online video analytics company. I met Eugene Lee at the Snowcial conference in South Lake Tahoe a few years ago. He’s passionate about snowboarding, video, data and dancing with MC Hammer. So he sent me some interesting data from ChannelMeter on who watches travel videos on YouTube and how well they perform.
Here’s what they did
- They took a random sample of 5 million travel related videos posted to YouTube in the last 12 months.
- Then sifted out the best quality, most viewed, most liked and most commented of those travel videos.
- Extracted the top 100 and analyzed them.
Here’s what they found
Travel videos are well liked. Makes sense. These videos are OVERWHELMINGLY liked.
The best travel videos come from 4 types of creators. Travel destinations are creating videos, and other travel agencies are creating travel guide videos. On the consumer end, users are creating and posting their own videos and those videos are doing quite well comparitavely, which is interesting considering that most people don’t spend any money marketing content from their vacation. The 4th creator type is people posting review videos.
You can map these videos to two types of behavior. 1) Users are watching the destination and guide videos to research their next trip. 2) People posting the user generated and travel tips videos are sharing their experience. More on how these activities fit into the travel buying process in Rob Gaedtke’s presentation here.
The way I see it, people researching a trip need the value of the trip proved in advance, not just the value of that specific trip, but any trip. Which is why it’s less important to showcase, for example, the difference between a powder day at Vail vs a powder day at Aspen, than just to show the awesomeness of a powder day alongside your branding. Once we see it, we’ll get the rush of remembering our own similar experiences and the possibilities are proven, and the positive emotions brought up by the content are associated with the brand who evoked them.
Who is watching the best travel videos? Middle aged men. This is the demographic most likely able to afford a nice vacation experience. So taking the time and effort to market directly to them is worth it.
Views of travel videos posted to YouTube overwhelmingly (60%) come directly from YouTube.
YouTube Views
- 23%: search [YouTube is 2nd largest search engine]
- 12%: related videos [similar videos, consistent metadata]
External Views
- 14%: embedded or linked on creator’s site [your blog is important]
- 11% embedded view 3% clicked through for more
- 16%: outside sites [external sites syndicating good content]
- 17%: mobile [more than from Facebook (7%)]
More on the elements of an experience video tomorrow (OK Monday)…
-M
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