By now pretty much everyone with an internet connection has seen or heard or heard about the Gangnam Style video by the South Korean ‘K-Pop’ artist Psy. The massive success not just on YouTube but also on Facebook and Twitter has meant that it has been analyzed to death. But a guest post at HypeBot and an associated Infographic lend a lot of intriguing insights into how we gather and share this type of information.
The most intriguing part for me is that in spite of being a YouTube video, YouTube had the LOWEST engagement of any social site, with many more Facebook ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ and Twitter ‘retweets’ and ‘favorites’. Here are a couple of thoughts about this:
The high number of users who aren’t signed in should be troubling to Google – it has a current policy of stuffing Google+ down everyone’s throat and then reporting numbers as if anyone is actually choosing to use the service … and this is a reminder that people are quite happy to just not log in. As for the external video embedding, that also presents a bit of a quandary – if Google shuts off YouTube embedding, it is very likely that someone else would quickly step in to allow it and reap the benefits. Yet by allowing embedding they are essentially giving advertising eyeballs to another company.
Check out the full infographic:
Oh … and in case you are NOT one of the 1 billion viewers of the video …
