Google recently invited people to create short videos about their Google Chrome web browser, and Chrome Shorts features a collection of short films about the browser. Here was my favorite of the bunch which has just under 300,000 views since being uploaded 3 weeks ago.

However you would have thought with the media push Google has put on promoting Chrome that they could have pushed at least one of the eleven videos they created over a million views by now. They have been plugging the browser on their front page and running television ads and let’s not forget the fact that they OWN YouTube. Should they have staggered the release of the videos? Embedded the videos on the Chrome landing page? Just goes to show that even the company that owns YouTube can’t force a video to go viral.

We all know that YouTube is the gorilla in the room but is it the right video sharing site for you? Maybe you’re a video blogger? Maybe you like to create short “How To” videos?

Luckily there are niche video sharing sites for virtually every type of video content out there. More than I could possibly profile here. Thanks to TubeMogul Research & Quantcast for providing much of the data needed for this profile. Here’s my breakdown with statistics and demographics for 15 of the more popular sites in alphabetical order:

5 Min.com

Description: Short “How-To” videos (under “5min”) that answer practical questions.

Gender Demographic: Male 55% / Female 45%

Age Demographic: 17% – 12-17 yrs / 33% – 18-34 yrs / 28% – 35-49 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 366,ooo

Blip.tv

Description: Publisher-friendly video sharing and distribution site with an integrated video blogging platform.

Gender Demographic: Male 57% / Female 43%

Age Demographic: 33% – 18-34 yrs / 33% – 35-49 yrs / 28% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 1.8 million

Monthly US Traffic: 766,000

Brightcove

Description: Great quality video with an easy to use, quick, user interface. Largely high-income and college-educated users.

Gender Demographic: Male 50% / Female 50%

Age Demographic: Evenly distributed between 18-34 yrs and 35-49 yrs age brackets.

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 1.9 million

** Should be noted that Brightcove is no longer a video sharing site (as mentioned in the comments) as of December 2008 and now is focused exclusively as a video hosting and distribution platform since January 2009. You can utilize their platform to upload to sharing sites such as Veoh.**

Crackle

Description: Easy to use but video quality could be better particularly since it is positioned as a multi-platform next-generation video network owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Gender Demographic: Male 50% / Female 50%

Age Demographic: 19% – 12-17 yrs / 39% – 18-34 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 2.5 million

Dailymotion

Description: Dubbed the “YouTube of Europe,” it’s a fairly simple and straight forward user interface but hasn’t developed a real community in the US…yet.

Gender Demographic: Male 59% / Female 41%

Age Demographic: 12% – 12-17 yrs / 40% – 18-34 yrs / 29% – 35-49 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 48.2 million

Monthly US Traffic: 7.2 million

Google Video

Description:Why would you go to Google Video when there is (and Google owns) YouTube? Poor video quality leave this a brand for video search, not really for new video discovery.

Gender Demographic: Male 53% / Female 47%

Age Demographic: 26% – 12-17 yrs / 32% – 18-34 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 7.5 million

Metacafe

Description:One of the world’s largest video sites that specializes in short form video content from both new emerging talent and Hollywood’s heavy hitters. Uniquely controlled by the user community so if you have a good community, you can get your videos on the front page.

Gender Demographic: Male 58% / Female 42%

Age Demographic: 16% – 12-17 yrs / 36% – 18-34 yrs / 28% – 35-49 yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 43.5 million

Monthly US Traffic: 13 million

Motionbox

Description: One of the few video sharing sites that offers an option to securely share your videos with friends & family. After AOL Video shut down, they recommended their users to transfer their videos to Motionbox.

Gender Demographic: Male 52% / Female 48%

Age Demographic: 26% – 18-34 yrs / 31% – 35-49 yrs / 23% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 268,000

Monthly US Traffic: 144,000

Revver

Description: Revver pretty much started revenue sharing for video content providers. They connect makers,  sharers,  and sponsors  of internet video in a free and open marketplace that rewards them for doing what they do best.

Gender Demographic: Male 57% / Female 43%

Age Demographic: 36% – 18-34 yrs / 30% – 35-49 yrs / 23% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: Unavailable

Monthly US Traffic: 779,000

Ustream.tv

Description: Live interactive video broadcast platform that enables anyone with a camera and an Internet connection to quickly and easily broadcast to a global audience of unlimited size.

Gender Demographic: Male 55% / Female 45%

Age Demographic: 34% – 18-34 yrs / 33% – 35-49 yrs / 22% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 6.6 million

Monthly US Traffic: 1.4 million

Veoh

Description:Focused on full-screen video programming for anyone with a broadband connection. Site lacks a  sense of social community.

Gender Demographic: Male 56% / Female 44%

Age Demographic: evenly distributed audience across all age brackets.

Monthly Global Traffic: 12 million

Monthly US Traffic: 4 million

Viddler

Description:Coolest player interface with features like comments tied to a particular time in the video and automatic webcam synch.

Gender Demographic: Male 56% / Female 44%

Age Demographic: 39% – 18-34 yrs / 28% – 35-49 yrs / 20% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 2.1 million

Monthly US Traffic: 726,000

Vimeo

Description:Completely user-generated content used heavily by videobloggers and podcasters. Really quick upload and very hip interface. Largely high-income and college-educated users.

Gender Demographic: Male 65% / Female 35%

Age Demographic: N/A

Monthly Global Traffic: 9.5 million

Monthly US Traffic: 3.6 million

Yahoo! Video

Description: Entertainment-oriented video site. Unfortunately not yet fully integrated with all of Yahoo!’s community destinations and so really missing out on the social aspect to their service.

Gender Demographic: Male 55% / Female 45%

Age Demographic: 16% – 12-17 yrs / 41% – 18-34 yrs / 25% – 35-49 yrs / 16% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 3.2 million

Monthly US Traffic: 1.8 million

YouTube

Description: Unless you live under a rock you know who YouTube is. Their strong user base and community offers the greatest opportunity to both go viral in a big way…but also to get lost quickly.

Gender Demographic: Male 50% / Female 50%

Age Demographic: 19% – 12-17 yrs / 36% – 18-34 yrs / 23% – 35-49 yrs / 19% – 50+ yrs

Monthly Global Traffic: 80.6 million

Monthly US Traffic: 69.3 million

This is a question that was recently asked by Feed Company in a survey of 40 executives at top U.S. creative ad agencies and media buying firms. Almost 28% considered it a success if a viral video got more than 1 million views followed closely by about 22% each evenly saying it was successful if it was viewed 100,000, 250,000, or 500,000 times. A meager 2.8% each considered it successful if it was viewed 25,000 or 50,000 each. I’m telling you that of all these numbers the 2.8% were the closest to being correct. It’s not about the cumulative total of those views, it’s about getting that video in front of the right eyeballs.

This was a quote I pulled from the Feed Company’s Viral Video Marketing Survey “The Agency Perspective” The last part about the quality of engagement and conversation — that’s the real key to the success of a viral campaign.

Here’s an example that we utilized for ourselves using word of mouth or viral marketing as a self-promotional piece in a B2B environment with measurable results. Last September I was named by the Worcester Business Journal to their 40 Under Forty list. So to celebrate this we created a funny movie poking fun at myself. We set very clear goals to:

1. Increase our brand recognition within the Central Massachusetts region served by Worcester Business Journal.
2. To open a discussion which would hopefully lead to a working relationship with Worcester Business Journal.

First, we sent it to our contact at Worcester Business Journal to get their “blessing” before sending it out to our e-newsletter subscribers. The Business Journal’s editor-in-chief called us within 15 minutes to say that it had already been forwarded around their entire office and they wanted to show it at the awards banquet the next night with over 500 attendees. At the event the owner of the Business Journal (and several other regional business newspapers) came up to me and asked if they could send it out on their e-newsletter to their list of over 5,000 subscribers.

Within about two weeks after the event our e-newsletter subscriber list doubled and from that event we have created videos for two of the event attendees, we produced videos for all three business journals owned by the parent company of Worcester Business Journal and have all three business journals set up to resell our online marketing video product. As with any word of mouth marketing campaign, it needs to grab people’s attention and be easily passed on.

Based upon our website views of this video and the video views on sharing sites such as YouTube, we had a little over 12,000 total views. That’s it. But we were able to target our demographic specifically to decision makers in businesses in a select region. So all the right people were viewing the video that we wanted to engage with it.

So what’s the moral to this story? You can have 50 million views of a video but if it ultimately doesn’t lead to the desired brand interaction you were looking for how effective was it really? Be more targeted in your distribution and don’t worry about cumulative views if it is engaging the right people.

How Much of a Typical Online Video Is Actually Watched?

5 Questions Interview: Mike Langford of Tweetworks

Just to be clear – I’m not siding with Motrin. Nor am I dissing the social networking juggernaut that is the collective community of Mother’s online. The video itself wasn’t anything breathtaking and may have been marginally condescending – I’ll give it that much. You can watch it below to form your own opinion:

Pretty dumb, right? Let’s be honest. The phrase “It totally makes me look like an official mom”…come on. I doubt there is a mom out there that wears her baby in a Bjorn carrier because all the other cool mom’s are doing it.

But all this blogging and Twitter conversation, with a very small amount being negative, is getting people talking about Motrin. What their ad campaign did was create a truly great viral marketing video. People are talking about their campaign although there are a small group who are angry about it, the vast amount of comments I read on Twitter just called it dumb or criticized Motrin for generally not connecting with their demographic. There were many complimenting it too. Think about it…when was the last time you had a conversation about a pain reliever or an ad campaign by one?

Here’s where Motrin really fell on their face with this campaign. Their first reaction when this small amount of negative feedback started trickling in? They pulled the site down that was hosting the video. That’s right…so the video finally generated some buzz about their product after it had been up for over a month with barely a blip on the radar and then they pulled the site down after a little negative feedback launched the video virally rather than trying to immediately put out the fire on their website with this group of social networking Moms who were offended or people who may just be curious about the video and to see what all the hub-bub was about. Brilliant.

Now that you already know you screwed up, why not engage the demographic you insulted and open up conversation? Don’t run and hide…engage.

Now that they’ve acknowledged they made a mistake, what they really need to do is launch a social media rescue campaign. Start checking Google alerts and comment on as many of the Mommy blogs as possible, start a Facebook group to allow public discussion and get feedback on their solutions, connect with Moms on Twitter and come up with an offer especially targeted to those offended by the ad. While they’re at it, they should start a blog themselves and speak from the heart about what they were thinking.

So what’s the moral to this story? What Motrin should have done originally was to hire a team of Mom’s using social networking to get their opinion of what they would find funny and what would appeal to them. Listening is rule #1 of social networking and Motrin tried to skip that step. If you’re going to speak on behalf of any group of people, you should listen to what they have to say first.

5 Tips To Creating An Effective
Viral Video Marketing Campaign

Viral marketing sounds like something you may be stuck in bed with for a few days maybe with a stuffy nose, and a fever…but it doesn’t have to be. Did you know that every minute over 10 HOURS of video are uploaded to YouTube. Think about it…10 HOURS…while you were just thinking about this…another 10 hours just got uploaded to YouTube! So how do you make your viral marketing video stand out? How do you get it passed on to others without you asking (hence the going “viral”)?

Here are 5 tips to keep in mind when creating a viral marketing campaign for your online video: >>> continue reading >>>

For this month’s interview feature I spoke with Michelle Cox who is the communications director for Metacafe. When she’s not busy watching videos, talking about videos or thinking of videos… well, she’s probably asleep (and dreaming about videos). After chatting about our favorite videos…we got the interview started:

MC: YouTube created the online video industry. We at Metacafe are creating the short-form video entertainment industry. We aren’t interested in providing a platform for any and every video. We’re focused solely on made-for-the-web content that is entertaining to a large and diverse audience. We think short-form is poised to take its place as the third pillar of the video entertainment industry, alongside TV and movies. There are so many talented producers out there making some really creative, innovative, entertaining short videos – from individual independent filmmakers to boutique production houses to major media companies. Metacafe is the premier destination for distribution of this content, and our unique approach to people-powered programming ensures that the videos our audience finds most entertaining receive maximum exposure on the site.

EG: What do you mean by “people-powered programming”?

MC: We engage our 30 million monthly viewers every step of the way in creating the Metacafe entertainment experience. First, our community review panel – made up of 80,000 volunteers around the world – takes a first look at every video uploaded to the site. They help us eliminate any videos that are inappropriate, and they help identify the videos that are most likely to prove entertaining to the larger audience. Second, once a video is on the site, our VideoRank^TM technology is constantly looking at how viewers react to it – telling us how entertaining it is based on factors such as how many people watch it to the end, watch it more than once, send it to a friend, mark it as a favorite, and more. The higher a video’s VideoRank^TM, the more likely it is to be featured on our home page, in our recommendation engine and other key areas around the site. Third, our viewers determine which videos earn money through our Producer Rewards® program – we pay $5 for every 1,000 views of an original video accepted into the program.

EG: One of your new features that recently made its debut on Metacafe is PLYfx, do you want to say a few words about this cool new feature?

MC: It is a really cool new feature! PLYfx is a creativity toolkit that enables Metacafe viewers to personalize their entertainment experiences by adding dialog bubbles, photos, webcam video, clip art, subtitles and more to videos. Once you’ve personalized a video, you can save it with a unique URL and even send it to your friends directly from the Metacafe video player. PLYfx is currently in beta testing, but anyone can check it out by clicking the “Enable PLYfx” button embedded in this Metacafe blog post.

EG: The opportunities to monetize online video are rapidly increasing across many of the top video sharing sites, how does Metacafe allow the video producer to monetize their video?

MC: Our Producer Rewards® program was one of the first to pay independent video creators for their work, and we’ve paid well over $1 million to hundreds of creators since the program launched in October of 2006. Any creator can submit a video for consideration, and the basic requirements are simply that it be an original work that is appropriate for and proves entertaining to our large and diverse audience. We pay $5 for every 1,000 views, and the creator gets the first payment for $100 after the video crosses the 20,000 views threshold. We’ve also recently established partnerships with a number of boutique production firms creating short-form content for the web – companies such as 60 Frames, Howcast, Next New Networks, Aniboom and others. These are revenue-sharing based relationships in which we share a percentage of advertising revenue with content creators.

EG: What is the one hint or tip you could share that most people creating videos fail to realize or include in the production or launching of their video on Metacafe? What makes the difference between a good video with a handful of views and a great video with thousands of views?

MC: There’s no magic formula, but a few tips for success:

• Capture the viewer’s attention immediately – In short-form entertainment, you need to get into the action right away. Lead with the punch line and keep it punchy throughout.
• Do something original – Viewers are always looking for something new. Amaze us!
• Keep it short – The average video on Metacafe is 90 seconds long. We don’t accept anything longer than 10 minutes, and we find that viewers start dropping off after 3 minutes or so.
• Make a high-quality production – You don’t need expensive equipment, but you should spend the time to ensure your video looks and sounds good. Write a script. Use a microphone. Light your set.
• Package your video well – A video’s title, tags, description and thumbnail make the difference between a video that stands out from the crowd and one that gets lost in a sea of content. Be thorough and accurate in creating the metadata for your video to ensure it reaches the right viewers and meets their expectations.

EG: What is coming down the pipe from Metacafe to stay ahead of the game or enhance the user experience?

MC: One of the big things we’re focused on right now is rolling out Wikicafe - a mass collaboration platform that empowers our community to edit video metadata. The feature is currently in beta testing with our registered users, and we’ll be officially launching the feature later this summer. I really can’t emphasize enough how critical thorough and accurate titles, tags, descriptions and other information about a video are. The challenges of video search are well documented, and we think Wikicafe will help address many of these problems. Ultimately, it’s about matching the right videos with the right viewers – and the right advertisers with those viewers. We’re serious about engaging our community every step of the way, and Wikicafe is a natural next step in our people-powered programming approach.

EG: Thanks Michelle!