MDF(smash)

Rocketboom: 125 Million Served

spytap:

moth:

This is a big deal. Rocketboom’s been going strong, what, six years? And keeps growing, evolving, launching new sites and shows, and finding new audiences, and it’s served at least 125 million views (I’m sure it’s much more, and Andrew’s being modest and conservative). That said, Andrew’s right: it’s not the number of your views that counts as much as the value of the audience you’re connecting with. 

One thing I wish we’d mentioned in all our Next New Networks billion view celebrating (and there’s still time to fix that) is that we also have around 2 million subscribers on YouTube, iTunes, and email, and our average rating on sites like YouTube is a little over 4.0 (on a 1 to 5 scale). That’s across 1 billion views, and 8,000 videos, and hundreds of thousands of ratings from viewers. And that’s an incredibly important metric: the love factor. Rocketboom, like many of the web series that inspired me to get in this business, has that in spades. Sponsors take note… people don’t watch web series because they’re what’s on, and there’s nothing better to do, like TV. They seek them out, and they love them.

dembot:

Congrats to Next New Networks on reaching a Billion views, that’s quite a few views! We just went through the exercise of putting together stats on views served here at Rocketboom and couldn’t get to an exact #. Greg spent a couple of weeks on past logs, we interpolated a bit on some early data, and when we came up with a general range, we decided to go ahead and pick the lowest number of the low end of the range just to be confident, and set our markers.

Rocketboom has served over 125 Million videos views to date.

One thing thats important to remember about video views is that they are becoming less and less of an indicator of how well your media is doing. While we have never bought a single view, it’s common place for companies to buy views, and this essentially hacks the system in a negative way for everyone. 100k views for only $189 is a pretty good deal. Another common view inflation trick occurs when companies buy banner ad traffic for pennies, which drives traffic to videos ads that sell for dollars. It’s a lot like Twitter where you can often see the scams more transparently, and the value of the content and the audience is not really of concern. The web is infested with spam accounts that are created for the sole intent of manufacturing traffic.

I used to blog regularly about Rocketboom updates, and market updates, and then it kinda fell by the wayside as the company has grown and I’ve just gotten busier and busier, a typical excuse. While the world has certainly changed over the last several years with regards to more audiences and more predictable content online, surprisingly, the market is still developing rather slowly and it’s often much more deformed than it appears — I’ll try to chime in here with more comments more often.

Go Andrew, and go Rocketboom!

Emphasis mine, and congrats to both companies!