The Visualist

Ok, it’s been more than a month since I’ve posted the Standing On the Shore video remix on Youtube as an experiment with Insight features.
Since my last post, the video has been mostly promoted through Youtube search, social networks, and what Youtube calls viral.
Viewer attention curve (Hotspot) has evolved little but mostly accentuating the scale of the curve.

The number of views has been in constant (slow) progression, but 2 days ago, the numbers exploded (+200%).

The reason : Search rank, the video passed from 6th to 1st position in the search query : “standing on the shore remix”. I don’t know what triggered the change on Youtube, but I have some theories

(note that sources info are one day late compared to view counts)

This video had a big attention number, almost 90% of people that started the video stays to the end. A reason for that is that it addresses hardcore users that where interested enough in the topic to look at result #6 and stay until the end. I also noticed during this period, attention of viewers during the slow intro part dropped below average, like I expected a previous post.

• Theory #1 : Attention results of videos are analyzed by Youtube expert system on a regular basis, and it saw that the performance of this video was good compared to other results, and it promoted it to #1.
• Theory #2 : Youtube shuffles the order of results to make the content feel new.

Based on my user usage of Youtube, my bet is that it’s probably a bit of both, and it’s probably handled in a scoring system (what did you expect from google ?).

So now, what are the changes I expect :

• On the sources : I expect more viral, because it seemed that viral was proportional to the number of views (with a 1 or 2 days delay). So we’ll see if a viral explosion happens, or not
• On the attention curve : Now that the video is #1 in search results, people brought to video will probably be more casual, and have less time to spend on a video, so I expect attention to drop a little, this is probably what google expects too, their goal is to challenge video performance to make good videos stand out. The curve has started to flatten, maybe it will just even all parts of the video.

Too bad we cannot split-test videos on youtube, that would be fun to see the results of a video without the intro part.
Anyway, insight is an amazing tool that will help video expert improve their content each time.

Hey, it’s been a while I didn’t post about music.
My friend Tresh who signed with a label (Krispy Beatz Records) recently and still has some of the coolest remixes in town

Hybrid – Blackout (Tresh’s Sci-Fi Breaks Mix)
Duplex – Homework Aeromix (Original by Daft Punk)
Chris Cornell – You Know My Name (Tresh\'s Royale 7 Mix)

I’ve been playing these songs on the game Audiosurf (which is available for $2.49 today), and it gives an good mash-up style feeling.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn.

It’s incredible how fast internet has been growing, a few years ago it was rare to have a personal website, now it’s incredibly common to have a blog page. So I did an update to fit a more common way of exposing information.

I will share thoughts and information on the following topics : game development, entertainment (music, movies, games, web), people, probably anything what interests me. The name of the blog is The Visualist.
Right now the web site presented is just quick and dirty install of Word Press (which looks great). I will put all the previously available information in the new structure, it will take some time, but I hope it will migrate nicely.

As a conclusion, I would quote Julius Caesar : “Recommencer, ce n’est pas refaire.” (Restart is not remake)