How do you measure the success of an online video campaign? Is success based on the weight of views or does the natural pass along effect of people sharing among friends, peers, family members and social networks provide a true measure of virality?
In short, can a video be a viral hit if it’s gained a modest number of views but a disproportionately high number of shares among users, particularly if those shares happen in a niche communites or interest groups? Our take is that it’s not all about big numbers; shareability in the form of Facebook shares and retweets across Twitter have equal standing.
50,000 highly targeted, quality views and countless shares is of equal, and arguably greater value to advertisers as the value of half a million views and relatively little traction among the audience in terms of shares.
This is the thinking behind our new partnership with weekly business title New Media Age, which has chosen the Viral Ad Network to power its first viral video charts as part of an attempt to provide the title’s readers with an insight into what brands are doing in the viral space.
In conjunction with NMA, we are publishing two charts every Monday. The brand chart compiles the most popular advertiser funded branded videos in the UK, excluding music videos. Music videos are filtered out of the results because they do not promote a brand as such, rather an artist or band, and the sheer popularity of these videos would skewer the results.
A separate UGC chart ranks the most popular user-generated content videos, excluding brand videos. It includes traditional media gone viral such as an ITN news clip, UGC content uploaded by the public and music videos including mash-ups and concert footage shot on a mobile phone.
The reason we’ve separated UGC from branded content is simply because if you mixed the two, branded content would rarely surface in one unified chart. But, many of these brands take their cue from the latest memes and trends being popularised by internet users so the UGC chart is aimed at getting under the skin of the latest UGC content.
In terms of our popularity metric, a video’s position on the chart is determined by viral effect, as measured by shares on Facebook or retweets on Twitter, in addition to views. Taken together, we hope the two charts will compliment and inform one another, and provide valuable insight for the industry.
We hope you like ‘em. And in the coming weeks and months we’ll be pulling out any interesting titbits from the charts so keep an eye on the blog for viral chart-related insights.
Posted By
CorwinB