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Don’t Watch These Videos

Mar 15 2012

Whatever you do, don’t watch the Dollar Shave Club or Kony videos. If you’ve already seen them, forget about them and move on.  It’s just never going to happen. Your next video isn’t going viral, and guess what? That’s okay. We know it's tempting to think about – tomorrow morning you wake up and your video has 250,000 views, by the end of the week you have just shy of 3 million (Dollar Shave is at 3.4M). But let’s take an objective look at the numbers and see what our odds of pulling this off look like.

Don't watch this video, it will poison your mind:

YouTube reports that it has 800 million unique visitors per month who, combined, watch a total of 4 billion hours of video (or on average 3.75 hrs per visitor per month). Sounds good so far! But now let’s look at the competition for those 800 million pairs of eyes. How many other videos are on YouTube standing between us and our captive audience? Turns out, there are too many to count (and Google isn't telling) but conservative estimates put the number somewhere around 250 million (± 300 million).

What Google does share is that in addition to your lovingly crafted product demo video, there are another 60 hours of new video uploaded every minute to YouTube! Which means that if we only consider the new videos added this month there will be over 2.5 million hours added.  And if our average visitor is watching 3.75 hour in a month, the chances of him spending that time on your video are somewhere around 0.0001%. And all this assumes that your business video is at least as entertaining, engaging and shareable as the NBA highlights, music video parodies and animal tricks that it is competing against.

The conclusion: the odds are stacked heavily against our business videos getting more than a handful of views per day on YouTube. Yes, occasionally a video will go viral and give us false hope, but to focus our efforts on this elusive virality is equivalent to us spending our marketing budgets on Powerball tickets because there was a big winner two weeks ago.

No, instead of chasing the dream of an instant internet sensation, we are much better served spending time developing a video marketing strategy that focuses on how the thousands of visitors on our actual site are interacting with our videos. This isn’t as grand and sexy as the viral video splash, but it is much more likely to help us grow our businesses as we continue to hone our message to website visitors. And if we want to take it one step further, we should be using video promotion strategies (SEO, email integration, etc) to continue to drive more prospects to our site. This is video marketing strategy.  For 99.9% of companies, any time spent discussing viral video plans is only a distraction from the real video strategy work.

Also, definitely go watch the videos, because they're amazing, and you could probably learn a lot from their tactics. Just don't count on your videos going viral.

Ezra (11 Posts)

Director of Marketing


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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2012 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Video Rocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.demoduck.com Andrew Follett

    Great post! I think the idea of focusing on a video marketing strategy vs. a one-off viral sensation is a message a lot of companies small and large need to hear. That’s not to say you should avoid doing a video that is fun, interesting and potentially “viral”, but “going viral” shouldn’t be the end goal. How would you suggest companies approach creating a video marketing strategy?

  • Ezra

    Thanks Andrew. The right video marketing strategy is of course going to vary from business to business but the general approach we take here (and encourage others to try out) is to make content quickly, analyze how it performs and then iterate. We started with a very basic screencast explaining our product / key benefits and have over the last 4 years honed that message while also making a bigger investment in our videos.

    Of course, the key to that is having the right tools to measure how the videos are performing, but luckily we got a free Wistia account when we started the company!

  • http://www.livenetwrk.com Abey John

    I don’t fully agree.

    We need to constantly churn the idea mill for a connection that will evoke a large scale response. DSC is premised on a single idea: over priced shave tech. Kony: War sucks. Both those ideas have then been spun up with a strong script, arresting cinematography (yes even DSC – low tech production no doubt but classy editing), and honest button pushing that evokes the response.

    Granted. The typical business video is not going to do that. Yes, we need a video marketing strategy. Yes we should not hold our breath and cross fingers waiting on that one hit wonder that will change the game. But we should not forget to keep our minds open to the possibility of discovering that powerful idea that will tripwire the response.

  • Ezra

    I think that’s totally fair push-back Abey. The odds are stacked against a video going viral but that’s not to suggest that DSC and Kony got lucky. Both were well produced and as you point out, nail a key message that it is easy for lots of us to relate to. I wasn’t intending to take anything away from either with this post.

    And also totally agree that we should always continue to think big, because the fact that information/stories/video can spread globally in days is truly remarkable and powerful (both in the context of business and social issues).

    Things are clearly more nuanced than I laid out in the post — thanks for calling me out on it and for continuing the discussion!

  • http://www.wecapture.co.uk We Capture

    Hi.

    Fair point made by and large.

    I never ever try to sell “viral” to clients but there are certain formulas that we can work to (and do) that allow our clients the chance to leverage the YouTube phenomenon in the fact that it is the second largest search engine rather than that it has lots of relatively low value eyeballs in the main.

    As an internet marketeer and video producer, I wish it was all about creativity, authenticity, cheek and originality….

    But, in all honesty if someone wants to learn more about a product or service and your video is found on YouTube in front of others and is relevant, then that gives the client a chance of converting “floaters who are looking to buy” who perhaps are not aware about your product or service as it is in a crowded marketplace….job done as far as I am concerned, the question then is, how relevant is it? does it convert….etc.

    A mixture of high quality video production, and Video SEO goes a long way to capitalise on that and ensures the eyeballs are highly relevant when done well.

    That said I love Wistia products and also see a huge benefit in the analytical nature offered to Wisti hosted videos. Though video should, in my opinion, be hosted in a few areas and be part of a coherent mix.

  • Ezra

    Thanks for the comments Anthony. There are definitely ways to leverage YT more effectively than just hoping a video goes viral. And we often encourage clients to use YT in conjunction with Wistia because they have such different functions. We just don’t want marketers thinking that a video strategy starts and ends with a viral video on YT.

  • http://www.sitebeam.net David

    Getting 100 million views in 6 days clearly isn’t good for your sanity if you’ve seen Jason Russell going on a naked rampage and punching the ground with his fists!