Top 10 Videos of All Time (well, last 5 months anyway)
I was messing about with a couple of video sites today and started wondering what the top videos on each site were. The results are below.
The chart is fun if you want to compare the types of top videos across sites, but it's problematic if you use it for quantitative measurement.
The only interesting statistic you can really pull from this chart is the approximate number of views a video gets per week on each service. That changes the order on the chart. For example, Evolution of Dance on YouTube has about 35.3M views over the course of 5 months. If you divide 35.3M by 5 months, you see that the video received about 232,000 views per day (Its popularity is actually a result of a logarithmic function, but sorry Egon, I left the T1 calculator in my spare pocket protector).
Do the same thing for every entry, and you find that Google's Eepybird clip received about 68,000 views per day, Metacafe's video received about 31,000, and Revver received about 23,000. The remaining order is Bolt, Veoh, iFilm, Dailymotion, then Grouper. MySpace doesn't say when the clip is uploaded, so I couldn't measure that.
The other details you'll notice is that aside from YouTube and MySpace, people don't comment on videos that often, and people usually can't be bothered to rate videos. If I were better at math and had more patience, I'd survey the top ten videos on each site and divide their total page views by days live. You could probably figure out what the necessary critical mass for popularity is that way. There's lots of other ways to slice and dice some robust data -- let me know if you've seen anybody doing that.
(If the pretty HTML chart below isn't showing up correctly in your browser, you can view the spreadsheet here.)
| Site | Video | Views | Length | Rating | Votes | Comments | Age | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| x | Reel Pop | |||||||
| YouTube | Evolution of Dance | 35.3M | 6:00 | 4.5 (of 5) | 53,660 | 11,770 | 5 months | |
| Metacafe | Animals Vs. Humans | 11.3M | 1:36 | 4.69 (of 5) | 588 | 1 year | ||
| iFilm | Miler Light -- Catfight Uncensored! | 5M | 1:06 | 3 (of 5) | 2 | 3yrs, 11m | ||
| Revver | Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos | 3.6M | 2:57 | 4 (of 5) | N/A | 5 months | ||
| MySpace | Fast and Furious -Arabian Drifting | 3M | 0:29 | 13.015 | ? | |||
| Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos II | 1.36M | 3:01 | 4.5 (of 5) | 7,306 | N/A | 2 weeks | ||
| Dailymotion | Southpark-piratage | 870k | 2:12 | 4.7 (of 5) | 679 | 13 | 11 months | |
| Bolt | Hazy Monday | 837k | 134 | 5 months | ||||
| Veoh | Denis Leary Hates Mel Gibson | 260k | 3:38 | 4 (of 4) | 77 | 44 | 2 months | |
| Grouper | Grouper Street Fighter | 56k | 0:51 | 15 | 5 months | |||
Cool data, Steve.
Another interesting question - one which is probably unanswerable - would be, what have been the ten most popular clips posted *illegally* to these sites, and how many times have they been viewed? I wonder if they'd surpass some of these legally-posted clips.
SK
Posted by: Scott Kirsner | November 10, 2006 at 08:07 AM
Before this I had never seen the evolution of dance, becuase like I said.. I'm so out of the loop. And you're in too deep.
The vid is crazy though and I would recommend watching. I'd love to see the stats that Scott mentioned.
Posted by: Lex | November 11, 2006 at 11:01 AM
Lex! You really do care... ;)
Posted by: Steve Bryant | November 11, 2006 at 12:09 PM