Vidmeter can supposedly tell you. Launched in late December (I think the 30th to be exact), Vidmeter crawls the top 10 video sites (Break.com, Daily Motion, Google, iFilm, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, vSocial, Yahoo, and Youtube) and ranks the videos to determine the most popular.

Vidmeter

First, Vidmeter’s software automatically records the numbered of views and comments from the top listed videos once per hour. Their editors then merge similar videos on multiple websites (for example an SNL skit that was uploaded multiple times).

It then automatically ranks videos for the day by counting the difference between that day’s view total and the previous day’s view total. The most viewed videos are the most popular and ranked highest. The final step is the latest view and comment counts are set as the “all time” counts for the videos and they are ranked accordingly.

The accuracy of the view counts has been questioned due to the disparacy of the different services and their definition of a view. From the WSJ:

For instance, every time someone clicks play on a video at vSocial Inc., a site that aims to sell premium video services to businesses, it counts as a view, even if the video playback is stopped immediately, and even if there were multiple clicks from that same computer on the same day, Chief Executive Mark Sigal told me. Yet on Revver, a site that shares ad revenue with users who upload videos, a view is only counted if the viewer watches all the way through and downloads an ad at the end. The site also tries to put a cap on multiple views from the same computer by monitoring Internet protocol addresses, a spokeswoman said.

With that being said – it’s still strikes me a useful tool to get a quick and dirty idea of what’s hot in video right now (for free). As a marketer, there are a lot of interesting parts about a site like vidmeter:

  1. I can get a good general idea of what’s hot today without having to sift through a whole bunch of sites. This helps to adapt our own video initiatives.
  2. I like the honesty. Let’s face it – sex sells and if you look at a lot of the top videos they are definitely adult only. A welcome change from Google or Yahoo’s lists of the most popular search terms.
  3. Great to see quick results.
  4. It’s a great example of building a cool site and giving people a reason to link to you.

Since it’s Friday – check out the top video of all-time (or for the 7 days they have been tracking):


Posted by Chris Winfield at 1:01 pm
Bookmark this post:
Comments