3 popular formats to consider while creating video news content for YouTube audiences
The popularity of YouTube is not new. However, some of the most popular videos have been the focal point of Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Over the last 15 months, the organization has analyzed the top-five most viewed videos each week to determine the nature of popular videos.
From January 2011 to March 2012, these tops 260 videos experience tens of millions of views. Interestingly enough, these videos fall into three specific formats:
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-News videos created and submitted by citizens
-Videos created by journalists that are shared by citizens
-News organizations compiling videos with content from citizens and their own journalistic content
As Journalism.org points out, citizens are very important in the flow of news creation and distribution. Citizens accounted for 39% of the top videos, and 51% had the logo of a news organization, although some of the footage appeared to come from citizens and not journalists.
Some other key insights brought forth by Pew’s research are that these top videos contained a mix of edited and raw footage, they do not rely on personalities to drive the popularity of the video, and the length of the videos varied greatly (with 18% of the videos over five minutes long).
More information on this study can be found here.
Have you been using a mix of citizen-produced content with your own edited video footage? Please share tips on your YouTube strategy in the comments section below.
