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.

That’s great to get feedback, and I’ve finally been able to have a Hotspot graph for this video. Some fact that could be interpreted from this data :
- The video is hot : more people keep watching and rewatching than leave. That’s a good sign, I didn’t loose my time, I lost other people’s time
- The intro is a bit long : I knew it, but it’s important to set the mood and create anticipation. Plus the viewer doesn’t have much choice watching, the whole video is loading, the challenge is after that, you have to follow with something really strong otherwise there will probably be a big drop.
- The cave part brings interest : in this part the music is very different from the original track, that’s probably why people want to check that again.
- The outtro is quite hot : It can be that people are jumping a the end, to check if there’s something more interesting, or maybe want to check again the little text they didn’t have time to read. But I don’t really know why it’s so high.

Next youtube insight update, it will show a heat map of where people are looking on the video I can keep dreaming

I decided I had to remix this cool Empire of the Sun video on top of the remix. So I did it
Hope you like it !

This is one of the most impressive videos of the MODERAT show. You certainly don’t want to miss it. Peace.

Moderat “Rusty Nails” from Pfadfinderei on Vimeo.

Unplanned, I went to the show of Moderat (Modeselektor + Apparat + Pfadfinderei) in Montreal. And they crafted a pretty good scene experience. Pretty solid minute by minute show, very progressive. Modeselektor and Pfadfinderei have collaborated before and you can see that clearly.
My first impressions (somehow important) where that the music has some resemblance to Boards of Canada (great), and the visual, except being mostly based on abstract real footage, reminded me of the good old demoscene time in its progressive style (please stay with me reference below ).

Here is the teaser of the show : http://www.vimeo.com/3837671

The video just teases you but if it works you can find all the videos of the show with previews on iTunes : here.
And there is a DVD available at retail (who uses that, now ? )

So about the demoscene, here is one of the best intros of the kind : Rise by Mindforce and Park studios

Here’s a little playlist, including some of the best Halcyon work and Kosmoplovci, there is no youtube video of minimalanimal, at your own risk ). There are much more so feel free to complete it.