The Days Of The Viral YouTube Video Appear To Be Over
It wasn’t that long ago when a YouTube video that caught fire and went viral seemed like an almost every day occurrence. Those days appear to be over though and the analytics firm Pex has the data to prove it.
According to the latest Pex report, only 0.64% of all videos posted on YouTube ever make it to 100,000 views or more. To make matters worse, those 0.64% actually garner 81.6% of all the views on the platform.
To put it another way, less than 1% of all views get 100k views or more, and those videos that do represent more than 80% of all YouTube views!
Now let’s look at YouTube metrics another way. More than 621 hours of content are being uploaded every minute, or 10 hours of content every second, according to Pex! Users uploaded 1.3 billion videos last year, and average about 13 video uploads per person per year. Most of these will never be seen by more than a smattering of users.
Now here’s something to keep in mind – 800 million smartphone users are blocked from accessing YouTube in China and some large parts of the world still don’t have fast enough connections to even consume video content. That means that a big part of the world isn’t even invited to the YouTube part. That doesn’t mean, however, that any of those 800+ million were ever going to watch your music video in the first place, as that’s getting less and less likely as the viral video becomes more rare.
That being said, the music category is the most consumed by YouTube users at 20%, yet it only represents 5% of all videos on the platform. And music is the only category where users watch the same videos over and over.
Even though these metrics might look bad from a new or mid-tier artist standpoint, the fact of the matter is that YouTube is a great repository for music performance documentation and artistic expression. Spending a lot of money on production might not be worth it though, unless you’re lucky enough to get into the 0.64%.
