Here at TubeMogul we recently authored a study answering the following question: throughout the life of a video, do most views occur in the first days and weeks or are they distributed randomly over time? Since we track millions of videos, we took a random sample of 10,000 videos, hired a statistician and found a clear answer in the aggregate data: video viewership peaks early.
In that, we found that on average, videos are quite time-sensitive. Trends pointed elsewhere, such as "evergreen" (non-time sensitive) content always fetching views, or videos randomly "going viral," seem more of a rarity than an underlying trend in the data.
While we were pitching the story to Mashable, Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins asked a cutting question: what if you broke the results down by video category (i.e. "How-To")?
Good question. Here are the results we broke down for him and the readers of Mashable:
While all categories fit the pattern of peaking early with a few videos going viral here and there, some categories are more evergreen than others. Intuitively, "News & Blogs" die fast. Perhaps more oddly, "Science & Technology" exhibited a huge initial spike, achieving 61% of the category's total 90-day views in two weeks and then hovering around 1% thereafter.
How-To, while hardly "evergreen" as the term is traditionally thrown around, fared relatively well over time:
