YouTube by the Numbers
Tim Wintle of Rubberductions forwarded me a pointer to a new piece of research which analyses viewership for YouTube videos in the first month. Key findings:
In the first month on YouTube
- 70% of videos get at least 20 views
- 50% of videos get at least 100 views
- Fewer than 20% of videos get more than 500 views
- Fewer than 10% of videos get more than 1, 500 views
- 3% of videos get more than 25, 000 views
- Around 1% of videos get more than 500, 000 views
These numbers are described by the following chart:
I suppose the natural assumption is that the data follow Zipf's law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
Why don't they plot the data in a way that makes it easier to see whether the curve is Zipfian?
Posted by: Peter Turney | January 30, 2008 at 10:26 AM
You can use the Youtube API's to capture stats about your own films. http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/reference.html#VideoFeeds
Posted by: Flea Circus Director | January 30, 2008 at 10:40 AM
You're telling me that 1 out of every 100 videos uploaded to YouTube get 500k views in the first month on the site? I think something fishy is going on here.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | January 31, 2008 at 01:58 PM
Marshall - I think I would have to agree with you. Let me see if I can get an answer from Tim.
Posted by: Matthew Hurst | January 31, 2008 at 03:20 PM
Great Analysis!!
Posted by: Víctor Gil | February 04, 2008 at 04:17 PM