Over 100,000 YouTube views in less than a week, some insights

The idea was simple, the timing was perfect.

A woman in England dumped a real cat in a wheelie bin, was caught on cctv and the footage ended up on YouTube and then national TV.

The Kilkenny hurling team, known as ‘The Cats’ were hoping to make history by beating Tipperary to win 5 All Ireland Championships in a row.

Smack bang in the middle of these two headline news events I came up with a simple idea ‘film someone dumping a ‘Kilkenny cat’ in a wheelie bin’.

The next day, Friday, I drove deep inside ‘enemy lines’ to purchase said cat. I toyed with the idea of getting someone well known to perform the dastardly deed. Perhaps a well known Tipperary hurler dressed in drag or similar. I thought about it for a while and decided it best to keep it close to the original video footage and ’employ’ the services of an unknown woman (nationally at least).

Cue my mother. “Ma I want to video you throwing a cat in a wheelie bin” I said. “For what”, was her confused reply. I explained what I had in mind and this was the result.

On Monday evening 30th August I uploaded the video to my YouTube channel and then posted to my Tipp Tatler Facebook page and then shared through my personal page. I was banking on family and friends and relations who knew my mother Noreen picking up on it and sharing it further. I knew it was quite good and would probably do the rounds of Borrisoleigh and maybe a bit more as she is a popular woman and much liked by all who come in contact with her, and little did I realise her exceptional acting abilities. I had no idea it would go to the 120,000+ viewers that it now stands at or would be featured in so much of the mainstream traditional media and linked to on dozens of websites.

I think the video is beautifully simple (not that I’m biased or anything). But the screenplay, if you like, has all the main ingredients of the original video with some extras thrown in. The solitary wheelie bin at the beginning and end of the clip, the arrival and departure of the woman caught on camera, the stroking of the cat, the binning of the cat (which happens to be from Kilkenny) and the coup de grace the catchphrase ‘Five in a Row My Arse!”, language unbecoming of a mature lady some might think. All captured in 17 seconds. The fact that practically all of the country was hoping for a Tipperary win possibly also helped.

YouTube have a thing called ‘Insights’ where you can analyse statistics like who’s watching your video, their age, what they are watching it on, how they came to watch it etc. If you’re interested in that kind of thing read on, if not, tune out now.

Statistics on the location of the video.ie. Where was the video viewed, shows that
53.3% on YouTube
31.8% on an Embedded Player (where the video is on a site other than YouTube, eg Facebook, Tipp Tatler etc.)
14.6% on Mobile Devices
.32% YouTube Channel Pages

Facebook without doubt won the embedded player contest with 28.8% of the views on embedded players coming from there. Followed by Boards.ie 0.69%, Newstalk.ie 0.44% and Tipp Tatler 0.32% (Yeah, yeah, there I go plugging it again, well tough :))

The demographical statistics are also quite interesting.
Broken down by sex the video was viewed by 64% Male 36% Female.
The larger male % is probably explained by the video associated with a predominantly male sport.

The video was viewed more by the over 35’s than the young whipper snappers.
More than half the viewers were aged between 35 and 54.

13-17yrs 10%
18-24yrs 12.05%
25-34yrs 15.55%
35-44yrs 26.81%
45-54yrs 23.60%
55-64yrs 9.66%
65+yrs 2.28%

The Hot Spots chart is pretty nifty I think.
It tracks the audience attention by watching where viewers tune out or rewind a particular piece to watch it again. A red vertical line moves along as the video plays so you know at what point viewers enjoyed most. The graph below shows the audience attention was in the hot zone throughout. I guess the length of 17 seconds made it easy enough to accomplish that.

Some other, what I think are interesting, points are
When it was at 14,500 views I had a look at the insights and the % for viewing on mobile devices was 21%.

While the 35-44yrs group was still the biggest % of viewers, the 25-34yrs was slightly more than the 45-54yrs.

The day after I caught those figures was the day that the story appeared in the newspapers and was mentioned on radio etc. This suggests to me that the traditional media sources drove an older demographic who were less likely to have smart phones to search for the video online. This is further borne out by the statistics of the number of visitors to the Tipp Tatler website through various combinations of the search words Tipperary, woman, cat, bin, Kilkenny etc. which increased significantly towards the end of the week.

I was tempted as it was growing in popularity to edit the video online, as YouTube allows, and maybe add in some reference to the Tipp Tatler magazine but decided against it, as I didn’t want to interfere with what appeared to be a winning combination. In any case, a lot of the national media mentioned the Tipp Tatler along with a local paper and ourselves of course. Our YouTube channel is linked to our website, but that reference would be lost viewing it embedded on other sites. If doing something similar again however I would be sure to put in some subtle hint of who was behind it. Hindsight is a great thing.

It’s been an unusual but fun week, the phones didn’t stop ringing from when the papers came out on the Thursday with The Independent, The Star and The Evening Herald all with some mention of it and a radio interview with Ray D’Arcy on TodayFM, followed on Saturday with another interview with Marian Finucane on Radio1. I’d like to thank my mother for being such a good sport and for capturing the hearts of so many people.

But do you know what topped it all?

Tipperary won the match! All Ireland Hurling Champions 2010! 🙂