While Nancy Giles opinion piece on Twitter showed how she missed the mark because she didn’t understand Twitter, the guys creating SuperNews clearly get it and took a clever jab at Twitter and at the general narcissism with social media in general. This was created as part of the animated sketch series, which airs on Current TV where they typically take a witty and humorous look at the days current headlines. The video has over 1.4 million views since it’s upload a little over two weeks ago.

This is the first of a weekly blog post (at least in theory) where I will profile a video on YouTube that went viral in the past week and what about the video made it unique and got people talking about it or viewing it.

The first video I chose to profile is “Extreme Sheep Art”. It was uploaded Monday March 16th and in a little over a week it already has nearly 3 million views. The video is by a group of guys called the “BaaaStuds” that is well designed to capture the viewers attention with a clever artistic creation using sheep, border collies & LED lights to create artwork. I know it’s peaked your curiosity so go ahead and watch it. It all ends with a “suggestion” to go check out Samsung’s new LED TV product line.

45% of viewers find a video by direct navigation to a video site (i.e. going to YouTube and searching or clicking around the featured or related videos).

No surprise here given that over 10 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube every minute that going directly to the video sharing sites and searching would be the top method of finding videos.

In terms of individual web sites referring traffic, no single source dominated, here are the top 20 individual referrers:

However, since there are a limited number of players in certain areas online, TubeMogul was able to infer that:

• 11.18% of all traffic comes from search engines
• 3.66% comes from social networks
• 3.19% comes from social bookmarking sites
• 0.63% derives from video search engines
• 0.05% is directed from Email/IM
• 80.88% makes up the rest of the referred traffic…of this mix it is almost completely made up of blogs from the thousands of different blogs they scanned.

Here are the really interesting facts here:

Digg beats StumbleUpon by nearly 0.4% for video referrals

I wouldn’t have guessed that. When I share videos on both social bookmarking sites my traffic from StumbleUpon is nearly triple the traffic I receive from Digg. StumbleUpon is my #4 traffic source for the website (which of course does include my blog posts) bringing in 9.97% of my site traffic while Digg is my #10 source of traffic (also including my blog posts) accounting for about 3.85% of all my site traffic. About half of my bookmarks are for videos while the other half are for blog posts (possibly even this one will end up on both). Of course this is just me and I am not profiling over 35 million videos for my statistics.

0.05% is directed from Email/IM

This I find staggering to be so low. One of the easiest and most cost effective ways to get people to share your videos is through email marketing – particularly to an existing base of people who have opted in to receive your email newsletter. In a recent post about integrating video into your email marketing campaign I found that there was a significant 175% increase in click-throughs when video content was included in an email campaign. It sounds like a lot of people are missing the boat on this possible distribution channel.

Blogs sourcing most of the 80.88% of all referred traffic in this sample.

To those trying to make a video go viral, this should be telling you to reach out to relevant bloggers who could help you tremendously with the push for video views.

0.63% derives from video search engines

This is bad news to the ever increasing number of online video search sites that seem to keep popping up promising to help your video go viral or supposedly helping you search. With less than a 1% take, that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. I’ve long held that most of these sites have very little value to the online video producer – this study just proves my theory.

So the real take-a-way here…

…is engaging bloggers to work with you by sharing the video with them. If nearly 81% of video traffic is coming from blogs it only makes sense to try and engage relevant bloggers to share your video. The other real key that isn’t really discussed is to make sure you optimize a video’s meta-data to ensure it can easily be found by those who are searching.

How many views make a viral video a success?

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?

eMarketer also puts online video viewers at more than three-quarters of US Internet users, and estimates that percentage will rise to nearly 90% in less than three years. These numbers just go to show that online video continues to grow incredibly fast and offers the savvy business deploying online video content more opportunities to engage with a  growing audience if the content is created correctly to engage viewers without a hard sell. Transparency is key. If it’s a straight up sales video don’t try to disguise it as a “funny” video. Online viewers can sniff out a fraud within 10 seconds.

So with that in mind the next part of this survey is what really bothered me. The subtitle of the article was “Is all of it monetizable?” and it stated “For marketers, this growth raises the question of how much online video can be monetized.”

STOP. I repeat stop trying to monetize every single video out on the internet. Stop trying to squeeze a cent out of every online video just because it has a viewership to market to. There are occasions particularly with long-form (online television shows or movies) where pre-roll ads or post-roll ads could be seamlessly built in around the content. But please stop trying to squeeze ads in on a 90 second video. Particularly while the video is running and it blocks the bottom half of the screen with its “message”. Do you think these content-blocking and interruptive ads make me want to buy your product?

If you really want to take advantage of online video growth and the budding audience that goes with it — hire a content creator to produce a video or series of videos for you that is entertaining, engaging and has your product or service loosely worked into the story line. Make outdoor hiking gear? Create a short series about hiking up Mt. Ranier using your gear in the video series. Sell office products? Shoot your own mockumentary of “The Office”. There are a million ways to produce your own online content to get your message out without interrupting what online videos people are watching with rolling ads. Besides if you create content geared and tagged to be found by your demographic, it’s that much more targeted to reach your audience when and where they are searching.

I think eventually viewers will move away from video sharing sites where these video ads are used and the “marketing powers that be” will think online video cannot be used for advertising mainly because they don’t understand how they need to completely rethink their advertising tactics for this medium.

What do you think? Where do you think online video advertising is headed? Share you thoughts & keep the conversation going below in the comments.

How many views make a viral video a success?

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?