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YouTube Is Not A Magic Elixir...And The Data Proves It

**UPFRONT DISCLAIMER: I own a real estate video company - though I try to stay focused on empirical data in the posting below, I do have a financial stake in a different company focused on the same market

BACKGROUND

This morning we looked at every You Tube property video that was marked as "1 week ago". This means that the real estate video had been posted between 7-13 days ago. Within our own company, we consider the first two weeks critical as it is a reasonable timeframe to begin to see tangible results not only in terms of visitors but also in terms of visitor feedback and action (contacts, etc.) We specifically excluded certain types of videos that were not strictly property video - interviews, drivethrus, seminars, promotional videos etc.. Although to be honest, the results would not have been much different.

ANALYSIS

We found the following empirical data:

Number of Property Videos Posted To YouTube During This Period: 235

Total Number of Views of All 235 Videos: 3775

Average Number of Video Views after being posted more than one week and less than two: 16 views

Mean Number of Video Views (50% with views above and 50% below) during same period: 8 views

The much lower mean number signifies that there are a few "watched more than others" videos propping up the average. These are hardly eye-popping bifurcation points - a video from greece with 125 views, toronto with 202, two from CA with 125 and 113 respectively, and then the clear winner from India with 360. No other videos are even close to 100 views in their first 7-13 days of YouTube life.

We've talked about YouTube before in terms of effectiveness (sales) but the numbers here are too paltry to even begin to consistently generate sales. Note: You are easily able to reproduce the results by searching "real estate", sorting by most recent, and capturing data about the videos that are marked "1 week ago". This data is fairly telling of how effective YouTube really is or, in this case, is not (and I am a strong proponent of real estate video of any form).

CONCLUSIONS

We've previously discussed issues with YouTube. Our own fledgling 6 month old site in English and Spanish have completely different and much more positive numbers than the much better known YouTube site - if you haven't heard about us, each property video is narrated in English, Spanish, and Portuguese as part of our standard video package. To compare with Youtube, each of our language videos for the same property gets at least an order of magnitude of YouTube's video views which means that any single property video on our site across all 3 languages will get between 20 and 30 times the video views of the Youtube site within 2 weeks. Perhaps, it is a standards issue but we think that it is more likely people prefer LARGE video with crisper resolution and no buffering. I would not be surprised if other dedicated real estate video portals also handily surpass YouTube's results.

This data supports what we have suspected anecdotally about YouTube for some time. We'll have better data in the coming weeks but it seems that YouTube only generates about 15,000 video videos per months for properties. Our site had 60,000 real estate videos watched in March 2007 alone arguably making us one of one more trafficked real estate video around - all this without a single US property video.....yet.

Guess where we are headed next?

Tony (daily blog: http://forsalebylocals.wordpress.com)

Posted by A. Grey | Vidlisting.com| Real Estate Video Mentor on 05/06/2007 12:58 PM

Comments (23)

video, youtube, challenge

23 Comments on YouTube Is Not A Magic Elixir...And The Data Proves It

MAY

2007

Great article! This really goes back to the fact that Real Estate customers go to where they really can shop for Real Estate. You don't go into a grocery store to shop for consumer electronics right? YouTube.com is great and fun, but people go to YouTube.com for entertainment purposes. Inregards to Real Estate, your stats show the differential.

Kathy: That is certainly the point (and you provided a better analogy than I could have btw).

I have to say that I was likely more surprised than anyone...everyone bandies about the general YouTube stats but any sort of close analaysis at the real estate niche in particular shows a completely different story.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tony

A. Grey - Welcome to the ActiveRain Community! It's nice to see someone else from our area finding a voice on here. Maybe we could hook-up for coffee sometime? Great analysis data. Thanks for sharing!

Interesting information A. Grey. I've not gotten into video yet, but will certainly check your group as I lead into it.

Rich: I'm currently spending about 8 months per year travelling about in Latin America. I prefer to come up to WA when the weather is nice :) I'll shoot you a mail when I am back in town. I'd also like to get a video interview with you ;)

Keith: I'm always available for technical assistance or to answer questions. Thanks for stopping by

Curious about video...this is informative...thanks

Larry: You are certainly welcome.

Tony,

Great post. YouTube is a video phenomenon but not the goldmine that some make it out to be for real estate professionals. We do not put any of our content on YouTube, mostly because it does not fit into our target demographic - the luxury niche.

That being said, I wrote a post on this topic yesterday, and Fred Light made a valid point that videos loaded on YouTube and properly categorized and tagged will positively impact your search engine rankings, particularly on Google. I thought that was an interesting tidbit. While it doesn't necessarily apply for everyone, I thought it worth passing on.

A million thank yous to whomever elevated this entry as a featured post.

I dont know how the "featured" post process works at all but I am humbled every day by the great folks that participate on this site.

Thanks again.

Tony

Eric

I read your points on your post and totally see why it would not work for you...it doesnt work for us either for many of the same points :) That said, Fred is *the* king of real estate video so his point of view is definitely worthy of consideration.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Tony

Great post, thanks for the info, very valuable.

A. - You are both knowledgeable and articulate. I appreciate you sharing your expertise, you tube analysis and opinions. There is so much to learn. Each day I read and learn there is so much I don't know!

I personally use you tube as a storage device for clients who want to upload their videos to a public domain and then to use the embed feature to put videos other places (website / blog / mls). Is there a better site to do this with?

Mr. Grey, there is inst one small point that you may be missing. Perception is capable of killing or curing. A takeoff on the phrase "BELIEF kills and belief cures." JUST INCASE my point did not register, good perception Bullds on itself, BAD perception feeds on itself. In other words more, products have failed because they were underrated than because they were overrated, especially if the 'product moves to live up to it "overratedness".

Nice job on the number crunching. Good luck getting off the ground in the US.

I'm a numbers guy, too. Thanks for breaking it down. I just haven't moved into the video arena yet. More articles on the subject would be appreciated.

Ana: Thank you

Marlene: Eery day is an opportunity to learn for me as well

Abraham: we'll expect to have the same capability, convert, and embed capability within the next week or two

Horace: excellent advice. Thanks for stopping by.

Daniel: Thanks...stay tuned for our US plans

Chris: More are forthcoming. There is a subscribe button at the top of the page and to the right :)

Tony

The KING? You've GOT to be kidding! LOL I'm still trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing... :)

I'm primarily a web designer, so my main focus is getting eyeballs to the clients' website. Since a number of these video sites (not YouTube, but most others) DO get indexed in Google where customers DO search, and since it's FREE to upload - I figure you've got absolutely nothing to lose.

Additionally, as a listing tool, it's pretty impressive to tell your customer that their home will be on the first page or two of Google in a few days! And my experience is that happens about 90% of the time, depending on how competitive the search terms are.

However, once every Tom, Dick and Harry that takes a bunch of still photographs, applies the "Ken Burn's Effect", throw in some copyrighted music and then calls it a video figures out how to convert them and upload them to these sites, my guess is the effectiveness will be gone. Fortunately, most of those slide shows (aka 'videos') are flash and most people won't be able to figure out how to convert them!

Fred: Thanks for your comments. Hey, the Ken burns effect worked for Ken Burns! My favorite copyrighted music story involved a video with "Stairway To Heaven" at max volume and the property owner insisting that it stay. Take care

Tony