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| Heatmap showing attention on thumbnail |
Since Google introduced universal search a few years ago, hardly a search goes by without a large proportion of users being tempted to click on those video thumbnails. And click we do. Eye tracking studies confirm that these thumbnails get deliver healthy clickthrough rates as you can see from this heatmap showing how much attention is focused around the thumbnail on a Google search.
Given the power and influence that YouTube has over both our search behaviour and more generally our overall web consumption, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what people are searching for when they arrive there.
This first post in a series focuses mostly on the broad categories by comparison. Future posts (when I get around to it) will show deeper insights and peculiarities around what we’re looking for on YouTube.
Ten things you never knew about YouTube
1. Kate Middleton is the 100th most popular search term on YouTube.
2. “Peppa Pig” is the third most popular search, with almost twice as many searches as “Lady gaga”.
3. “Justin Bieber” is the most popular artist, followed by “Adele” and “Rihanna”. He receives ten times as many searches as “Rebecca Ferguson” of The X Factor.
4. There’s about the same number of searches for “How to lose weight” as there are for “How to gain weight”
5. “Doctor Who” is about as popular in search demand as “Kate Middleton”.
6. Searches around the Lego franchises like “Lego Star Wars” are huge - about the same amount as those around “...Sport...” and more than those around “...Funny...”.
7. “Anne Widdecombe Strictly Come Dancing” attracted the same level of search interest as “Apple iPad”.
8. There are as many searches for “Funniest thing ever” as for “Gillian McKeith Faints”.
9. Searches for “How to apply eyeliner” are equal to those for "How to w$nk" and twice as popular as “How to annoy people on Black Ops”.
10. There are more than three times as many people looking for ways to convert YouTube material as there are searching for anything "official".
10. There are more than three times as many people looking for ways to convert YouTube material as there are searching for anything "official".
Scroll down for the Top 100 Most popular searches on YouTube.
About the data
The data is from 100,000 searches performed by UK users arriving at YouTube from search engines over a one year period, ending October 2011. It is from Hitwise, so it’s robust.
I created some deliberately broad clusters (or categories) – things that leapt out at me when studying the data. The combined volume of these groups amounts to around 20 per cent of the 100,000 searches, so while it’s just the tip of the iceberg, I think it’s interesting.
I’ve stuck to common cultural interests and themes and have tried to clean as much junk out of my clusters as possible in order to maintain integrity. For example, in the ‘Life & Death’ cluster I filtered out variants of ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’ so as to avoid skewing the data. Similarly, the ‘Films’ slice in ‘Moving Images’ includes movies.
The bar chart shows comparative search volume between each of these defined categories, so we can immediately see that ‘Moving Images’ and ‘Music’ categories attract the largest share of search volume. More surprising is that the five artists selected to comprise the ‘Music Artists’ category, are roughly equivalent in search volume to all ‘Games’ related searches, which confirms how powerful YouTube is in terms of exposure for popular artists.
Method
The approach is to filter the 100,000 searches by a given word, say “Winehouse”, and to count the combined number of searches including that word. This reveals underlying search demand and allows us to look beyond the surface of the most popular searches (or the head of the long tail - or those top 100 above if you like).
About the Wordles
Each of the Wordles gives an impression of how frequently a single word has appeared in a category. Where it seemed appropriate, I removed top-level categories in order to look beyond the more obvious and highly generic words. For example in the Music category, the word ‘music’ was filtered out of the Wordle to allow some less generic words to surface.
Top 100 searches over the last year
| 1- justin bieber 2- adele 3- peppa pig 4- rihanna 5- cher lloyd 6- radio 1 7- sex 8- annoying orange 9- cheryl cole 10- nicki minaj 11- mp3 converter 12- katy perry 13- rebecca black 14- jessie j 15- top 40 uk 16- adele someone like you 17- lady gaga 18- nursery rhymes 19- bruno mars 20- eminem 21- tom and jerry 22- mr bean 23- les paul 24- charts 25- translator 26- jls 27- fred 28- ed sheeran 29- iphone 5 30- royal wedding 31- matt cardle 32- radio 1 playlist 33- selena gomez 34- one direction 35- black ops 36- hit 40 uk 37- arsenal 38- amy winehouse 39- japan tsunami 40- spiderman 41- yogscast 42- swagger jagger 43- lego star wars 44- michael jackson 45- beyonce 46- go outdoors 47- harry potter and the deathly hallows part 2 48- charlie chaplin 49- bluexephos 50- thomas the tank engine |
51- the wanted 52- mickey mouse clubhouse 53- charlie sheen 54- fireman sam 55- mickey mouse 56- susan boyle 57- ladslads 58- glee 59- eurovision 2011 60- tinie tempah 61- eastenders 62- susanna reid 63- transformers 3 64- boobs 65- cars 2 67- convert youtube to mp3 68- ellie goulding 69- front 70- call of duty black ops 71- willow smith 72- vue 73- fifa 12 74- eurovision 75- inbetweeners movie trailer 76- teletubbies 77- pingu 79- cinema 80- katy b 81- miley cyrus 82- horrid henry 83- modern warfare 3 84- 2 girls 1 cup 85- pokemon 86- taylor swift 87- gummy bear song 88- pottermore 89- chris brown 90- xhamster 91- freddie mercury 92- twinkle twinkle little star 93- doctor who 94- radio 1 chart 95- chatroulette 96- itv 97- power rangers 98- harry potter and the deathly hallows 99- qwop 100- kate middleton |
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