How to Analyse Our Video Traffic

Talking to Kirk in class today he had come across a website which containted a lot of useful information on how to analyse your videos and what it is that you need to do to try and make them alot more popular.

Here is the information from the website:

Here is a link to the website: http://www.squidoo.com/youtube-super-star

Overview

Two scientists have recently collected and researched many months worth of statistics on millions of YouTube videos. They've discovered any video belongs to one of four categories based on the number of views. The two categories you're interested in are viral and quality.Once you understand how these categories work you can use this knowledge to your advantage and become a YouTube super star.

The essense

Videos on YouTube become popular because they get a lot of views. The total amount of views can be traced back to views per day. If you look at how these views per day evolve starting from the day you've posted your video you can estimate whether you video is viral or quality.

Once you get the hang of it you'll be able to hone in to the viral or quality 'effect' and actually trigger it for all your future videos.

What you'll need/who this is for

YouTube has the perfect tool for tracking the daily number of views your video gets. It's hidden behind the 'Insight' button on youtube.com/my_videos.Open the Insight panel of your most viewed video now. What you'll see is a graph showing a history of daily views. You'll work with this graph in the next steps.

Step 1: determine peak day

Look at the graph that shows the history of views per day (or just 'views') and try to determine the peak day. This is the day that has gotten the most views since the day your video was posted.You may find there are multiple peak days. If this is the case your video is neither viral nor quality. Check out the graph for you second most popular video.

Step 2: determine the category

Now that you've found peak day and you're sure there's only one you can determine the category your video belongs to. There are two important categories (I'm ignoring the two others because they tend not to generate a lot of views).

These two categories are:

•Viral or exogenous critical (EX-C): in this category videos rise to peak day very quickly. They rise anywhere from a few days to two week (rising in one day is not viral!).

•Quality or endogenous critical (EN-C): in this category videos rise to peak day slowly. They rise over the course of multiple weeks to months.Rising refers to the period starting with the day traffic starts to pick up to peak day. In this period each day or week gets more views than the day or week before up until peak day.

Note: if your video is still fresh peak day may not have happened yet! If your video has been posted more than one week ago and views are still rising you most likely have a quality or EN-C on your hands.

Congrats! However, in that case you won't be able to accurately predict how many views you'll gets.You can do the calculation but you have to remember that the actual number of views will be higher, probably much higher!

Step 3: calculate how many views your video will ge

tNow that you know if you video is viral or quality you're almost ready to calculated how many views you video will get starting from peak day.You only need to look up one more detail: the approximate number of views on peak day. You can find this on the Insight graph of your video. Try to be as specific as possible but don't hurt yourself.

Now click on this link and enter these variables:

•Peak day•
The number of views on peak day
•viral or quality

Click 'Calculate' and you'll know how many views your video will get starting from peak day. The number is an approximation, it can be off by as much as 20% in either direction. Still, it will give you an idea.

Final Reflection

The good thing about an online show is it's availablity, you can watch it whenever and wherever you are, thats the beauty of the internet and technology you can now watch videos on youtube from your iPods or you iPhones or your regular phones. From your games consoles, anything with video, audio and internet capabilties. That is how online shows differ from theatre and TV it's ready available for you to watch when you want. TV shows have now started to be put onto the internet to watch if you missed an episode etc but they're not all doing that yet. And people do upload recordings of being at a theatre onto youtube, but the quality just isn't as good as being there.

Because our show is online, we decided that we would market online. Instead of the traditional posters or leaflets or just gathering up people and telling them about it. Or using the method that TV does which is to have adverts, ok we couldn't have done that due to the fact we don't have the contacts or money but if we were in that area of business that is what we would have done. Instead we created groups/profiles on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. Once we created these pages we would then send invitations or links to our friends to gather up some population. Once our friends were connected to these pages, we would then publish comments about how our project is going or images and vidoes of everything. We would then put up links to our episodes on these pages. This is how we would get our viewers, through social networking sites. We did actualy put up a few posters around our college, we don't know if this gave us any audience or not.

Within the space of two weeks our first episode got 803 views which I think is quite alot actually, maybe we needed to add more tags to it for it to pop up in more common searches. So far for it we have gotten 15 comments on youtube, some are saying that they think it is good, others are saying what needs to be improved upon. We had recieved a very good piece of feedback from a website called Facepunch, this site is full of forums on all sorts of comments a guy in our group decided to open up a thread on that website. Some of the comments we recieved were irrelevant but we did recieve a few good meaty bits of feedback which were very useful to us. On our second episode we had recieved 300 views in just over a week and received 5 comments from the public on this. Our third episode got the most views (by views to time comparison) it has gotten 232 views in 6 days, and has recieved 4 comments.

The good thing about our webshow is we are able to receive feedback whilst we still are in the planning stage for the enxt episode, so anything we have been told that could be improved or change we have some time to reflect on it, like when we were told our script made no sense or wasn't as funny, were were able to quickly act on it and get a different person to try with the scripting. After being noted on our editing we were able to act on that and make sure we spend some more time on it and watch it through time and time again so we can check for things, little details we missed or continuity errors

Audience feedback questions

Here are a series of questions that Mike and Tara have come up with to ask a focus group about our web-series. I think that these are a great choice of questions. I can't wait to receive our feedback from the group.

What do you think of the concept of Lines?
(show first episode)
Overall, what did you think of the first episode? What were the strengths and weaknesses?
Did episode 1 make you feel like you wanted to carry on watching future episodes?
(show second episode)
What do you think is different from the first episode?
What did you think of the second episode? What were the strengths and weaknesses?
(show third episode)
Do you like how the story has progressed over the series?
What did you think of the third episode? What were the strengths and weaknesses?
What would you like to see in future episodes? Would you want a change of characters/different locations etc.
overall questions
What ways did the characters appeal to you, what did you like about them and the social groups they represented?
Do you think Lines was marketed well?
Are there any other ways you think we could promote the series of Lines? (not including facebook, myspace, twitter etc)
Would you look forward to an episode four?
Thank you for taking the time to come to this Q & A session, we welcome any further feedback you may have.

Focus Group

Here is the video of the focus group that Matt had edited, by the looks of everything it seemed to have gone very well.

Focus group questions

Here is a group of questions that Mike & Tara had come up with to ask the focus group:

Here are the questions that Mike and Tara came up with to ask a focus group on thursday
What do you think of the concept of Lines?
(show first episode)
Overall, what did you think of the first episode? What were the strengths and weaknesses?
Did episode 1 make you feel like you wanted to carry on watching future episodes?
(show second episode)
What do you think is different from the first episode?
What did you think of the second episode? What were the strengths and weaknesses?
(show third episode)
Do you like how the story has progressed over the series?
What did you think of the third episode? What were the strengths and weaknesses?
What would you like to see in future episodes? Would you want a change of characters/different locations etc.
overall questions
What ways did the characters appeal to you, what did you like about them and the social groups they represented?
Do you think Lines was marketed well?
Are there any other ways you think we could promote the series of Lines? (not including facebook, myspace, twitter etc)
Would you look forward to an episode four?
Thank you for taking the time to come to this Q & A session, we welcome any further feedback you may have.

Feedback From episode 2

Peer feedback
A couple of interesting shots
Strange narrative, cannot understand it (7 People mentioned this)
Cuts well
Characters work well
Sound levels are high & low (5 people mentioned this)
Taster bit / preview works well (3 people mentioned this)
Too much in one content in one episode (2 people mentioned this)
Good angles used
Jumps too much
Pointless shots used
Confusing genre (comedy or drama?)
Acting is not very good, could be better
Spy could of been done better, e.g appears in the room like is the skeleton
Silent moments ned sorting out
Need quicker cuts
Continuity works well
'Jaws' sound / music cuts in too suddenly & drops out to early



Teacher feedback (Pete)
Continuity with previous episode (costume, scripting) works well
Elliot's character has been developed well
Use of jaws music?
Suddenly goes silent
Much better editing than the 1st episode
Add footage, where it goes black / silent?
Like the taster for episode 3 at the end

Here is feedback that we had recieved from everyone in our class including ourselves and our teacher Pete.

Again people mentioned about the sound levels being a bit off. The main point that came up was that people are finding it hard to understand what is going on with the whole storyline. I think next time we need to try and think up of a better script, people had mentioned this about the first episode. The sound levels again are off, some ar elow some are high, need to always change the volume level of the computer/laptop to be able to enjoy the video.
People had said that the preview of the next episode was really good, and it helped them try to understand what is going to happen next

Episode 3