Viral Videos: The Top 10

2 Responses to “Viral Videos: The Top 10”

1. The Viral Factory
   Posted from: 87.224.67.246

   December 4th, 2006 at 5:05 am

   Hello Brian, I we noticed your post, thanks for the PR, just one thing…..

   There’s speculation that we made these figures up. Fair enough, they’re pretty high. But we stand by them. Here’s the breakdown for SWK, since as usual poor Ghyslain is getting the most attention. Not everything is included (it was a pain in the ass collating all the information and not all of it is relevant), and there are some assumptions.

   Firstly, and most importantly, this is a figure of views, not people who have seen the clips. There’s a big difference.

   Secondly, we calculated online views only. He’s been featured a bunch of TV shows, but we ignored those.

   Firstly we looked at views of the clip on sites that track views (YouTube, Google Video etc). This came to around 100 million.

   But those sites have only really started getting big views in the last year, SWK has been around since April ’03 – 3 years.

   Currently (Nov ’06) there are 500,000 Google returns for “Star Wars Kid” and 13,400 for “Raza” and 29,000 for “Ghyslain “star wars”” as of Nov 2007. We assumed over 2.5 million cumulative returns since ‘03. Of these, approximately 1/3rd are blogs / articles / forum posts. That gives us 840,000. We assume each one has been read by an average of 50 people (some are tiny blogs, others are FoxNews).

   That gives us 42,000,000 people worldwide who are aware of the SWK phenomenon. About 1 in 4 of the online population. Let’s assume 75% (31,500,000) of them have watched one or more clips.

   There are around SWK 120 clone videos. We assumed that on average viewers have watched 10 of these – many will have watched a couple only, some will have watched all of them.

   Finally, people go back to these clips again and again (the number of recent views referred to above proves this). This is the “long tail” people keep going on about, and we needed to factor it in - so we assumed that people would watch a clip once a year, so 3 times.

   Which adds up to 945,000,000. We rounded down – what’s the odd 45 million between friends?

   One last thing – the point of this was not to get The Viral Factory talked about, we’re a marketing agency and we don’t need people talking about us, unless they’re other (bigger) marketing agencies. We were paid to do this by UKTV, for “Totally Viral” which is a new TV show with tons of virals in it so it could get talked about. So could you all talk about Totally Viral instead. ;-)

   The Viral Factory
2. Rob Blackie
   Posted from: 82.111.146.18

   December 5th, 2006 at 4:57 am

   So the viral factory have increased the number of views from a provable number of about 100m (still impressive) to an utterly ridiculous 900m by a series of absurd assumptions. How many people do you know who have watched more than one clone let alone an average of 10. Fifty readers for each blog?

   Although views are different from readers it’s worth noting that this results has more views (900m) than the latest estimates of the whole global population with internet access (800m).

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