Music Videos Rule The Roost

Recently, for a client’s need I set out to find which types of videos are more popular on the web. Prima facie, music videos appear to hold more promise than the other types. Unfortunately however, my client’s videos are not about music, but that is another story. Curiosity gets the better of my other works on hand, and I decide to dig in for more information on popular video types.

It is always an enigma to identify what actually works on the web and what doesn’t. Since people look for information mainly beginning with search engines, there is at least no doubt that the search giants know what exactly are people looking for, in what numbers, from what area, and so on.

Do search engines share those information? The answer is both yes and no. Yes, because tools like Google AdWords Keyword Tool gives you the country-wise and global search figures for various search terms used by the surfers. No, because the question that hammers the mind is how reliable are they.

The doubt about Google Keyword Tool’s apparently discrepant figures is not a product of my brain. Recently in this article, author Gary Shannon points out that Google has quietly updated the tool’s accuracy in providing the search figures.

Music Videos Most Popular On YouTube

In the article on YouTube marketing, I’ve quoted data from a couple of studies that confirm that music is the most popular category in the video sharing site, having nearly a third of the total share (30.7% in actual found by the Sysomos study; see the image below). The same view is expressed by David Burch of TubeMogul, the big online video distribution facilitator. He puts the share of music videos at 31.9%, coming as they do from the top five music labels.

More Search Figures

Google Keyword Tool (more on keyword research using this tool), is convenient to find demographic search data, so let us find out what we can reveal using the tool.

I’ve used the exact phrase search for all the keywords that came up in response to the search for the seed word, video. The figures that come up offer a fascinating study, to say the least. The following partial image for Germany is a part of the search exercise.

For the location United States, the phrase ‘music videos’ is the second most popular, just after ‘video’, and having 201,000 monthly searches and 3,350,000 global searches to its credit. On further probing, I find that the phrase ‘music videos’ or ‘music video’ appear 42 times in the top 50 keyword phrases listed. This is awesome, no doubt.

I spend some more time to see how the figures stand for other locations/countries using the Google Keyword Tool. Even if there are flaws – as some would say there are – a like-to-like comparison is always better to seek meaning from the data we get.

Here are the figures in the following table:

Conclusion

It is obvious that the love for online video is the maximum in the United States than any other country. Is that because of entrepreneurial spirit in that country? Perhaps.

The popularity of music video is however apparent from the number of times the phrase appears in the top-50 searches. This also proves the veracity of the findings by Sysomos in the pie-chart above.

In that case what can you as a web video maker do to reap some benefits? In my understanding, there isn’t much that the average video maker can do – and that includes this site as well – unless there is something in the site about music videos that can engage the viewers.