--- In [email protected], "David" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Mike M. is correct that YT has only landed a first punch. And it may > be a big showy punch with no power behind it. The YT statistics > appear to be cooked in at least a couple of ways.
I agree. I just started researching how these YT channels do the numbers they do, and it's my [currently uneducated] opinion that it's the social/group/clique overlapping amongst other things that you state in your post that create these posts with outrageous numbers of hits. > In navigating > around YT one often manages to "watch" videos twice by accident by > going back in the navigation. Kids put their videos online and > refresh refresh refresh to get to the top of the most watched lists. > It's so bad that there are videos "outing" egregious perpetrators and > demonstrating the effectiveness of the technique. Uh-huh. I saw Paul's video about that: <http://pjkproductions.blogspot.com/2007/02/cheating.html>. The same thing happens in video games. People make two accounts and then play against themselves online and always beat themselves and make it look like they actually have some skills at the game. YT is a popularity game, so it makes sense for them to juke the stats. > It seems that > there are many aspects of the YT wayfinding experience designed to > generate lots of accidental views and crank up the numbers. In > addition, the network effects on YT are enormous. If your video > bubbles up to a spot where people will see it -- like most viewed of > the day or week list -- it will go on garnering many many more hits > while often better videos languish. Absolutely. That's the reason to juke the stats, initially. The more views you have, the more likely it is that you're going to be featured somewhere. As soon as you make it to a page that a lot of people are going to see, the snowball keeps rolling downhill, and you get even more hits. That's why researching what makes popular YT videos so popular is a dead end, because there's no common factor except that all of these videos exist within an environment where there's incentive for people to solicit views, view other people's videos and respond to them based on alliances, juke their own stats and those of their friends to get back into the public eye and replicate the movie "Jackass". > As a result, it's doubtful that > even YT with its huge numbers can deliver a real audience. I agree, if by "real", you mean an audience outside the closed environment that responde with the same numbers. First of all, YouTube shows hits by anyone, not unique visitors. If you have five friends and they reload your video 100 times each, you look more popular than the person who attracted 1 view each from 200 different people. There's no way to prove that these videos are getting more viewers and maintaining their interest while attracting more users. Also, you're right about the way they set up autoplay. If you go from one video to another, and they change your list on the side, if you want to get back to the list you had, you have to hit the back button, which reloads the video you already watched. You don't watch it because you only returned to find the link you were looking for, but they still get credit for it. On top of that, YouTube's method of "featuring" videos skews the results. Look what happened when they put Josh Leo's tax video on the front page. He got something like 300,000 views! :D It was pointed out that a lot of the comments posted about that video were from hecklers, so YT videos benefit from people hating on them as much as they benefit from people liking them... if not more. > I've only done a cursory examination, but what I saw suggested a kind of a > Brownian free for all that looks like a fair extension of the > behavior of the dogs-on-skateboards and teenie boppers shaking their > asses crowd. I checked the stats on some of the "other" videos made > by the people with the most viewed videos. Those "other" videos > which are no worse than the "most watched" videos and made by the > same people have a tiny number of views, suggesting that even having > a hugely popular video - in the multiple millions of views -- cannot > deliver even a fraction of that "audience" to your next effort. Absolutely not. It all depends on who gets featured, and who piggybacks on someone else's popular video with a video response. On top of that, you have no idea how they're actually getting their hits. If they send out bulletins on MySpace that open up to an auto-playing video, they get hits from people that were only trying to find out what was going on. That's not to say that there aren't some very popular "channels" on YT with thousands of subscribers. The question is how did they get those subscribers, and do any of their numbers translate to "the real world" outside of YouTube? Can you really take a couple of idiots that jump off of stoops head-first and roll themselves down hills in garbage cans, make a series out of their videos, sell advertisement on them and pull in YouTube-ish numbers of hits without the social redundancies of a closed environment? > Some > of my less watched episodes have more views than the less watched > productions of people with a video with millions and millions of > views. All of this suggests chaos, randomness, luck, timing and a > total lack of a cohesive consumer behavior. It suggests a million > kids with a footprint that looks like multiple millions of kids > viewing videos that are in front of their faces because those videos > at the top of the wayfinding experience. It suggests browsing more > than searching and much more than seeking out and following specific > artists. It suggests kids (and a few interested adults) sneaking a > couple of YT vids into their day before mom calls them to dinner. And the response to that is to attempt to serialize and monetize viral video. The goal being to constantly create videos that have "oooh, you've GOT to check THIS out!" appeal. You can either take the time and effort to make something you consider decent or try to come up with someone slipping on a banana peel every week or falling off of a skateboard. Without accurate stats on who's watching, why they watched it and whether they watched it again, there's no proving what the formula is or replicating it without the same social incentives and "videos in front of their faces" being implemented. > YT is a website where any cute girl under 25 who appears to be not full > of herself is valued, dogs on skateboards are endlessly fascinating, > lighting your farts on fire is high art, and most things displaying > sentential logic or thought requiring more than 20 seconds of > attention are doomed. YouTube is a big bloated chimera. > > -David The YT stats are clearly bogus and prove nothing... Especially not talent. Unfortunately, since they got bought out, everyone wants to know how they can be the next ones to sell out, too. :) Make videos fast and cheap and get as many viral eyeballs on it as you can. Even better, set it up so that the users create the content for you and your TOS allow you to do whatever you want with their content without paying them one thin dime. :D The rigid control of MSM has been traded in for the numbers game and attempting to track and quantify ADD patients as they randomly click buttons on the internet showing the prettiest girl or the dumbest guy. Meet the new boss. -- Bill C. http://ReelSolid.TV
