Ryan MacMillan

Via Iain Tait’s Crackunit, I came across this on Asi Sharabi’s No Man’s Blog: YouTube trends report #1. It’s interesting research, but I’m not sure that it’s a trends report; I’d say it’s more of a snapshot at this stage. It’ll be interesting to see how subsequent reports expose trends, though.

I’m carrying out a little YouTube quant research of my own at the moment. Every day, at the same time, I grab the titles of the 20 most recent videos (I think there’s enough randomness in that for this to work). Then I count the views on them, and on all the videos titles I’ve collected to date.

By the end of the week, I’ll have 140 video titles in my sources list, and will have been tracking the first lot of videos for a week. I’ll continue to track the daily views on all the videos for a few more weeks before I start crunching any numbers.

What I expect to get is some sense of the life cycle of videos; perhaps being able to separate the ones that take off from the ones that don’t really go anywhere. I should be able to get some sense of what the average performance of a YouTube video is, right now.