How Fan Videos Helped Sell Adele’s “Hello”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that having a good video to accompany it can really help a song to gain popularity, as seems to have been the case with fan copies of the video for Adele's "Hello" according to recent analysis.
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Guest Post by Bobby Owsinski on Music 3.0
We all know how powerful video can be when it comes to having a hit, but a recent analysis of Adele’s “Hello” by Pexeso really drives the point home that video copies play a huge part in fan awareness. The site tracked the hit song over a period of 101 days, starting on its October 22nd release date on YouTube, and found out a lot about the popularity of video on various social platforms.
- First of all, more than 60,000 copies of “Hello” were found across eight popular social media platforms. 45% were published on YouTube, while Facebook accounted for 29% of copies, followed by Vine, which accounted for 12.9%.
- Even though Facebook had far fewer copies published than YouTube, Facebook still garnered over 2x more video views than YouTube. According to the site, Facebook racked up an average of 73,083 views per video, whereas each YouTube video of the song amassed an average of 23,095 views per video . Vine actually ranked higher than YouTube, with an average of 49,904 views per video. Of course, as you’ve seen by my recent article on the subject, all platforms measure what a view is differently, with Facebook being particularly generous in that regard.
- Facebook was the leader in terms of engagement though, with 41,436,124 cumulative likes and shares on all video copies, and 15,634,315 on the original. Believe it or not, Google+ came in at second place with 1,715,636 engagements on video copies and 1,496,299 on the original. While it may seem a little lopsided that copies of the song beat out the official uploaded song, remember that there were far more user-generated copies available. One thing here that was surprising is that copies of the music video received over 2.5x more engagement than the source video over the course of the survey.
- Speaking of copies, the official video was copied and uploaded extremely fast. It took just 2 minutes and 7 seconds after “Hello’s” music video was published to Adele’s VEVO channel on YouTube for the first copy to appear on Facebook. It took slightly longer for YouTube, at 3 minutes and 12 seconds later. 18 minutes and 48 seconds after its initial release, the first Vine clip of “Hello” surfaced.
- Despite all you hear about YouTube and the record labels being tough on piracy, only 16.9% of the 60,055 copies of “Hello” that were located were removed via takedown request. 36% of those takedowns came via YouTube, but they accounted for only 13% of the 27,033 total copies published to the site.
This is indeed a strange new video world we live in that’s asymmetrical in nature. It can’t be assumed that the results on one platform will be matched by another, or that one is better than another. One thing’s for sure, if the fans like your song or music video, it will for sure make it’s way onto every available social platform available.
[photograph: Egghead06 via Wikipedia]
