Today we are approaching the answer to this question with an analysis of the demography of commenters on YouTube. For this, we have randomly picked 2,120 videos from YouTube, for which we found 36,459 comments. That’s an average of roughly 17 comments per video, but note that this number doesn’t mean much because the random 2,120 videos include ones that have no comments as well as ones with several thousands of comments. Since YouTube doesn’t actually expose more than 1,000 comments per video, we had to limit the analysis of the comments per video to 1,000.

Out of the 36,459 randomly picked comments that were analysed 21,464 were by male commenters, 9,914 by female commenters. The remaining 5,081 commenters did not expose their gender.

Gender of commenters on YouTube

Even if all the commenters that did not expose their gender were female (which is unlikely) – the clear majority of commenters are male.

Now let’s look at the age distribution. Out of the 36,459 randomly picked comments 26,668 provided their age. The distribution of ages is given in the next graph.

Age distribution of commenters on YouTube

The graph provides the exact age distribution as given by the commenters. Assuming they have all been truthful, we arrive at an average age of commenters of 27.59 years, i.e. the majority of commenters (namely 50.4%) are below 28 years of age.

Age distribution of commenters with 50% marked

Details of the distribution are found in this table:

Age distribution of commenters

Now, you will have noticed that out of the 36,459 randomly picked comments that were analysed, interestingly 326 declared to be over the age of 100 and the graph clearly spike for over 100 year-olds. We cannot easily make decisions about whether people have provided a misleading age or not, but for those over 100 it is a fair estimate to say that are incorrect. Since they create an unfair bias in the statistics, we also provide the analysis with ages above 100 removed.

Age distribution of commenters less than 100 years old

Now the average age of comment authors has come down to 26.6 and 52.93% of commenters are less than 27, 75% less than 36 years old.

The largest number of comments has been posted by 22 year old males (6.5%). As our initial gut feeling was the most commenters on YouTube are males between 15 and 25, this analysis has confirmed the gender and roughly the age group: the majority of commenters are between 13 and 27 years old.

We have no explanation for the weird shape of the graph which has a strong dip at 18 years and an unexpected peak at 29 years. This may well just be a problem with the small data set that we used, or there may be some fact to explain this. If you have any theories for these values, please leave a comment. We intend to undertake a broader analysis over more videos and comments in the future and may even be able to test your theories.

If you are not publishing videos in social networks online, you are missing an opportunity to extend the impact of your brand online.

The situation with video is comparable to the beginning of the Web. Then, only the big brands were quick to embrace the new medium and have a representation on it – mostly a simple Website that re-enforced the existence of the company and its brands online and provided information for the online community. Web presence matured over time as the medium became mainstream, and it spread out to smaller organisations and brands.

Now, 15 years later, we are at the beginning of another era: video has become a medium online. For many, YouTube has become their default entry into the Web and they spend most of their time online on YouTube. For the majority, YouTube is the dominant search engine and the second largest search engine after Google overall.

What do people find when they search for your brand on YouTube? Go and try it out – you may be surprised what your community is posting about you! Would a YouTube user find your message amongst all the other chitter-chatter? What impact will that have on your brand?

Some of the larger brands understand. There are some very good YouTube brand channels online. For example, check out the Nike Football channel. With 8,326 subscribers, it is the number one most subscribed sponsor channel of all time. It hosts 207 videos of diverse football highlights involving Nike. Or look at a new channel like the MINI channel which already has 41 videos after only having been created on the 1st January 2009.

In Australia, other than the political parties and bloggers, not many YouTube channels have been set up. Probably the best are Cricket Australia, XXXX, and Tooheys. Comparing just the two beer brands, it is easy to notice that Tooheys uses the channel just for re-publishing TVCs, while XXXX uses it to create brand engagement – a difference that is also reflected in the number of videos, subscribers, channel views, and friends.

Why are they spending money on social video?

Video has huge advantages over other content. Videos are able to provide a direct and rememberable explanation of what a brand stands for – much more so than text or pictures. Video is therefore twice as effective for conversion actions than text only. An Australian study showed that 57% of online users have watched online videos before making a purchase decision.

But not only does video help in the actual act of selling. Video also has an advantage when it comes to exposure to eyeballs on the Web. In Google universal search, video is 50 times more likely than other Web content to turn up on the first search result page. Yes, you read correctly: 50 times more likely – just think about all the SEO that you’d have to do with other content to have such an effect. On top of that, users are more likely to click on the video thumbnails on the Google result page than on any other results – the thumbnails are strong in directing eyeballs.

Now that we’ve seen the upsides of video, you will ask yourself what the kind of content may be that you should publish about your brand. What would be the purpose of publishing video to social networks? Video is a communication channel like any other. You can use it for any brand strategy that you may be preparing. You might consider creating videos to launch a new brand, to diversify an existing brand, to educate about products, or to start a conversation with your customers.

Here are some examples of what companies have used their YouTube channels for:

• Nikon Australia use theirs to provide tutorials and product demonstrations
• Qantas provides facts about the company and their TVCs
• Doritos Australia use it to run an ad competition
• AXE provide funny content
• Sun Microsystems publishes a vlog that includes interviews of executives

My recommendation is not just to upload the videos to YouTube, but also to pick some other social networks that focus more on your actual target audience, e.g. Dailymotion for a European focus or Break.com for a young males focus. Also make sure to consider your release strategy and video SEO to reach a maximum number of eyeballs for your content. And finally: don’t forget to measure your success over and over again – with metrics tools like Vquence’s VQmetrics service you can learn which content and strategy works for your audience and which doesn’t. It is such attention to numbers that Natalie Tran who publishes Australia’s most subscribed YouTube channel reckons has helped her make it such a success.

The report analyses global trends for how users interact with online media and make recommendations for how advertisers should should react to them.

Of course they had to point out the explosion of social video use in the past few years and recommend increased use of social media and video to advertisers.

But what really impressed me was that they actually took their own recommendations and applied them to their own marketing strategy: the report was published on a blog with a YouTube video showing Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank explaining the report.

It’s only one of two videos that they have posted to TheNielsenCompany channel, so it’s a new phenomenon. Yet, it’s what I would call “eat your own dogfood”. Nice work!

BTW: Nielsen should put some video SEO on those YouTube videos! At minimum they should add some links and improve the descriptions.

From a content owner’s perspective, this is a very different way of dealing with video content. Traditionally, video content is monetised directly. Even video ads are typically distributed on the Web on real estate that is either under the control of the content owner or of an advertising agency. Instead, in today’s Web, the power lies in letting go. Letting go of the control of one’s video and in turn receiving more viewers and creating more conversations, which influence the behaviour of consumers.

If content owners are enabled to measure the influence of the videos that they “let go”, there is really no negative side-effect of letting go. A good example of a successful measurement of a social video marketing campaign is at Global Neighborhoods.They used a website and YouTube video to reach their target community, which they had researched well beforehand. In an unusual move, they put all their video assets on YouTube and made them available under a creative commons license to make sure their target audience interacted massively with the content. They started a relationship and a conversation with their target audience, which brought them thousands of customers.

Measurement was a key part of their campaign. Their campaign measurements were extensive and included Web metrics, video metrics, and paper-based customer questionnaires. In the end what mattered was the number of customers for their new product. However, they were able to tell that about 47% of their customers had come to the new product through the Internet.

Further analysis of the video views and comments was undertaken, too, since YouTube provides these measurements. The lessons learnt from these measurements were not shared in the article, but their emphasis on measurment and the impact it had on the positive result is overwhelming.

Injecting video into social networks does not necessarily mean losing control. With the right tools it is possible to monitor what is happening and to be able to become involved in conversations.