Online Video Reports Best Practices

According to TubeMogul.com’s Jan. 2011 Report for Online Video Best Practices, fewer than 1% of all videos exceed one million views. The report says, “Even getting featured on YouTube’s homepage yields fewer views than it used to, despite the site’s meteoric growth (or perhaps because of it). Videos in the ‘Featured’ or ‘Spotlight’ spots on You-Tube’s homepage average 86,100 views per day that they are featured. That represents a 28.2% reduction compared to the same measure two years ago (June 2008), when videos featured averaged 119,864 views per day. The result is that paid media is now necessary to get videos watched, even in viral video campaigns.”
Video length is also crucial when measuring video completion rates. According to the report, medium length (1-1:30 minutes) is the best performing range regardless of production format and/or industry category.
Click away rates on pre-roll video advertisements range from 10-38.4% the report finds. Using a sample of 7.87 million video streams over a 48-hour period, with 10-30 second ads, the findings show that pre-rolls work best with premium content. Even with premium content, however, shorter pre-rolls work best in terms of keeping viewers from clicking away.
Social media continues to outrank all other sources, such as search with respect to growth in streams.  Twitter continues to outpace all other referring sources by almost 3 to 1.