Ben Lowry is a friend of mine… he made Great Game 1/5 with me. He is also a giant ass who loves to be argumentative. He saw my long tail post as another opportunity to pounce, but of course I rebutted all of his attacks. He claimed that my long tail was a myth and that it really is the newly released content that is pushing my views.

My proof to the contrary:
-The 34% of total views from top 2% of videos vs the MUCH higher percent of other content providers.
-My top100 videos (19%) resulted in 105,000 views (80.7%).
-Of my top100 videos, 57 were 6+ months old.
-Those 57 videos totaled over 44,000 views.

As I did say in my previous post, releasing new content IS important. But the foundation of long-term success and growth is 100% about the long-tail.

The summer has been pretty good, business wise. Since June 1st, I’ve released 54 videos. I’ve done 11.3 million views. No individual day was under 85,000. And only 1 video released during that span has done 300,000 views. How is that good, you ask?

To me, my business is all about the long tail. The bigger my long tail, the better I’ll do. Sure, big hit videos give short term spikes in views… but it’s the long tail that keeps the ship afloat. Despite only having 3 videos over 500,000 views released in the past 6 months (out of 21 total, none of the 3 in my top 14), my long tail continues to increase. A few videos released over a year ago continue to bring in 1-2k views/day… and believe me, over 500+ videos, it all starts adding up.

It’s hard to judge the line between the power of the new release and the long tail, when viewing things as a whole… so it is important to keep releasing content. But some interesting tidbits for you… as per data publicly available on TubeMogel.com: Shaytards‘ top 10 most viewed videos for yesterday were 74% of his total views (622k/838k). VenetianPrincess‘ are 89% (282k/317k). Sxephil only had 280k views yesterday because he hadn’t released a video since Thursday. My top10, however, only resulted in 34% of my views (44.8k/130k). What does this mean? It means that if many of the top vloggers on YouTube stopped, they would instantly lose their popularity and daily views; I, on the other hand, have a nice long tail and will continue to get a solid amount of traffic for a long, long time even if I didn’t release another video.

So while I’ll never do the overall volume that the top channels do, I have the nice position of knowing that if I want to take a break, I won’t suffer that greatly in revenue, as opposed to many others who are bound to constantly release new content.

So today I have hit 50 million total video views. This is as per tubemogel.com, not what it says on YouTube, as YT’s view stats are lagged by 3-4 days. This is very cool stuff, especially given the time it took to go from 10 to 25 mil vs 25 to 50 mil (178 vs 209 days OR 11.86 vs 8.36 days/mil). This is almost a 42% increase in views/day, with an average of almost 120,000 per day over the past 209 days.

More stat milestones… This is the only level too broke 2 million, just edging Use Boxmen as my 2nd game to 2 mil; this also makes the 2 TITOL games #1 and #2 on my most viewed list all time. But to keep John’s ego in check, he still has less total views than his AG co-worker Joey (5.36 mil vs 5.39 mil)… barely.

Random other stuff: going to try and start posting daily again, if I can. This means not everything will be work related. Not sure if this is a good or bad thing.

So crazy to think… amazing really. For a walkthrough to have so many views. This is the only level’s walkthrough hit 3 million views today. Yay!

Use Boxmen will hit 2 million very shortly as well.

Don’t think I’ll have any new 7 digit milestone posts for a while. Oh well.

The original list is from February. A lot has changed since then. There are 17 new videos in the Top 100. The 100th video viewcount increased from 58k to 93k. Total views from the Top 100 has increased from 22 mil to 33 mil. But other things remain the same… Armor is well in first, with BubbleBox still solidly second. Joey Betz is still my top dev, but John Cooney and Eugene Karataev are gaining. And the % of views from the Top 100 has decreased from 81% to 76%.

Here is the data from Feb, side by side with the data from now:

Views are viewcount in thousands, Count is number of videos in the Top 100.

Didn’t get a chance to post about it yet, but I hit 500 videos last week with my 2nd half walkthrough of Pipol Smasher. Not too shabby, although I had 410 on Jan 6th, which means I’ve only uploaded 91 videos in the past 6 months. This makes sense though, since in early 2009 I was uploading walkthroughs to any game I could find. Now, I’m only uploading walkthroughs where I can monetize them.

Also had a 5th video hit 1 million views, and a 6th that should hit 1 million today (999,000 as of midnight).

Here is a breakdown of my videos by views, of July 09 vs July 10:

Are there any statistics/data that you guys would like me to show? I plan to do an update of Top Sponsors / Devs by views later this month.

I typed “Walkthrough” into my YouTube search bar and waded through the 1st 17 pages of results, which takes us down to 200,000 views per video.  ”Walkthrough” returned the results of any video with the word Walkthrough in either the title or description of the video.  This should be a pretty all-inclusive list, barring any games besides Ice Breaker that have a crapton of videos for 1 game (I just happened to know about the walks for those games, so I knew to check…  no one of the vids has 200k+ views).

The List: Game Name (# of Vids) – Total Views in Millions – Ave Views/Vid

1. Red Remover (2) – 11.4 – 5.7
2. This Is The Only Level – 2.8
3. Wake Up The Box – 2.6
4. Poptropica: Nabooti Island – 2.0
5. Cover Orange – 2.0
6. Use Boxmen – 1.8
7. Roly-Poly Eliminator – 1.6
8. This Is The Only Level TOO – 1.1
9. Poptropica: Big Nate Island – 1.0
10. Wake The Royalty (2) – 1.7 – 850k
11. Poptropica: Astro Knights (4) – 2.8 – 700k
12. Fragger (2) – 1.4 – 700k
13. Poptropica: Spy Island (3) – 1.9 – 633k
14. Demolition City 2 (3) – 1.9 – 633k
15. Poptropica: Counterfeit Island (4) – 2.2 – 550k
16. Poptropica: Mythology Island (4) – 2.0 – 500k
17. Demolition City (2) – 1.0 – 500k
18. Crush the Castle: Players Pack (4) – 1.3 – 325k
19. Stadium Sneakout (10) – 1.0 – 100k
20. Ice Breaker (40) – 1.8 – 45k
21. Ice Breaker: Red Clan (40) – 1.4 – 35k

These are video groups done by 1 person; no mix and matching.  Also, no 1 game/island had more than 1 person with 1 mil views on their walkthrough… although 1 or 2 of the Poptropica Islands were close with a 2nd.

Analyzing the list shows very specific types of games that meet this list: Poptropica, Phuzzles, and Puzzle Platformers account for 19/21.  CtC:PP is a physics game, but not a phuzzle… and Stadium Sneakout is a point & click that doesn’t really belong on the list at all because each video is :08-:30 long.  The top17 are 6 Poptropicas, 8 Phuzzles, and 3 Puzzle Platformers.  Finally, I made 8 of the top 18 (8 of 12 if you discount Poptropica).

If you know of any game that I missed, please let me know.  :)

Got this sexy screenshot last week:

Don’t know if anyone else finds it impressive, but I sure do. Also, thanks to these 3 vids, I got my first entry into the Top Monthly Channels, maxing out at 90th. Alas, the good things disappear so quickly; when those games were new, 200k+ views a day… now, under 80k.

This post stems out of my getting 10,000 subscribers while in NYC last week. It made me think about the relationship between total views and total subscribers, especially in comparing conversion rates from a year ago and now. It also just so happens that I’ve kept track of milestone dates of both views and subscribers, so I have some nice data points to work with. All information in this post will be based on a 1000:1 view to subscriber ratio.

Basic analysis: View and Subbie growth remained relatively similar through the 5000 mark, at which point Views started to completely dominate. I could go back into my spreadsheets and pull more data points of small areas between 5000 and 10,000… but that just seems like too much work.

The interesting question to all of this is why. I have a few theories, the combination of all likely forms the real reason.

-The 5000 mark is hit in roughly July-Aug 2009, which is around when I started to get a lot of in-game features. The in-game features increases views, but the views are not on YouTube, which almost certainly is the dominant factor as to why views increase dramatically from this point onward and subscribers lag way behind.
-There are only so many people interested in flash game walkthroughs. After those 5000+ people subscribed, it took much longer to get more because they just aren’t as interested in the content.
-Aug or Sept 09 is around when I stopped doing videos for random games, focusing only on games that I can monetize (the vast majority of which are in-game). This has resulted in less videos being released overall, so less exposure.

So what this tells me is that when the views are coming from YouTube, there is about a .1% conversion rate of view to subscriber… but when the views are from embeds on other sites, the conversion rate is closer to .02% (about 1 in 5000). This .02% is more from looking at data from the past month or two specifically, not from the difference in 10,000 values in the chart above.

I spent some time on 2/17/10 compiling a spreadsheet of my top 100 videos, their aprox viewcount (rounded down to closest 1000), sponsor, developer, and whether the video was featured in-game or not. From there, I tabulated the top sponsors and the top developers (only calculated devs with 3+ videos in top 100, unless they have 800k+ views).

I have 450+ total videos, so this is less than 25% of my total videos… but these 100 account for over 22 million of my 27+ million views, so they are a fairly accurate representation of the whole. Obviously, the farther down the list you look, the less accurate it is (like LegitGames having 1 video on there, but they have 2 others that just missed the cut).

Any questions or additional data you guys would like to see? I did not include the raw list of top 100, nor did I do any analysis of in-game vs not in-game. And TITOL2 is not counted in this list for Armor or jmtb.