Our Videos at One Year: Facts and Figures

Well, as of today it has been exactly one year since all this video craziness began.  On April 22, 2007 we published RSS in Plain English.  We never guessed these videos would take us so far - it was just a problem that begged to be solved.  Did you ever see a blog post with the same name from 2004?

Since our work is in front of people often, we both feel a little self conscious in talking about the numbers behind the videos. We don't want to seem ostentatious or too self-promotional.  But, at the same time, I think that exposing some of the figures provides context and hopefully examples of the power of Social Media.

So, let's take a look.

First, please note that the #s of views are rounded and cumulative across hosts. A single video exists in multiple places and those views are added together.  These numbers comes from our accounts on You Tube, Blip.tv and dotSUB.  We use other hosts, but these are our core.

Totals April 2007-April 2008: 

Total views (including client work):  3.9 million views
Total views (excluding client work): 2.4 million views

Most viewed Client Video: Google Maps for Mobile 834,000 views (includes UK version)

Most viewed Show Video: RSS in Plain English: 755,000 views

Breakdown of Views by Video (Common Craft Show only):

RSS: 755,000
Wiki: 436,000
Social Networking: 207,000
Social Bookmarking: 205,000
CFL Lightbulbs: 53,000
Zombies: 280,000
Blogs: 169,000
Photo Sharing: 42,000
Twitter: 223,000
Podcasting: 5,000 (published 2 days ago)

Breakdown of views by host (Show only):

You Tube: 1.3 million views
Blip.tv (embedded on our site):  772,000
dotSUB: 300,000

Incoming Links from Blogs

We would not have become popular without bloggers.  We've always aimed to create useful resources that bloggers can use to educate others.  One way that we track usage by bloggers is Technorati.

According to Technorati (today) for CommonCraft.com:

Technorati Authority: 3,040 (incoming links over 6 months)
Technorati Rank: 170 (170th most linked-to)
Blog Reactions: 15,000+

Here's how "Blog Reactions" looks across videos (rank/authority isn't always available)

RSS: 462
Wiki: 786
Social Networking: 452
Social Bookmarking: 560
CFL Lightbulbs: 45
Zombies: 151
Blogs: 444
Photo Sharing:100
Twitter: 535
Podcasting: 34

Search Results 

We've been surprised to appear on the first page of Google searches for these terms:

RSS
Wikis
Social Networking
Social Bookmarking
Zombies
Twitter

Our SEO secret? Make content people want to see. 

Language Translations:

One of the resources that has been very important to us dotSUB - a free way for our videos to be translated into multiple languages via subtitles.  We're so excited by these language figures:

RSS: 27 Languages
Wiki: 30 Languages
Social Networking: 25 Languages
Social Bookmarking: 18 Languages
CFL Lightbulbs: 12 Languages
Blogs: 20 Languages
Photo Sharing: 9 Languages
Twitter: 15 Languages
Podcasting: 4 Languages

So, this past year has been a blast and something we never expected.  We just make the videos - you share with friends, you link, you view. We owe you - big time.  That's what I love about the social web - everyone contributes a bit and those bits roll up to bring visibility to content that may have never been discovered otherwise.  Thank you so much for an awesome year!