Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Thursday, January 31, 2008 at 12:15 PM PT

Half of YouTube Videos Get 100 Views in First Month

Putting a video on YouTube almost guarantees you an audience, right? In many cases that’s true. Fifty percent of videos get at least 100 views in the first month they’re on the site, according to a survey by ViralManager (via Data Mining).

After looking at “a large dataset from Q3 and Q4 of 2007,” ViralManager found that 70 percent of videos get at least 20 views, while three percent of videos get more than 25,000 views. And then the most popular videos are very popular: one percent of videos get more than 500,000 views, which is actually quite a lot, if you think about it. It often takes more than a month for a video to spark, so I’d be interested to see this study extended.

What do you think? Do these numbers sound reasonable to you?

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Topic: Online Video

Comments (10)

Another statistic we’ve found is that in the first 24 or 48 hours after releasing a video, the number of views you get is usually about 50% the number of subscribers you have on any site. This goes for Youtube, Yahoo, Vimeo, and our own RSS feed (video hosted on Blip). The day after we launch a video, if we have 1000 subscribers on a certain site, we’ll have 500 views on that site, +or- 100 or so. I spoke to Paul at FYI yesterday and he mentioned the exact same thing with their properties, and said that Nalts has told him the same as well.

Interesting, if not useful.

adam quirk — 1:29 PM on January 31, 2008 Reply
Adam, I’ve noticed that, too. I have about 180 subscribers on my YouTube channel, and I generally get about 80-100 views within the first day of posting.

Rekidk — 8:59 AM on February 2, 2008 Reply
Err, can anyone say long tail?

Gordon Mattey — 4:32 PM on February 2, 2008 Reply
Maybe the phenomenon of 1/2 subscribers being the first view only applies to people with major amounts of subscribers. I have 16 subscribers and somehow I ended up with 130 views in the first day… to my great surprise

anerky — 9:39 PM on May 18, 2008 Reply
Yay, it’s good to know that my videos are in the top 50% view wise in the first month.

Please check out my videos
http://www.youtube.com/zexkstudios

Funny, original short films and web series’.
A great one to search is
Ash the Depressant

The Best — 4:34 AM on June 7, 2008 Reply
Well i had 0 subscribers and got 4,000 views on a video in 2 weeks…

http://youtube.com/ItsJoeDaniels

joedaniels — 9:14 AM on July 4, 2008 Reply
Well, some people think that by sub4sub will get you views, but it doesn’t. So that changes the whole perspective of the theories.

I have 41 subscribers, and get around 50-100 views per month, and around 3 in 24 hours, 20 in 48 hours.
It works if you don’t sub 4 sub people.

BandanaWedgie — 3:32 AM on July 13, 2008 Reply
I just barely made 1000 views in a week or so

I need more!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvNp6eDXw58

Spunky — 1:04 PM on August 5, 2008 Reply
I need More views!!!!!!!!!!!11

JERRY — 5:53 PM on September 9, 2008 Reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECDVS1KpDpw

shocktalker — 11:28 PM on November 17, 2008 Reply

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