Sunday, March 7, 2010

YouTube: Who is a Hit Contributor?

I have an addiction to the popular video website YouTube. It contains the music videos I want, the humor I crave, and even tutorial videos for anything you could possibly think of. Though I am on this video broadcasting system for hours a day, I have never really thought of how these videos become so popular. How did the famous dancing wedding party become such a hit that primetime shows are using the same idea? How did the famous piano playing kitten end up on my Facebook wall? So I asked myself, what makes a video a hit?

After reading the study of Persistent Paradox, I found my answers. The study looked at the reasons of success and popularity in the video uploads. The research was conducted to view 10 million uploaded videos. The quality of the videos was considered as well as the age of the video. The older videos tend to receive more video views counts since they have been on the website longer. Very few videos receive much attention if the contributor broadcasts videos constantly. The most popular have been from a first time post or a random upload. The study also found that the popularity of these videos changes over time.

With this research in mind, I decided to look up the most popular videos that have been on YouTube, and decide for myself why they were viewed millions of times.

"Charlie bit my Finger"
This video has had 166,874,929 views since it aired in 2007. This is considered a definite hit. It is humorous but very simple. Watch it and see what you think.



Another video is the "Evolution of Dance". With 138,505,127 views since 2006, this video has the appeal of entertainment and talent.


A more recent video on the list comes from a main stream celebrity. Miley Cyrus has taken over the world of music and every young girl wants to be Hannah Montana. When Cyrus released her "7 Things" music video, YouTube was hit will millions of views. The video has 112,120,624 views since its release in 2008.



What these videos have in common is their appeal to the American society. They are humorous, extraordinary, or already known in the entertainment world. I would have to agree with the study but I would love to hear about a study on what the American audience gravitates to on YouTube and why they view the videos. I guess that might be a study I can conduct some day. Happy YouTubing!





1 comment:

  1. I agree with their decision to not hire that girl. You can't tweet about company business, that's private. I would never hire someone into my company who couldn't keep the companies business within the company. They were right. They have lots of high profile people in and out of their building. If that girl were to tweet about those people, she would be breaching their privacy. I'm not famous by any means and I would hate for the world to know where I was and what I was doing if I wasn't sharing that information freely. She should have known better. They shouldn't have hired her either way, apparently she doesn't have enough common sense.

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