My tenth YouTube video (in a thousand days and a month)

Revision as of 10:50, 26 April 2014

1034 days ago, I uploaded my first YouTube video, to celebrate Elena's birthday (on the 22). Yesterday I uploaded my tenth [2], on the Holy Week in Madrid.

The nine other videos before that are listed below, starting with Happy birthday Elena, which is my most successful video to date.

Over half of my videos are Timelapses. I bought the video camera precisely to do the stop-motion animation of the birthday video. Somehow, the real gift should have been the camera itself, in our capitalistic driven world where what matters is what costs. We have maintained a record of pictures ever since we met, but did not have anything to do videos, which is an altogether different dimension. So I took advantage of a birthday to make an expensive inversion, but so as to avoid a well known birthday present problem in happily married couples, I turned the camera into a tool for something else, which was a retrospective of all of Elena's birthdays since we met.

Something really cool with YouTube is their statistics. After it produced its little effect on the morning of the 22 of May 2011, the video views quickly dropped to noise about zero, with some occasional clicks from errand souls on the video platform... as expected. To my surprise, it later came to grow to an average of roughly 3 hits a day, that it has been sustaining since early 2012. I cannot imagine what is the drive. This measures some sort of random flow that brings me viewers from everywhere on the globe (so say the statistics) for whatever reasons.

We have no clue either what happened on the 30th of April 2013, with 48 hits, most of them from different viewers as suggested by the "unique cookies" feature.

The views above are the total over the ten videos. The breakdown below shows their respective impact and the rate at which they have been uploaded:

Beside the pioneering video, the significant input really started on 27 December (2013) (the birthday of Guille) with Les Pompettes in Clamores, I have not provided any video, since luo xi is a short capture that could have been equally uploaded to google+ instead (and probably be lost like all that I have put there) and 人, that was an actual work, thought over and crafted in its realization, did not provide a very interesting result and accordingly failed to generate any attention (even the color choice of YouTube makes this video unnoticeable).

Note how the tenth video is, on the other hand, the record-breaking one for its short term impact. It is one week only after its upload the number two in my channel:

Back to the overall statistics, these are on the left the lifetime views for all videos but now smoothed over periods of 7 and 30 days, providing a less jerky curve than the daily count (which is a nice feature for small channels like mine whose daily impact is not voluminous enough to get rid of noise), and the actual weekly and monthly averages:

There are way more analytic tools one can look at, such as geography, demography, playback locations, traffic sources, devices, etc. I'll just show you the demography in our case as it is the one of slightly more interest in the above list:

Another fantastic tool is the audience retention. For each video, you can track in real time what percentage of people are still there, comparatively to other videos of the same length:

The "Organic" status means this is from actual people interested in seeing the video in the first place, as opposed to statistics for adverts, inserted in other material (some business I do not get into, of course). Advertisers can therefore study how well they manage to retain people into seeing their commercials and how to contrive better next time. Obviously, as everything else, it starts to becomes ugly when money gets in.

For the rest of us, YouTube is a great tool delivering a fantastic service. I am looking forward developing my channel with always more fun stuff, at least for us, which means many more lousy 人-lookalike and some personal footage of interest only to our close circles, but once in a while, maybe also something that could be useful, informative, entertaining or all that at the same time to the public. I, as a part of it, definitely gets a lot from similar channels from amateur anchorpeople, broadcasters and other occasional artists.