Tuesday, September 04, 2007

YouTube Metrics and The 2008 Presidential Race




I’m writing this blog post to answer a question posed by Micha Sifry over at TechPresident and also to clear some glaring errors in what was an otherwise interesting article.

Sifry write that she’s “thinking out loud about YouTube metrics, but doesn’t include all of the metrics. Sifry wants to know if there’s a relationship between the number of YouTube subscribers and viewership. The answer is it’s more complicated than that. But before I explain why, I need to clean up these problems in Sifry’s article.

Take a look at this. This article was written on August 16th 2007. This is August 29, 2007. Sifry states that “John Edwards' (You Tube) numbers are somewhat higher than the other leading Democratic candidates because his campaign is using YouTube as the player for videos on his own site, while Obama uses Brightcove and Clinton uses an in-house tool.”

Really?

I wonder which numbers Sifry was looking at?

I created a table that compares the YouTube statistical numbers for the Democratic Candidates with those of the Internet’s top Republican Challenger Ron Paul. Now keep in mind I’m pulling these numbers straight from the channel pages of each candidate’s YouTube page.

Let’s look at the results.

The leader in this area by a massive margin is Senator Obama, who has 11 million channel views. As you can see, the closes follower isn’t that close at all.

Now from this, we should expect Barack Obama’s video views to be so far ahead of everyone else’s that there’s no comparison. Indeed, a look at my own channel statistics, which you can’t see, but I can from my account, shows my overall video views to be ahead of my channel views.

But when I use TubeMogul, the best evaluator and recorder of online video traffic ever constructed, we get results that imply fewer video views than the 11 million subscribers. But here’s the problem – and I think it’s one that Sifry had – but did not see – in looking at YouTube Metrics using TubeMogul. TubeMogul only captures a date range going back six months; Senator Obama’s YouTube channel was established almost one year ago. So while we can’t see Senator Obama’s account to learn how many video views he has, I can safely say that the video views do outpace the channel views.

One major reason for this is something not properly recorded by YouTube – it’s called the embed code. It allows you to install someone’s video on your blog or website. The trouble us, YouTube only records links, not embeds, in video stats.

So an Obama video can be set and then played and replayed and there would be no record of the embed, but high video view stats, higher even than channel views.

On top of all that, Obama has more videos posted on YouTube than many candidates. Ron Paul, the overall view leader, has just 44 videos on his channel. Considering Paul’s popularity, he’s not got enough videos out there to take advantage of it. His view numbers should be far higher than they are, and they would be with 100 more videos.

Finally, it’s very important for candidates to take YouTube even more seriously than they do. It commands 60 percent of the video distribution market share, and the next closest competitor MySpace Videos only has 16 percent of the market, and then Google Video (which really doesn’t count here) has 8 percent. Plus, there are about 70 YouTube-type companies, which makes challenging YouTube’s market share almost impossible (here that NBC!?)

The lesson here is three-fold – first the relationship between YouTube subscribers is more complicated than it seems, second, TubeMogul can only capture part of the picture, not the whole, and third that people do see the candidate message on YouTube, and given the shift in YouTube’s demographics to an older audience and for no other reason than the mainstreaming of YouTube, an audience more likely to vote in the 2008 Presidential Race.

6 comments:

  1. Hi Zennie,

    That's an interesting analysis. Since you seem to be taking this seriously, would you mind reading and commenting on this article from techPresident that deals with Obama's channel views?

    http://techpresident.com/node/193

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  2. Hi,

    Actually, I do refer to Sifry as a "he" in the video. I say "his."

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  3. Hi Zennie,
    Interesting analysis - I'm glad you put the spotlight on viewership analytics, as you show that the numbers can be misrepresented. However, you're a little off on the analysis. TubeMogul views and those noted on TechPresident are not just from the last 6 months - they are from all time on any videos that are currently in a publisher's channel.
    TubeMogul counts views from a bottom up methodology - every video is summed to arrive at the cumulative views. So you can arrive at Obama's 3.1M views if you add up all the views for all of his videos. In this way, we can analyze what makes up every component of Obama's total viewership through TubeMogul. "Channel views" can be deceiving, as there is no way to know the composition of this number, and there is no way to check the accuracy.
    I'm happy to discuss with you further.
    Best regards,
    Mark Rotblat
    TubeMogul, Inc.
    mark at tubemogul

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  4. Hi Mark,

    I'd like to see this, because I can't go back and see how each Obama video did in 2006 with TubeMogul. In other words, it doesn't seem to sum the videos if they were seen for say, one month one year ago, but are still in the system.

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  5. Good point - you cannot drill down to the videos performance prior to the date tracking started in TubeMogul. However, the cumulative total does count these videos. So if the start date of tracking was 3/1/07 and Obama had 20 videos prior to that date with a total of 1M views, you wouldn't be able to see how the 1M was broken out among those 20 videos until after 3/1. However, the 1M views would be incorporated into Obama's cumulative figure.

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