Visible Measures Blog

No, not that kind of race! In the race to attract the largest online video viewing audience, Usain Bolt dug deep for a stunning late surge, blowing past the heavily favored Michael Phelps in the last few days of the 2008 Olympic games. By the time the dust settled, Bolt cruised to victory, surpassing an astonishing 10.5 million aggregated views to Phelps' against-anyone-else-this-would-have-taken-the-gold 8.3 million views.

What's most impressive about Bolt's viral viewing victory is that he was a virtual unknown when the Olympics opened. Indeed, Visible Measures was able to identify just 32 video clips related to Bolt that had accumulated less than 650,000 views. By comparison, at the same point, Michael Phelps was already well on his way to becoming a viral video star, with 92 placements and nearly 1.9 million views.

However, by the time the closing ceremonies had rolled around, Phelps had won an unprecedented 8 gold medals and Usain Bolt had not only crushed the field in three of the premiere sprinting events, he did so while setting three world records and crossing the finishing line in, er, style. And the Internet video audience had a chance to vote with its mouse, propelling household-name Michael Phelps to impressive 341% video growth.

But he was no match for the newcomer Usain Bolt, who's viral viewing audience ticked up sharply with each race he won. By the time of the closing ceremonies, Usain Bolt's online viewing audience had shot up 1,540%. The fastest man on earth indeed.

Source: Visible Measures Viral Reach Database

And that's the power of viral video, which is defined by this type of consumption: audiences around the globe can now see their favorite athletes in action again and again, enabling them to send spectacular moments to friends, empowering them to embed world-record-breaking races on their blogs, and more.

This data was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 95+ million Internet videos from 100+ video-sharing destinations. Check out our Viral Reach Database section to learn more.

As you might imagine, we're looking at some other interesting Olympic comparisons and would love to know what you think. As always, comments are encouraged!

Watch as Visible Measures CEO and co-founder Brian Shin talks about our audience engagement and True Reach™ metrics at the AlwaysOn & STVP Summit at Stanford, honoring the AO Global 250 Winners. Visible Measures was selected for the award by the AlwaysOn editorial team in July.

We’ve been discovering all sorts of cool things living in online videos lately. First there was initial attention (also known as initial abandonment), a phenomenon where about 30% of the audience stops watching online videos in the first 10% of playback. This was exciting stuff for us -- yes, we’re excited easily -- but this was only the beginning.

As we moved past initial attention and tracked the progress of viewers throughout the rest of the videos, we expected to see a gradual erosion of interaction as people lost interest. We expected the graph to be a steady downward slope.

But this isn’t what happened.

Instead, we found an unexpected spike of abandonment at the very end of most videos and have termed this concluding abandonment. Our preliminary analysis shows that, in general, more than 20% of the viewers who make it deep into any given video wind up abandoning the stream before it completes (i.e. reaches 100% play through). In other words, roughly 1 in 5 viewers click away right before the video ends.

And like initial attention, we see a wide divergence in concluding abandonment between different types of content. Music videos, sports highlights, and news clips each keep their audiences engaged throughout the video at variable rates. It turns out that the end is no different.

While concluding abandonment is an interesting and unexpected discovery, the more we talk it over with our customers and partners, the more it makes sense... videos tend to have a well-defined ending, viewers can see it coming, and once it's clear the clip is winding town, many viewers immediately move on.

Concluding abandonment reinforces the idea that Internet video is a lean-forward experience... throughout the entire video. Regardless of where viewers are, how much they’ve seen, they’re ready to hit the eject button the moment they lose interest. Even two seconds from the end! It turns out that concluding abandonment is just another consequence of this media consumption behavior. Cool.

As we’ve found, and as initial attention and concluding abandonment has shown us, it’s not enough to get people to merely start the video. This has significant implications for content licensing and ad impression counting models that are predicated on 100% play-through measures.

At Visible Measures, we’ve seen that linear play-through of a video -- watching a video from start to finish -- appears to be the exception, not the norm. This makes understanding where viewers drop off -- where ever they drop off -- essential for video publishers and video advertisers alike.

Matt

Last week, we unveiled a new section of our Web site, which explores the enabling technologies behind our complete measurement solutions. I wrote about two of those sections last week, our Video Placement Multiplier and Viral Reach Database. Today, I’ll round out the trio and cover our Video Metrics Engine technology.

The Video Metrics Engine comprises a range of capabilities for measuring how your online audience engages with your Internet video content. Technically, the Video Metrics Engine is a computational grid that receives, processes, and stores information on millions of video streams every day. It’s fed by our publishing partners’ video players, each of which is instrumented with our tracking code that captures every interaction from every viewer in every video. This information is transmitted to the Video Metrics Engine and is aggregated, processed, and loaded into our distributed data warehouse. Once the video player data reaches our data warehouse, our clients can explore it using our Web-based dashboard.

Oh yeah, all of this happens in real-time and at ‘Internet scale’ – across millions and millions of videos. Not surprisingly, the Video Metrics Engine is a state-of-the-art grid, designed to scale out as the universe of videos expands. Accurately describing this can be buzzword-heavy: on the hardware side, we've constructed a shared-nothing infrastructure using multi-core processors, gigabytes of memory, and multiple disks with terabytes of space per node. On the software side, we use parallel processing and distributed data storage to efficiently collect, access, and retain data. The system is scalable, failure resistant, and highly available. Fun stuff, particularly for our technical team.

Our Video Metrics Engine has been with us from the very beginning of the company, and has grown in capability and capacity as we’ve engaged with our customers. In order to produce Internet video audience behavior in its entirety – as it happens – we needed to create the capacity to cost-effectively process all of the data associated with an expansive video sharing network or an exponentially growing viewing audience.

Now that the Video Metrics Engine is deployed, operational, and growing every day, we’re applying it to uncover some of the fundamental truths of how online viewers interact with Internet video content. The fact that lunch time is one of the most popular times for watching online video didn’t come as a huge surprise. The phenomenon of not just initial attention but concluding abandonment (stay tuned!) did. And we know that we’ve only just scratched the surface when it comes to audience behavior measurement.

So, if you’re a video publisher, advertiser, or viral marketer, let me invite you to check out our enabling technologies. And, of course, please contact us if you’d like to learn more!

Today, Randy Pausch, the professor whose "last lecture" about "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" became an internet sensation and an inspiration to millions, passed away from cancer.  In Randy's lecture, shown in the video above, he highlights key lessons that he's learned in his life, such as that "Brickwalls are there for a reason: they let us prove how badly we want things", "Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted", "You can't get there alone, and I believe in Karma", "Tell the truth, be earnest, apologize when you screw up", and perhaps most importantly "focus on others and not yourself".

I wanted to post this video so that more people could have a chance to see this.  Yes, it's a bit long, but I highly encourage you to watch it - it's pretty moving / touching / inspirational and all around awesome.  We often get so caught up in the daily grind of trying to get to where we're trying to go, that we often forget to step back and reflect on why or where we really wanted to go in the first place.  With his teachings, research, this lecture, and his best selling book, Randy has left us with a critical perspective that we can hopefully apply to our own lives, the perspective of what's really important and what you leave behind.

Yesterday we introduced a new section of our Web site focused on the enabling technologies behind our end-to-end Internet video measurement solutions. As a follow-up to my earlier post on our Video Placement Multiplier capability, today I'll cover our unique Viral Reach Database.

The Viral Reach Database is a constantly growing repository of analytic data on 95+ million Internet videos from 100+ different video sharing sites, making it -- as far as we know -- the industry's broadest data set of its kind. For each video, we capture and store a number of data points, ranging from the video title and author, to daily views and comment counts, and more. On a typical day, we might add over a hundred thousand new videos to the database. We also update the performance-tracking data at the mind numbing rate -- to me at least! -- of over 1,000 videos per second.

We've been working on this technology for a while now and recently unveiled it as part of our VisibleCampaign announcement as well as showcased some of its core capabilities at the New York Video 2.0 Meetup. So, make no mistake, our Viral Reach Database contains a massive quantity of video measurement data that spans from the biggest sharing destinations, like YouTube and MySpace, to international sites, like China's Hupo.TV and Italy's TuoVideo, to targeted content aggregators, like StreetFire for car enthusiasts and aniBoom for animation fans. The breadth and depth of this data allows us to measure a video's True Reach™, meaning that we can track not just the video itself, but re-uploaded copies, fan responses, remixes, mashups, parodies, and more.

The sheer scale of the data we’ve been processing through our Viral Reach Database has allowed us to start making some exciting discoveries in Internet video. For starters, we’re beginning to see macro-trends emerge in areas like viral video diffusion and competition between major brands across the various video sharing sites. These initial findings have been fascinating, but this is only the beginning and there’s much more to be discovered. We’re looking forward to sharing some of these insights in the months ahead, so stay tuned for more.

We launched a new section of our site today that details the enabling technologies behind our Internet video metrics and viral video distribution offerings. We've learned a ton since we launched the company -- was it really only six months ago? -- and we're now ready to talk about our core technologies and how they combine to make our end-to-end Internet video measurement solutions possible.

Over the next few days I'll write up a few posts that cover each of our enabling technologies and how they have changed in response to market feedback. Though we're a relatively young company, we've been fortunate to collaborate with -- and learn from -- some of the world's biggest media companies, most innovative Internet video publishers, and most influential brand advertisers.

First up is our Video Placement Multiplier, which can distribute your videos to more than 40 Internet video destinations -- from A(OL Uncut) to Z(ippy Videos) and almost everywhere in between -- in a single step. To be honest, we had a leg up here since we acquired Vidmeter and it's associated Vidmetrix capability last year. Since then we have been listening carefully to our customers regarding their desires and concerns about the viral seeding of their video assets.

We learned, for instance, that while many viral marketers want to distribute their video content far and wide, they also have concerns about where their video is placed and in what context it might be displayed. So, in addition to significantly broadening and upgrading our automated viral seeding techniques, we also have profiled every video distribution site we support. These profiles include parameters that allow you to make placement decisions informed by site traffic volume, audience demographics, geographic focus, content availability, and more.

We call this capability 'measured placement' because it allows you to distribute your video content widely while helping to ensure that your brand assets appear alongside appropriate classes of content. Our Video Placement Multiplier enabling technology has you covered 40 times over, giving you both broad choice and maximum control over your video distribution initiatives.

You almost have to laugh if you’re McDonalds.  You team up with MySpace to have a contest in honor of your legendary burger, the Big Mac, that’s turning 40, to give it a musical makeover.  You tell everyone that the winning jingle will become the official soundtrack of the Big Mac and that the winning artist will get to be in the commercial.  The winner will be announced on MTV on July 23.

So far, so good.

Last Thursday, however, when the five finalists emerged, things became decidedly more interesting.  This is because one of the finalists, Tamien Bain, had already worked with McDonalds on a project of sorts.

Previous collaboration, you’re thinking?  A professional insider placed among the mix?  It’s American Idol all over again!  Scandal!  No.  Not quite.

Tamien Bain robbed a McDonalds at gunpoint when he was 14 and subsequently jailed for 12 years.

And now he may have produced the newest jingle for the Big Mac and be on his way to stardom.

A fall from grace, redemption, and Big Macs.  It’s almost worthy of Shakespeare.  Almost.

Regardless, it’s definitely theater.  Internet video theater, that is.  

To be part of the action, click here to vote for your favorite.

To see Bain’s video, just look below or click on the link. 

CNN has a great video report about the internet videos which show cell phones surrounding unpopped kernals of popcorn that then all ring in unison, causing the popcorn to pop.  Turns out this was an underground viral ad campaign for a company marketing wireless cellphone headsets (see vidmeter.com for an example of the original videos).  Out of all the viral video ad campaigns we've seen, including the ones below (can you guess which brands these are for??), this one takes probably the biggest leap from ad to product connection. :)

So can you guess which brands are behind these videos? Here is a hint, the first one rhymes with Bay-Ran and the second was the first jean company to use rivets in the construction of their jeans.

Matt tears it up at NY Video 2.0.