Viral marketing & probability

I’ve spoke before about the truth about viral marketing, and our probability of viral marketing success. So here’s some number to help us all quantify it with the viral marketing haven that is Youtube.

  • The average youtube video gets watched for 6 seconds.
  • 2 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
  • Almost half the videos on youtube get viewed less than 10 times. (1 in 2.4)
  • Only 0.25% of videos get more than 10,000 views
  • A random sample of 10,000 videos uploaded received the following: 2,226 videos with no views in their first month, 237 with 1 view, 158 with 10 views, and just 23 with 100.
  • Only 1 in 3.1 million videos will get more than 1 million views

Sure we can increase our chances by creating great content, and frequency of posts. But getting a viral hit is like winning the lotto. Which for startups means it’s fine to play, but not to back our future on it.

2 thoughts on “Viral marketing & probability

  1. That’s certainly true, but I’d argue that a very small percentage of videos are designed to be viral. If you extracted all of the random home videos etc, the chances of success would look much better….

  2. That’s true only a small percentage are playing the viral game. But the fact that there is so much content, also creates difficulty in being found in the first instance.

    Nice comment Mike.
    Steve.

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