Guest post: What Paul Potts and Susan Boyle teach us about the changing face of social media
Britain’s Got Talent can claim to be the first TV show with a genuinely global audience – thanks to social media. In this guest post, Silvia Pfeiffer from Australian video metrics company Vquence explores the statistics behind Paul Potts and Susan Boyle.
The Paul Potts story
In 2007, Paul Potts was a shy mobile phones salesman with crooked teeth when he stepped onto the stage to fulfill his dream and sing opera.
After his outstanding performance on BGT, his dream came true: his debut album made him a millionaire.
At its time, the Paul Potts story attracted a huge audience on YouTube. Within the first three months, Paul’s main YouTube video reached 10m views. Now, almost two years after its publication, it has reached 50m views, putting it among the top 30 most viewed videos on YouTube ever.
The Susan Boyle story
It is 2009 and the same show has just discovered another opera talent: a month ago, it was the turn of Susan Boyle.
How much has changed with social sharing in the two years since Paul Potts?
Boyle has gained a much larger amount of early public exposure than Potts, with several fan club websites, multiple user-generated YouTube channels, and a great deal more social activity happening around her name. Twitter wasn’t a mass phenomenon two years ago and Facebook had only just started going down that path. So, Paul Potts’ spread relied mostly on IM and email.
In contrast, Boylle’s success is based on all conceivable channels of social networking. This includes Twitter – with a re-tweet from Demi Moore being credited for the quick initial distribution. As a result of all of the chatter, mainstream media have also covered the story – it even appeared in our Australian newspapers. Such an honour was not given to Paul Potts in 2007. But then, YouTube and the social web were not nearly as mainstream as they are now.
The graph above compares the views that the three top performing videos of Susan Boyle, Paul Potts and his runner-up Connie Talbot have had since the 10th June 2007. The graph shows how quickly Susan Boyle was able to catch up with the earlier BGT successes. After only five days Boyle reached the 10m views that it took Potts three months to get. Within two weeks Boyle overtook the 50m views of the Paul Potts video. Two weeks only! If we project this increase forward, the Susan Boyle video even has the potential to overtake the highest performing videos on YouTube ever.
Also note that almost 8m of Potts’ views have originated since Boyle’s video was published – obviously more people are newly discovering the Paul Potts story or going back to it. The Susan Boyle video has given the earlier videos of the same show a new potential for impact.
What is more stunning is when we take a look at the engagement numbers of these three videos.
While the number of views is fairly equally distributed between the three, there is clearly a dominance in engagement figures on Susan Boyle. The number of comments, ratings and favourites is much higher for the 2009 video than the 2007 videos. This implies that people are more familiar with these features and have made them a part of what they do with videos. In particular, they seem to be less shy to leave a comment these days.
Another engagement indicator is the number of video responses that a video receives. The video response feature is a more recently adopted phenomenon. Interestingly, the Potts video has three video responses, Connie Talbot has none, but Susan Boyle has 751! Early users of YouTube didn’t seem to care so much about creating video responses – or when they did, they didn’t mark them as video responses on YouTube.
So, what did people upload as “video responses” to the Susan Boyle video? A brief look reveals that many of these so-called “responses” actually have nothing to do with Susan Boyle and are just trying to exploit her fame with some link love. If this feature continues to be exploited in this way, it won’t be useful much longer. Blame the spammers.
Another measure of engagement comes from counting the number of copies, mash-ups, and discussion videos posted on the social video networks. We have determined the number of related copies and their views by using Vquence’s VQmetrics service which covers videos on YouTube, MySpace.TV, Dailymotion, eBaum’s World, Break.com, and Vimeo. As of 6th May, we determined the following:
We can see that the number of videos uploaded in relation to Susan Boyle has increased ten-fold in comparison to Paul Potts or Connie Talbot from two years ago. This indicates that people are more readily copying or producing new content alongside an existing piece of video.
In just two years, we can see just how rapidly behaviour has changed.
Dr Silvia Pfeiffer is the CEO of Sydney digital video start-up Vquence, which collects social video metrics for marketing campaigns and monitoring purposes through their VQmetrics product.
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I agree with you,that the social network has exploded on the world wide web,and that
television and the printed press is becoming insignificant.The evolving of the social network is incredible.
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Social Media is rapidly evolving.. Old media is has been slowly waking up out of its sleep only to find that in the last 2 years New Media has kicked in Big time. Now the viewer and their friends are in Control… Wait till 4g kicks in Globally and that blended with 3 billion mobiles, social networks and video…. 🙂
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Viewer behaviour has changed, but ITV has have yet to catch up as shown by the commercial opportunities lost in the Boyle scenario. I wrote about this in “Curses, Boyled Again” at http://theprojectfactory.com/curses-boyled-again/
Top line: 100M views of the video…Revenue to ITV and/or YouTube: $0.
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Sure The Revenue is Nill, but you cant put a measure on what it achieves for the Brand Awareness of a Company… Its Phenomenal and Global. Companys would pay through the roof to have 200 million views of 1 video.
Youtube’s value add is an extra 5 million people on their site daily.
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Hi Guy,
Funnily enough, Silvia’s piece originally touched upon the monentisation issue, although we had to edit it for length.
One thing that perhaps underlines the issue of digital versus TV is revenue scale.
For the sake of argument, Susan Boyle – Britain’s Got Talent’s biggest viral hit ever – might have monetised at $2m, if they’d got it right from the beginning. That’s (and I’m guessing a bit here) a single ad break in Coronation Street?
That’s the issue TV seems to be facing.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
My favourite guest article thus far Mumbles.
I wish I could do my assignments about this kind of stuff instead of the rubbish I’m currently researching.
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Which does lead me to ask what your current assignment is, Zac?
Maybe we can help…
Wasn’t it “old media” that “discovered” Susan Boyle, Paul Potts et al?
Sure online went a long way to popularising them globally beyond the localised BGT audience. This explains the larger on-line ‘audience’ than the single British broadcast which drew a measly (NOT!) 11.21 million people live in around a single hour for Susan Boyle (and would even higher when you include DVR playback, news reports , other TV coverage etc.).
On this basis, doesn’t “old media” deserve SOME kudos in this wonderful success story?
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Thanks everyone for your positive comments! Just some small replies here.
Guy Gadney: On the 24th April, ITV actually started their “Britain’s Got Talent 09” channel on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/show?p=AmTY70fF2Ys and uploaded the videos there. These are now the top search results on YouTube. And since this also implies that ITV became a YouTube partner, they are now making money with the ads placed next to these videos. They also disallowed all other videos from embedding very early, so they had quite some leverage against YouTube. So, by now, they are actually making some money and their video is increasing stronger than the one I wrote about here. Still … a pretty late step and more of an afterthought than planned monetisation.
John Grono: I agree that “old media” still has a big influence on the popularity of content. However, if you look at the Paul Potts story from 2 years ago, you can see that Paul Potts was in “old media” in the UK, but not overseas. He made it online overseas, but that didn’t impress “old media” overseas. The picture has massively changed because online is now mainstream. So, as online picked it up, “old media” picked it up, too, and thus further increased the reach. Also, a lot of “old media” is now actually part of online – just look at all the TV shows and newspapers that have an online presence. So, in my opinion, the difference between “old” and “new” media is just not so big any more. “Old media” cannot survive any more unless they also embrace online.
Cheers and feel free to check out other posts on video metrics at our blog.
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Sure… All this evidence makes a compelling argument that social media has gone mainstream. But I think natalie tran nailed the real lesson from the whole episode. And that is that reality tv loves ugly people… 🙂
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Last year, as Yellow Pages and newspaper companies filed for bankruptcy and TV and radio station revenues stalled, their online hybrids “zipped right along,” according to the annual report analyzing Web revenues for 4,353 local media properties representing more than 6,000 individual Web sites in the U.S. and Canada.
http://www.mediapost.com/publi.....aid=105744
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All this discussion of monetizing the Susan Boyle video on Youtube is quite arbitrary. On the official ITV site, I noticed that you sometimes get house ads, so I am assuming they were unable to sell all their inventory. So either their sales people aren’t good, or there is no advertising money out there. I’d bet on the latter, so where would the money to advertise on Youtube have come from, probably from ITV’s site, so not really a good position to sell on Youtube at the expense of ITV.
Worth also pointing out that without old media, the new media would not exist. TV still provides the content for people to blog, chat, upload, etc. Its become a symbiotic relationship, where they both need each other.
Finally, does anybody know who owns the video once its uploaded to Youtube, the content owner or Youtube.
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Shuffz. It is very rare indeed to get 100% sell through rates, especially when a page or site section gets an unexpected upturn in traffic. There are multiple levers involved and the reasons cannot be reduced as you do.
YouTube is sold separately to ITV so the two do not directly impact each others revenue. Officially, content is always owned by the copyright owner, not by YouTube.
TV provided Paul Potts and Susan Boyle, but its worth having a look at the myriad (and increasing) quantity and quality of online only short films, feature films, animations, webisodes, channels and celebrities. Natalie Tran’s mentioned in a post above as a good starting point. Also: LonelyGirl15, Sanctuary, Sam King, MySpace RoadTour, In God We Trust. It’s often that new things don’t exist without their older counterparts, but usually the new takes over and the old gently morphs into something different of disappears. Sort of like people.
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YouTube strikes deal with UK broadcasters to test pre-roll ads.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/medi.....sing-trial
ITV still “does not have a partner relationship with YouTube”.
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“t is 2009 and the same show has just discovered another opera talent: a month ago, it was the turn of Susan Boyle. ”
Susan Boyle is NOT an opera singer not is hers an operatic voice. She doesn’t pretend to be one: On the show she sang 2 Broadway selections and told that her ambition is to be next Julie Andrews who is a movie star and Broadway actress. Newflash: Broadway != opera.
While Susan Boyle is undeniably talented, her genre is not opera. A basic requirement for an opera singer is to be able to fill up a large theater with your voice WITHOUT MICROPHONES! This is a basic requirement for even a singer singing the smallest parts in the least known opera theaters. Susan’s voice while lovely is not big enough for opera – without a mike it wouldn’t be heard beyond the end of the stage.
For that matter Paul Potts is not an opera singer either. His voice is good – for an amateur – but his singing is nowhere near the level required by professional opera. Maybe he could have had it with some training, maybe not, but as of now he is not an opera singer. Yes, he sang in an amateur opera theater, but there is a world of difference between amateur opera and professional opera. Yes, he made millions selling an album with a number of semi-classical pop songs, some Broadway and exactly one opera aria, and his singing touches many people – the vast majority of whom has never been in an opera theater and hasn’t heard real great opera tenors like Juan Diego Florez or Roberto Alagna or Rolando Villazon or Jose Cura or Lawrence Brownlee to name but a few. But selling an album that includes an opera aria – or even many opera arias – does not turn one into an opera singer. Signing in professional opera does, and as far as I know Paul Potts has NEVER been invited to sing even in a regional professional opera theater in a stage opera production.
Here is a thought. How about you learn something about opera before mentioning opera in your posts? Because it seems like you think that anything that is not pop is opera. There are other genres out there…
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