It may be a 500-channel television universe but when it comes to what people are watching, it's increasingly videos, particularly YouTube videos. A lot of this activity is being fueled by bloggers who are embedding videos in their posts, or including links.
At Sysomos, we wanted to get a better idea of what the blogosphere was doing with YouTube videos so we analyzed 2.5 million unique YouTube videos that had been embedded into blog posts or featured links between July and December, 2009.
Among the things we discovered is that:
- There's no correlation between a video's rating and how many times it's viewed. The highest rated videos, which received a four or five stars, were less popular than videos with two or three stars.
- Young bloggers (20-to-35-years-old) are, by far, the most enthusiastic about embedding or linking to videos, accounting for 57% of total activity.
- Music videos are the most popular, accounting 31% of all analyzed videos, followed by entertainment (15%) and people and blogs (11%).
- The average number of views for the YouTube videos that we analyzed is 99,160.
Here's a few graphs that provide more information about how bloggers's use YouTube videos:
Top Categories by Blog Authority
This chart shows a blogger's authority score, and the kind of videos they embed or link to. Low authority bloggers are more interested in music videos, while high-authority bloggers prefer news and politics.
Demographics
By far, 20-to-35-year-old bloggers are the most enthusiastic about embedding and linking to videos (57.3%). Teenage bloggers (13-19) and those in the 36-to-60-year demographic group account for about 20% each, while bloggers who are more than 60-years-old account for just 1.4%.
When looking at the top categories for each age group, we discovered that older bloggers have a higher interest in the news and politics category, while younger bloggers link to only 5% of news and political videos.
Video Statistics
We also analyzed YouTube videos in terms of length and engagement metrics such as ratings, the number of times they were favorites, the number of views, and the number of comments. The average video is 4 minutes and 12 seconds, and has a rating close to four with 179 comments. Music and sports videos have the highest number of views.
Popular Topics
The chart below shows the most popular topics in videos from North American users. The most popular items include Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, global warming, weight loss and tea party.
You can read the complete report at http://www.sysomos.com/reports/youtube/ for more detailed statistics, as well as view the list of top videos.
