Understanding Viewer Dynamics on Breakout Videos
By Fred.Steve Woolf (the sometimes BTS half of the Epic-FU neé Jetset team) wrote this smart and insightful post on their record breaking 3,000,000+ episode on the smashface productions blog:
A couple of weeks ago an EPIC-FU episode was featured on the home page of YouTube thanks to the generous selection of their editors. We expected to get a nice amount of views, but we never expected the episode to move past 3 million views when all was said and done. In fact, the episode is still compiling about 10-20,000 views per day as of the time of this writing.
We’re obviously very happy that the show is resonating with the largest community of web video aficionados on the Internet. It’s gives us a great sense of validation to know that we created a weekly show that can generate those kinds of numbers. Not easy to do these days.
What was especially interesting to us was to watch this video run away from all the other videos that were featured on YouTube at the same time as us. No other video crossed the million mark during the week we were featured. I spent quite a lot of time thinking about why that happened to try and understand the dynamics that affect viewership on popular video hosting sites.
For one thing, we’ve been producing regular content for a year and a half with JETSET and now EPIC-FU. So to some extent we can call the built-in audience a factor in the video’s explosive views. But we didn’t have a significantly greater number of YouTube subscribers than many other shows that have been featured and did not experience such a high number of views.
Another possible factor is that we always place a frame strategically in the exact middle of the upload so that when YouTube generates its preview thumbnail, prospective viewers are given a sense of the tone and personality of the show when reviewing the myriad choices for them to watch. However this image is quite small, and some videos that typically experience large view numbers have scantily clad women or mainstream celebrities as their preview image. Our preview image of this video is shown at left.
Then there’s the title of the video: taking no sh1t, internet love song, writer’s guild. A very typical title for us since we cover so much ground in each episode. It’s somewhat provocative, but is definitely less so than many other videos.
Finally we come to the content of the video. We touched on a number of politically charged stories that engendered a great deal of discussion in the comments under the video. In particular we said some things about the Writer’s Guild of America strike that is currently taking place. These statements seemed to provoke a really strong reaction from many viewers on both sides of the issue. Given the timing of the strike and the topical nature of the commentary in our video, this seems to be a strong factor in people watching the video and then passing it along to their friends to see, which is the really important factor in generating huge view numbers.
So without getting more scientific about it, it seems like we had a combination of factors that led to the breakout number of views. Good title, solid preview image, passionate existing fanbase, and provocative content. This is the kind of formula we strive to have in every show so that when the opportunity comes along to be promoted on a place like the YouTube home page, we are able to take maximum advantage of that exposure.
Are there any other major factors that I’ve missed? Why do you think this video has 4X the number of views of any other EPIC-FU video on YouTube?
Super Steve Woolf
