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…)
A little bit strange at first, but then again very interesting – and very much inviting to watch it at least twice (which means exposure to this ad of at least 4×30 seconds).
A post at psfk pointed me to the fact that BBC 1 is doing a huge party in Dundee, Scotland, for real, and in Second Life, for virtual. They also pointed me to Wonderland who have some more detail on that party.
I myself stumbled upon that party just a few hours ago, however by accident. I tried Second Life for the first time today and tried to find places with lots of stuff happening.
Sofar, I noticed a lot of Casinos and places for „mature“ events, if you know what I mean. Having spent 2 hours in there, I could easily get the impression the whole place is a giant virtual red light district. On the other hand, I have seen a couple of places that look like good old suburbia, almost like Brookfield, Wisconsin, where I spent a year during a highschool exchange…
I saw many strange things in my first two hours in Second Life – may be I will open up a whole new blog category and write posts just on that.
But back to the topic: I noticed a lot of avatars spending their time at one single location, which turned out to be the BBC Site:
Now it looks rather empty, but when I first got there it was literally packed
I didn’t know at that time that this is a special event – instead I was quite impressed that the BBC does what I considered a sponsorship of a certain „party-location“.
Now, as I know the background, I am even more impressed: they take a real event online into a virtual world to let everyone outside Dundee, Scotland (i.e. everyone) take part in the event.
And they even get some advertising in there – at least some big circular billboards for artists that (I assume) they promote.
Wo ich sonst so bin...