From TubeMogul:
About a month ago, we launched a “Top 40″ list of the users getting the most views from videos deployed by us (an admittedly biased list, but an interesting one). We will be releasing an updated list shortly, but it’s worth pondering: what is the key to their success? Great content, for one. An additional insight came after we released our recent research on “Online Video’s Short Shelf Life.” A blogger savvily pointed out that most successful content creators already understood that online video fans have a short attention span, and thus put out a high quantity of videos.
Curious if that was actually the case, I tested it using our Top 40 list, and found it to be largely true. In the month of June, Chris Pirillo (#2 on our list), deployed 803 videos. Similarly, WatchMojo.com (#6) put out about 691. Further on down the list, Vlaze media (#35), put out a decidedly humbler 74 videos, and Sony (#40) deployed 32–and so on.
The data shows the brilliance of this. Since average online video viewership tends to peak on day three, putting out videos often allows producers to constantly ride the highest point of the wave. While individual videos rise and fall fast, a given producer can always have a steady audience.
Web video publishers need to balance quantity with quality if they want to be relevant, let alone scale, online. The pro of operating in a hyper-syndication world is that audiences might be splintered and fragmented, but you can reach them on those places if you have an effective distribution strategy. The con of it, frankly, is that it’s nearly impossible to stand out from the clutter.
When people question our strategy of publishing so much content (5,000 videos, 100 new each month), the analogy I use is this:
- Think of the Web as a massive college building… seemingly with no end in sight, as one classroom leads to another, and another, and another.
- Think then of the online video ecosystem as a huge classroom with a number of desks…
- With each online video aggregator (such as YouTube, MySpace TV, Veoh, DailyMotion, Metacafe, etc.) representing a desk. While those desks share some similarities, they are all, in fact, independent and stand alone islands. It’s not, after all, like YouTube links to the same video - or for that matter, related videos - on another site…
- On each desk you find stacks of paper on it, lots of them, with each stack representing:
* categories
* subcategories
* keywords- Each video is represented by a sheet of paper…
What do you represent? You’re a you-know-what disturber shooting spit balls on as many desks and stacks as possible. What services like Tubemogul do is help you get those spit balls on as many targets at once… but that’s just one small part of the equation. Why?
Ironically, while online video content is broadband content and dynamic in nature, currently SEO is utterly ineffective with video (relative to text content), so no one can really see through the sheets of paper, let alone see what’s on each desk.
Individually, no matter how great the content (quality) on each sheet of paper, they get lost in a sea of pulp and paper…
The only way to get your sheet seen by users - who might be landlocked to one desk (by having signed up on that site) - is to ensure that your sheets of paper fall on as many:
a) stacks, and
b) desks,
as frequently as possible… why?
In between the time you upload two videos… there’s a whole lot of papers landing on your sheet after yours has landed… making yours disappear from the top and rendering it nearly invisible to the human eye.
In other words, content companies that can’t scale syndication - and production - will find themselves irrelevant before long.
However, this opens up a new question, which is: is there such a thing as diminishing returns with marginal distribution?
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