So I got up this morning, fired up Techmeme to see what was happening in tech and on top was this blog post from online video tracking company Visible Measures featuring a home-brew list of the 18 most watched viral videos of all time.
It’s important to note that the video measurement startup didn’t simply analyze which videos got this total number of views on the 150+ video sharing sites it currently tracks, but also took into account views that were generated on other online properties where the videos were spread, like blogs and social networking services (a measurement method it refers to as True Reach).
I won’t bore you with the full list of very viral videos – check out the Visible Measures blog post to see who’s currently on top etc. – but there is a general observation I’d like to share and discuss with you.
Here’s what the company concludes after featuring the list:
As you can see, the list is a diverse collection of older and newer campaigns, and includes music videos, movie trailers, user-generated spots, and clips from TV shows. What they all have in common is a massive total audience.
I wouldn’t call it that diverse, actually. If you break the list down, you’ll note that it counts 8 music videos, 4 movie trailers, 2 TV show clips, and 4 user-generated clips. So out of the 18 online videos that amassed over 100,000,000 views according to Visible Measures, 14 are professionally produced videos that were arguably created for airing on television primarily, and certainly not specifically for online video sharing sites.
Furthermore, if you break down the list of 4 clips that were classified under ‘User Generated’, two of them are actually professional artist performances that were simply recorded and/or uploaded by a regular YouTube user (“Jeff Dunham: Achmed the Dead Terrorist” and “The Evolution of Dance”). Another one (“Lezberado: Revenge Fantasies”) features a woman talking about a professionally produced TV show (The L Word), and the video that Visible Measures links to on YouTube is actually one from the official channel of Showtime, where The L Word was aired on from 2004 to 2009.
So if you really want to be a pain about it, the only real user-generated video that was viewed over 100 million times would be “Charlie bit my finger – again!”, a video featuring two cute kids that funnily enough I had never seen before.
This isn’t abnormal, of course: mainstream media are called mainstream for a reason, just as celebrities are celebrities for a reason (well, most of the time) and popular music artists, TV series and movies are popular for a reason (well, most of the time). You’d have to be pretty naive to think YouTube (or any web service originally meant for amateurs to share videos on) isn’t always going to be used to massively spread professional music videos, movie trailers and clips from and about popular TV shows, and that they’ll overtake most if not all videos about dogs riding skateboards and whatnot.
This isn’t to say user-generated (amateur) content doesn’t have any value – it always does for at least one person – and could never be on par with professionally produced content, but looking at the list you’ve got to wonder whether we’re not all mostly craving for the latter on whichever medium we’re using at the moment we’re in the mood for it.
Your thoughts?
it is has 2g1c?
User generated media producers will successfully compete against the entrenched video production houses when distributed video production services are accessible to any user/producer with a net connection. This represents an opportunity for sand hill angels to develop a start up that combines the services of a traditional talent agency with the production capacity enabling video content to be produced from anywhere.
What I’m describing here is an ebay for video production talent enabling actors, writers, directors and editors to be auditioned and hired online by independent user/producers using a web browser to create high quality video content from anywhere.
@BetterBadNews, what are you talking about?? And, yes – where’s 2G1C?
where is two girls one cup ?
Thank God you are posting on Sunday.
Why’s that?
because i am usually bored on Sundays with TC not posting enough, and where I live the week starts on Sunday. anyway enjoy the weekend guys.
Mr Wauters,
I partially disagree with your conclusion, or rather the way in which you arrived at your conclusion. Isn’t it ironic that big name movie studios, record labels and TV now depend on a user generated social media platform to broaden the reach of their studio produced videos.
Doesn’t it speak volumes that Universal, Sony, Warner Brothers and Disney now consider it a coup when millions of YouTubers watch illegally uploaded or officially sanctioned snippets of their content?
For the most part, it’s safe to assume that the people who watched the videos on the list arrived at the content in a fairly straightforward manner, by typing the name of the song, movie, etc. into the search field because they were already fans, heard it on the radio, etc. Also, I would hazard a guess that movie videos have a much higher views per user rate than other types of content.
With the exception of “Charlie Bit My Finger… Again” and partially “Lezberado: Revenge Fantasies”, do any of these videos have any true viral element to them? Why are they called
“The Most Watched Viral Videos of All-Time?”
You say that previously you had never seen “Charlie Bit My Finger… Again”, well,
neither had I until 3 days ago. But guess what, I don’t think very many of the hundreds of thousands of people who have seen it multiple times got to it by typing “Charlie +finger” into a search box.
Sean Murphy
I wouldn’t call the big producers moving to social media platforms ironic, but rather natural (and long overdue).
You make a strong point about the viralness of videos vs. natural search traffic for music etc. I’ll get in touch with Visible Measure to see if they can offer more insight about that.
Great point there Sean, I totally agree with you. If we’re measuring the *viral* success of the videos, this list is not really relevant.
The reasons are most likely wide-ranging and great in number. But other than the production quality, I’d have to point to what’s driving users to go find those videos.
Take the songs, for example. If you’re looking at that music video on youtube, there’s about a 99% chance you heard the song on the radio or saw the video on TV or whatever, and that drove you to find it on youtube later on. Whereas, with amateur-generated content, the only medium through which you’d hear about it is the internet.
I think there are two maxims here that should be noted by everyone in the industry: 1.) professionals create (when they’re so inclined) good quality videos – they have the budget, it’s what they do; and 2.) users are great at sharing what they like. I think the quicker the industry acknowledges this, and more importantly goes with it, the better for everyone.
Well you know what this means, right? Someone’s going to create a video sharing service for “regular people” free from the mainstream crap. Sort of an indie service.
It’ll catch on with three people.
The technology they use to measure the reach should be pretty interesting. I am sure that it can be used for other purposes such as targeted ads since it probably computes some sort of hash to detect that it’s the same video on other services.
I also agree with Radio Matthew the two shouldn’t have to compete head to head and I think even the audiences are different from one another.
Hatim
That’s weird. Outside of the half-blood prince and souja boy, I haven’t seen many of those.
This post is so 90’s.. did you forget about the long tail? That’s the whole point of web 2.0, isn’t it? you have 1,000 companies creating professional content, and 100,000,000 people generating their own content. Who’s the winner (in terms of view count) here?
Not sure if Visible Measures can aggregate their stats on that dimension, but it would be interesting to know.
It’s not about winning or losing, nor is it about the long tail or user-generated content per se – the list is about which videos spread most i.e. professionally produced content.
Wow. you’re up late
Unless I’m in Central Europe, where’s it’s currently 2 PM
haha. you win!
I guess, i’m the only one up at this late hour
I agree with SolarplaneZ that the Long Tail is the more important factor here… Robin you say:
“It’s not about winning or losing, nor is it about the long tail or user-generated content per se – the list is about which videos spread most i.e. professionally produced content.”
I guess you mean that your article is about what you say you want it to be about… ok. – Sure the top 18 videos were overwhelmingly made up of professionally produced content (which got the highest individual views per video) …but the clear implication, is that you think that proves something, and my guess is that the conclusion drawn is that viewers prefer this content over UGC. Trouble is that in the bigger scheme of things, I don’t think that inference/conclusion really means anything.
i.e. Its a result that is hardly surprising, because this is a snap-shot in a continuum that represents a disruptive-scenario to TV and Broadcast media generally. As such, its natural for these 18 articles of “professionally produced content” to be at the top of the Power-Law distribution, and for the ‘not-good-enough’ content to be the hot-bed of disruption. (This is text-book disruptive-theory) …and let’s not forget that on YouTube alone that leaves approximately 142,499,982 others videos uploaded. (ref: http://tinyurl.com/6mvamr)
If the story is about: “See! Professionally Produced Content kills UGC! then its all too easy to justify why those 18 videos could not in fact be just pushed back into a 1.0 type channel…
The actual reality is that as you go down the Power-Law curve the % of UGC would increase, and perhaps % of views of UGC vs Prof-content per user would reveal a more meaty story… This is why the story of 18 top videos is not as interesting as the long-tail story. Because ultimately if there wasn’t a long-tail UGC revolution (that also gives rise to far less complex copyright issues as well) then there would not be a ‘video-sharing-site’ story being discussed on Tech Crunch at all.
I figure the 2 girls 1 cup comment was joking, but there is one notable absence from this list, which is Never Gonna Give You Up. Again, this is a music video, but its absence from the list calls into serious question (IMHO) the validity of Visible Measures’ methodology.
2G1C is *not* a joke
interesting from a ‘what video got watched most’ popularity contest perspective, i suppose. however, unless you’re embedding advertising into video itself (e.g., a coke can on a desk), the metric – from a perspective of what makes the most money – may be off. If we listed all videos watched at least 1000 times, the number of UGC videos would likely dwarf the number of professionally produced videos. Pitting the UGC video count (i.e., number of UGC videos multiplied by 1000) against the Pro video count (i.e., the number of professional videos multiplied by 1000) would, IMHO, crown decisively the UGC video counters. Why is this important? Because a person is not single faceted when it comes to interests. However, a product is. A product does not, obviously, morph. So, the coca-colas of the world want to know enough about the average coke drinker so that coke can place its banner ad or pre-roll, mid-roll or post-roll video ad into ANY video (not just the popular ones). This is a long way of saying, (i) I need coffee, and (ii) not a surprise that the most popular videos are the most popular ones on the most popular media (music and television). Nonetheless, as a member of big media, it is at least a good sign that our media is not dinosaur bound.
Not surprising that New Media often ends up being an adjunct channel for Old Media — they’ve got the reach to generate/promote “tipping points” for items that otherwise would drown in the sea of noise online.
Gratuitous self-promoting blog link: http://www.ratd...nd-philistines/
“Home brewn”… who teached you that?
Ugh, fixed. thx
Robin,
A disturbing take on “Charlie Bit Me”. NWS
http://www.brea...unny-spoof.html
I laughed
are the total views of these videos 100,000,000 (one hundred million) or 1000,000,000 (one thousand million)?
One hundred million. No video, as far as we can tell, has ever exceeded 1 billion views across the major video sharing destination sites.
Nothing beats “Benny Lava” by buffalax. Google it.
and yea, it’s the first video in Google search result….
I do think this is abit stupid.
Firstly most videos people are brought to because they read about it or heard it in mainstream media ie newspaper, tv, radio.
Then in terms of numbers its so wrong. If we take a song like beyonce “put your hands up” how many different video copies of the same song are on youtube along then you have covers etc.
http://tinyurl.com/c7e7rk
New personal Super Computer
Nvidia :Tesla
Hahah the charlie one is my favorite, nice to see at least one good user generated video up there!
Well Google Me News. One million views .
http://www.googlemenews.com
Since when do technos work sundays
where is the rick roll?
I hadn’t seen that Charlie Bit My Finger video either, but that was one of the stupidest YouTube videos I’ve ever seen. How on Earth did it get so many views?
This article would be less depressing if I didn’t totally agree with it. Darn you Robin. Darn you all to heck!
Visible Measure’s product does not work at all. You’re going to tell me Rick Astley’s video isn’t on this list? My 70 year old mother in India knows about that video.
Thanks for the constructive feedback!
With that said, our system has identified a few additional candidates for the 100 million views list. We’re verifying the results now and hope to have an update out early next week.
Wouldn’t it be more interesting to see what % of all the viral videos ever viewed were profession versus user generated? It is no surprise that most of the “blockbusters” are professional. User generated is more about serving the long tail.
i wonder why no one mention lonelygirl15. its stupid, by the point is, shes popular too.
That the 18 most viewed videos are professionally created does not suggest that pros beat amateurs.
that list is bogus; i don’t even see the best video of all time on there
http://www.yout...h?v=gEdJdGlUmbc
flawed since it don’t has a reference to the two yet undisputed champions of viral videos: Star Wars Kid and Numa Numa guy that are in the 500+ million views.
Yeah, no kidding. The Star Wars kid is missing for sure. What about the Dramatic Prairie Dog? One thing that isn’t not being considered by VM is that a popular video gets copied and changed hundreds of times. Look at how many Dramatic Prairie Dog spoofs there are….I think this study is bogus because people aren’t going to spoof something from the Main Stream Media like they will user generated stuff.