<videovortex> Slate Article: Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?

Mon Jul 6 09:30:01 CEST 2009

Jan Simons has sent you an article from Slate Magazine
<http://www.slate.com> .

A sobering view on YouTube stardom

 <http://letters.slate.com/W0RH020B9669EDE063B3630DEEC1A0> 

Why are my data so different? A developer for Rubber Republic told me
the company selected videos at random from a feed of newly added
material. My best guess for the decline in odds is that, in the 18
months between the two experiments, the number of total videos uploaded
has grown much faster than the audience of people willing to watch them.
A YouTube spokesman confirms that the amount of content uploaded to the
site has grown continually—it's now up to about 20 hours of footage a
minute from 15 hours at the beginning of 2009. (The company also says it
does not collect data on how many videos get more than 10,000 or 100,000
views.)

So, what are we to make of these numbers? First, getting even 10,000
views is an impressive feat, particularly if momentum builds
organically, like it did with "Charlie Bit Me." It's obviously easier to
get lots of views if a few popular sites embed or link to the video—the
main reason that the bumblebee mascot got so popular, for example, is
that it was embedded
<http://colunas.globoesporte.com/bolanascostas/2009/05/27/soco-do-mascot
e/>  on the Portuguese-language sports site Globo Esporte.

A short-term experiment like this one doesn't have a chance of sussing
out a phenomenon like "Charlie Bit Me," which didn't go viral until
months after it was posted. I'll post an update to this piece if I
discover in the coming weeks that I managed to catch such a
long-gestating monster. Anything's possible, but considering that just 3
percent of my videos have as many as 1,000 views, I'd say the odds of
that happening are vanishingly small.

These figures certainly don't ratify the grand promise of social media.
Not everyone uses YouTube to launch their showbiz or political career,
but the potential to do so is central to the Web 2.0 narrative that
figures in so many newsmagazine panegyrics
<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570743,00.html> .
When the odds of even 1,000 people viewing your video in a month's time
are only 3 percent, however, it's tough to argue that hitting it big on
YouTube is anything more than dumb luck. You could argue that this is
the way it's always been in show biz, and you'd be right. But wasn't the
Web supposed to change all that?

Chris Wilson <mailto:christopher.e.wilson+slate at gmail.com>  is an
assistant editor at Slate in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter
<http://twitter.com/chriswilsondc> .

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2221553/

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