 28, and Talbot at 35 (as of 13th May). These are the only show videos up in such heights – most other videos here are either music videos or legendary virals such as “The Evolution of Dance“, “Charlie bit my finger“, or the laughing Baby “Hahaha“.

Considering Paul Potts and Connie Talbot are a 2 year old success, it is quite amazing how many views they have attracted consistently, and more so recently, in the wake of Boyle: almost a fifth on Potts and Talbot views were in the last month. For comparison, see the following chart:

Approx development of views on Potts, Talbot and Boyle videos

All three videos have achieved around 50M views. Obviously, BGT is a huge success in social video and has enabled the show to become a world-wide story rather than limited to British borders. But has ITV been able to monetize on the success online?

In 2007, content owners hadn’t really come to grips yet with the value that YouTube presents. Thus, neither the Paul Potts video nor the Connie Talbot video are actually published by ITV. More importantly though, in 2007, YouTube was only starting to develop means to enable content publishers to share in ad revenue on their high performing content. YouTube actually had nothing to offer for these content owners. Nobody can blame ITV for not monetising the YouTube success in 2007.

Seeing all these successes, one would expect that ITV had made arrangements for revenue sharing with YouTube and possibly other sites well before this year’s show in preparation for a potential social video hit. Looking at YouTube, where the overwhelming majority of the success has been focused, it seems, however, that they missed the boat. According to The Times UK, the management at ITV insisted that they wanted special terms from Google for the Susan Boyle video because they saw the videos taking off.

Instead of opting for the YouTube tried-and-tested advertising methods, ITV went into discussions with them and wanted special pre-roll ad options, which YouTube wasn’t able or willing to offer. However, they achieved some special treatment after all, since it is not possible to embed any of the non-offical copies out of YouTube.

While ITV set up their own YouTube channel and show to publish official copies of the top BGT performances online, they could only watch as the user uploaded videos took off. Kudos have to go to ITV for acting generously and not taking down the copies – at least they can now get official numbers on the complete views on their content.

On 24th April, ITV finally published their own BGT channel and show on YouTube. This contains the official “Susan Boyle” video – almost two weeks after her TV appearance.

How will ITV now monetise the videos?

YouTube offers a revenue share model to publishers of high-performing content through a partnership program. This enables advertisers to place the following kinds of adverts next to the partner content:

• InVideo ads: These are little overlays that start at 10s into the video occupying the bottom 20% of the video player and containing Google ads. If a user clicks on it, the video is paused and a new tab opens with the clicked-through link.
• Companion ads: These are a 300x250px banner ads that appear on the watch page of a video of a partner in the prime position next to the video.

These ads can be targeted on user demographics, location, time-of-day and content genre. The content owners receive a 50% share on the CPM charged for these ads.

The ads can be placed on all copies of a piece of content, no matter whether it is published through the official channel of the content owner or through consumer copies. This is just as well for ITV, since the official video of Susan Boyle’s performance is only the 10th best performing Susan Boyle video on YouTube when ordered by view count (on 13th May). For relevance ordered queries, the official video ended up on top for a while, but is now down to position 7 – obviously YouTube’s ranking is based on freshness of a post as well as views.

Assuming the £20 CPM value that is quoted in The Times Online, the top performing video on YouTube alone could have made £1M in advertising revenue, half of which would have gone to ITV – certainly a number that hurts.

Indeed, this number should hurt YouTube as much as ITV, since YouTube only makes money from highly performing videos if the publisher becomes a partner and makes money, too. It should have been in YouTube’s interest to allow advertisements next to the prime performing content as quickly as possible. Maybe this shows a need for an additional revenue model for content owners that is not dependent on them setting up a channel or show with YouTube. YouTube should take this as an opportunity!

In the meantime, ITV is indeed making money on YouTube. Their own videos have seen an amazing number of views in the past weeks and the show keeps coming up with amazing talent. For Hollie Steel, the ITV channel indeed provides the video with the highest view count. More than 30M views have come to BGT content since the 24th April and all of this content bears advertising. This means the ITV channel should now have created approx £600K of ad income – a substantial number indeed.

The report analyses global trends for how users interact with online media and make recommendations for how advertisers should should react to them.

Of course they had to point out the explosion of social video use in the past few years and recommend increased use of social media and video to advertisers.

But what really impressed me was that they actually took their own recommendations and applied them to their own marketing strategy: the report was published on a blog with a YouTube video showing Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank explaining the report.

It’s only one of two videos that they have posted to TheNielsenCompany channel, so it’s a new phenomenon. Yet, it’s what I would call “eat your own dogfood”. Nice work!

BTW: Nielsen should put some video SEO on those YouTube videos! At minimum they should add some links and improve the descriptions.

All-excited, I went to YouTube to enjoy some shows. However, the first problem I had was that – at least here in Australia – the announced “Shows” tab was not available on the front page and there was no way to find the “Shows” or the “Movies”. Fortunately, the YouTube blog post also provided direct links, so I went there directly.

With new hope, I browsed the available shows and selected some to watch. I was, however, very disappointed. Most of the shows that I clicked on were not available in Australia. After some trial and error, I managed to watch “Astro Boy”, “Do you like Hitchcock”, and “Staffers”. I wasn’t able to access “Alf”, “The young and the restless”,”Star Treck”, “Beverley Hills 90210″, “MacGuyver”, “I dream of Jeannie”, “Dilbert” or “Bewitched”.

I would prefer if YouTube only exposed those videos that were actually available in Australia to us. What’s the point in pretending all this content is available, when it’s not? YouTube is no different in this respect to Hulu, which is virtually useless for an Australian.