May 22, 2006

Numbers of involvement via YouTube

By Roland Hachmann in Digital Culture | 0 comments

I just followed a link from the Church of the Customer Blog to a movie on YouTube, which is currently highly popular. It had 9 million views on Friday, when the post was written - now it has 12 million. That is an amazingly quick growing number, if anything. But looking at the rest of the numbers, I started thinking about the numbers of participation.

The video has been viewed 12 Million times.
18245 people put it into their favourites, i.e. found it somewhat remarkable
9340 people bothered to rate it, i.e. even forming an opinion on it
2566 people even went through the effort of writing a comment (and some are just very short!)

These are amazing figures. The number of views in general, but also the number of comments. Heck, it’s a video about a guy doing dance moves to songs of about 20 years of pop&rock history - everyone will have done or seen a couple of these! In theory, there could be 12 million comments.

But of course, there are not that many. Because for any given subject, you will have a small, active audience, and a large, passive audience.

Hence this is one way of getting guestimates of “response rates” on the web. Other than just responses via comments - because these always existed on many different sites.
I can’t think of too many other sites, where stats on viewings and following responses (favourites, ratings) are that readily available.

In this case, only 0,022% of the 12 million felt like leaving a comment. Nevermind the fact that there are almost 2600 comments for that one post, which is a huge number, the participation is relatively minimal. Or so it seems at first. But maybe this is just a very “normal” number?

(Mind you, if we speak in marketing terms: there isn’t an offer nor an incentive attached to participating…)

For your bookmarks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.