**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 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?
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