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Tech Field Day Viewership Rockets Forward in 2015

Last year, we were thrilled to report that video viewership had reached 750,000 views over five years of Tech Field Day. This year we’re proud to report that we’ve more than doubled that number: In 2015 alone, Tech Field Day videos on YouTube and Vimeo were viewed more than 839,000 times! This brings total viewership to just under 1.6 million views in six years. And our live stream viewership is extremely strong as well, with over 10,000 different people tuning in live in the last six months of 2015.

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839,000 YouTube and Vimeo Views

Views of Tech Field Day videos in 2015 were greater than in our first five years combined!
Views of Tech Field Day videos in 2015 were greater than in our first five years combined!

When we started Tech Field Day, we thought the video recordings would mostly be a historical curiosity. But once we began posting them to YouTube in 2012, viewership really took off. Today, Tech Field Day sponsors are as excited about reaching our 5,000 YouTube channel subscribers as they are to talk tech with our delegate panel.

Overall, Tech Field Day has almost 1,400 videos online. Although we have a few videos with truly amazing viewership (Cisco and Dell both have videos with more than 20,000 views), our average viewership is very impressive at over 1,100 views per video on average.

The Tech Field Day YouTube audience looks like the IT market
The Tech Field Day YouTube audience looks like the IT market (click to enlarge)

We have always wanted to keep the Tech Field Day videos open and free to view, so we have resisted any kind of registration or tracking. But our presenters often wonder just who out there is watching all these videos. With that in mind, we ran the demographic reports from YouTube and were unsurprised: The vast majority of our viewers are men between 30 and 50 years of age, predominately in the United States but also in English-speaking countries like India, the UK, Canada, and Australia.

10,000 Livestream Viewers

In addition to posting our recorded video, Tech Field Day added live streaming video in 2013. Since we didn’t have a registration page, we didn’t have much visibility into these viewers until Livestream updated their system (and our account) at the middle of last year. Now that we have more data, we can share some interesting statistics in that area as well.

Overall, the six events we live streamed since July attracted 10,035 unique viewers, as measured by Livestream. The average viewer watched for about 30 minutes, but many stayed much longer than that. There were a solid 100+ viewers watching at any given time, with the core audience interacting on Twitter and commenting that they felt like they were there in the room with us.

Our live streaming audience includes most English-speaking countries (and a few surprises!)
Our live streaming audience includes most English-speaking countries (and a few surprises!)

Once again, our strongest country for live streaming video was the United States. Our English-speaking event certainly plays a part in that, but time zones are a major factor as well: It’s very difficult to tune in to an event that runs from 8 AM to 6 PM Pacific time when that’s the middle of the night where you live! Yet we still had non-trivial viewership from India, Australia, and Japan, with some of these folks saying they rearranged their schedules just to watch the event live.

Thank You For Watching!

In summary, video engagement with Tech Field Day has been off the charts, dramatically exceeding our expectations. If you’re one of the 10,000 people who watched live or the thousands who subscribe to the Tech Field Day YouTube channel, we would like to thank you. Our event is dedicated to sharing knowledge and expanding the community, and that’s exactly what’s happening! We have many more events planned for 2016, and we hope to see you there!

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750,000 Views Later, The Tech Field Day Audience Keeps Growing!

A few years back, we summarized the viewership of a few Tech Field Day events and were happy to report 90,000 video views. Now that 2014 is behind us, we wanted to revisit these numbers and see how things have changed. My, how we’ve grown!

Tech Field Day video viewership has grown steadily over the last four years
Tech Field Day video viewership has grown steadily over the last four years

Back in 2013, we recorded 90,000 views of the videos posted for the 14 full Tech Field Day events we had hosted through 2012. This number included both YouTube and Vimeo views but excluded non-presentation videos and other events. So 90,000 views was a very good number!

What a difference a few years makes. We actually had substantially more than 90,000 video views once we included all the different Tech Field Day content (including roundtable discussions, symposia, and interviews) and it has exploded since then. We went from 2,000 views in 2010 to 14,000 in 2011, 133,000 in 2012, and 238,000 in 2013. But 2014 was something else entirely, with 372,000 views that year alone, as much as all previous years put together!

Added up, that totals an amazing 759,399 video views for 2010 through 2014! It sure sounds like our Tech Field Day content is appreciated and enjoyed by the IT folks who follow us!

Of course, statistics are only worth so much. We used to not post the video recordings of our sessions, and we believe Tech Field Day would be worth doing even without the videos. It’s really about the technical community and the experience for our presenting companies and independent delegates. Sharing knowledge is the most important element of what we do, and the videos are just one aspect of that.

But it’s nice to know that three quarters of a million views go along with it!

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One Year of Tech Field Day Video: 90,000 Views!

Tech Field Day is the signature event run by Foskett Services, and we couldn’t be more proud of it. For 2012, we added additional opportunities for interaction: Live and online Symposium events as well as Tech Field Day Roundtables at other major events. Through it all, we’ve tried to focus on producing the best content possible and placing it in front of any and all online.

Tech Field Day By the Numbers
2012 Tech Field Day Events: 14
Videos Posted to YouTube and Vimeo: 468
Total 2012 Event Video Views: 90,224

Evolving Video at Tech Field Day

Over the years, we have gradually shifted Tech Field Day into the public eye thanks to online video. Although a pro video team has been present at every one of our events, we didn’t make that video available to the public at first. The recordings were made available to our presenters, not all of whom were in a position to do anything with it.

We added live streaming video in 2011, throwing open the curtain for the first time. Now, anyone online could watch the proceedings and even participate remotely! This led to dramatically more interest and engagement outside the room, and we decided to make it a permanent fixture of Tech Field Day and all other events.

Midway through 2011, we decided to post high-quality recordings of all events on our web site, relying on Vimeo for high-quality embedding. And for 2012, we began uploading everything to YouTube as well, taking advantage of their massive audience.

Starting in the summer of 2012, we upgraded our video equipment to high definition and switched to Livestream. This gave us HD live streaming that was iOS and Android compatible! We will continue to improve the live stream over the coming year.

Tech Field Day 2012 Video Summary

Our audience loves video! For 2012, we posted 237 videos to Vimeo and 231 to YouTube from the 14 events we held. Together, video viewership was amazing, with 90,222 views! This doesn’t count people who just loaded the page or quit a few minutes in, either. These were substantial views, as defined by YouTube and Vimeo.

Our headline Tech Field Day events generate amazingly strong viewership. Wireless Field Day 2, Networking Field Day 3, and Storage Field Day 1 were held in the first half of the year. Now that viewers have had a chance to take a look, these events have generated 16,983, 16,535, and 11,552 views, respectively.

Although audiences haven’t had as much time to watch the videos from Wireless Field Day 3, Networking Field Day 4, and Storage Field Day 2 since they came later in the year, these events are performing strongly as well. WFD3 (September) is already at 8,064 views, while NFD4 (October) is at 7,942 and SFD2 (November) is at 4,437.

Overall, YouTube accounts for 62% of Tech Field Day video views, even though we usually embed and link to Vimeo because we prefer their customization options. This suggests that a majority of viewers are casually “stumbling on” these videos and finding the content compelling enough to watch all the way through!

2012 Tech Field Day Video Views

Thank You For Watching!

Tech Field Day is a challenging event for the presenters, the delegates, and the audience. The conversations are usually highly technical, diving deeper and lasting longer than most enterprise IT videos. The fact that our viewership is so high makes us beam with pride: We must be doing something right!

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Foskett Services Develops How-To Video Content For Druva Software

Druva Software has developed a simple and effective backup application for remote devices called InSync. When it came time to show off just how easy it is to install and configure InSync, Druva needed an independent and credible voice. That’s why they turned to Foskett Services to develop a series of video segments walking through the process of installation and configuration.

Learn more about our Video Production service

We experimented with a variety of formats for these videos, finally settling on a face-to-face introduction and voice over demonstration. This format maximizes the legibility of the software, allowing viewers to see just what is happening without the distraction of a narrator on screen.

Druva allowed us a great deal of flexibility in terms of scripting and producing the video.  They knew that a slick, scripted video wouldn’t convey the authenticity of the experience, and encouraged us to try the product out for ourselves. Indeed, we came away impressed with the tiny download and quick install of the InSync server and client software. As seen in the video, we really did have everything up and running in just about 10 minutes!

Producing product demonstration videos is one of our many services. We are expanding our capabilities and trying out new formats, including on-site interviews and live streaming of events.

Read Stephen Foskett’s review: You Really Can Have a Complete Backup System Up and Running in 10 Minutes!

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Digging Deeper: AlterSeekers, myYearbook, Sharethrough, and Spam

This morning I demonstrated an inept marketing “experiment” by AlterSeekers gone awry for EMC. It involved comment spam on some of the best-known enterprise storage industry insider blogs and EMC cut it off quickly. But this analysis turned up something else rather peculiar: An apparent hack on teen chat site myYearbook to spam video links on Twitter and generate views and buzz. Amazingly, EMC are again involved. Is this another face of this morning’s off-the-rails experiment?

Viral or Virulent Videos?

While exploring the fascinating world of link spam, I happened across the Twitter account of @LisaValentineNY (not linked), probably an AlterSeekers employee. I noted that the only thing she had posted recently were spammy @replies to Twitter users advertising Crucial-brand computer memory. Every reply included an odd trademark character (indicating a cut-and-paste job) and used the same bit.ly link, one created with the account of AlterSeekers employee Brent McLean. Clearly, Crucial was involved in the same type of anti-social marketing campaign as EMC.

This got me thinking. I remembered seeing some EMC videos tweeted recently, one involving former CHiPS star, Erik Estrada and another with pro golfer, Billy Andrade. They were somewhat amusing, but EMC, being an enterprise IT company, isn’t really a general audience draw. So I wasn’t surprised to see just a few thousand vides. Yet a glance at YouTube this morning shows an amazing 215k and 413k views for these videos. Either EMC’s videos really did go viral or they were wrapped up in this nasty spam business as well.

Aggregate Linkage

It’s easy to see bit.ly links to a given site. I just copied the YouTube URL into bit.ly and clicked on the aggregate link. This was eye-popping. Literally hundreds of tweets linked to the video, each from a different user. Yet every tweet was exactly identical:

CHiPs Erik Estrada in Speeding Ticket FAIL http://bit.ly/ad15nG

Either a hundred random users decided to tweet the exact same message and link to their followers or something fishy was going on here.

Random Tweets?

Two things immediately stuck out in this list:

  1. No one included the EMC name (which is included in the YouTube listing), only the general-audience Erik Estrada and CHiPs references.
  2. The tweeters were not the usual enterprise IT folks one would expect, judging by their cutesy names.

I picked a few at random to see who these EMC fans were (try it yourself!). They appeared to be teens posting teen-speak including quotes, photo ratings, and Q&A. In most cases (that I looked at), the users had never tweeted using any client other than “myYearbook Share” which appears to be a Facebook clone that links to social media accounts, including Twitter.

But each account also included a few exceptionally odd tweets. Along with the myYearbook junk were these spammy links to EMC’s videos. And lo and behold, most also included links the same Crucial Memory video being spammed by Lisa Valentine! What could be going on here?

Breaking and Tweeting?

This is truly weird. If myYearbook was inserting “sponsored” tweets along with their users junk, one would expect it to also come from the “myYearbook Share” client, too. But, without exception, these spam links came from “web”. This was especially notable for the (many) users who had never posted anything from the web client, and it smells like a hack.

It really isn’t credible that these random teens all decided to tweet cut-and-paste links to EMC and Crucial videos. And it really isn’t believable that they all decided to use the web client for the first and only time to do it. Either they were enticed to do it (“win a contest?”) or someone or something is posting “on their behalf”. Either way, this stinks.

Perhaps myYearbook has been hacked and someone is using users’ passwords to post these links. Perhaps the company is in on it, though there seem to be few complaints about them. Or perhaps someone is harvesting Twitter accounts from myYearbook and getting the passwords from somewhere else. Regardless, someone is doing something naughty here!

Who’s Responsible This Time?

Although Crucial and EMC are linked through AlterSeekers, I’m not sure they’re responsible for these tweets. There are a few links found in many of these users’ suspicious tweets, and all were created with the bit.ly account of another company, Sharethrough (not linked). Calling itself “The Leading Social Video Seeding Platform For Top Brands And Agencies”, Sharethrough appears to be some kind of viral marketing machine. But it’s unclear if they’re responsible for all this spam, either.

At the end of the day, responsibility lies with the companies that are benefiting from these shenanigans.

  1. Sharethrough is selling “video seeding” services that are using unsavory means
  2. AlterSeekers is selling “social media marketing” services that are either inept or obnoxious
  3. Their clients (EMC, Crucial, and someone called “Rhett and Link”) are getting page- and YouTube views from clearly inauthentic sources

Each of these companies must investigate upstream to discover what their providers are doing on their behalf. And each should inform all of us about just what is going on!

And it all started with a spam comment on my blog.

Update: Not Hacked But Seeded

I suppose it’s sometimes easier to find trouble when one goes looking for it. I received an email from Dan Greenberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Sharethrough explaining these links. His site “seeds” viral videos to a variety of platforms which invite users to share them with their friends. As Dan says, “When a user clicks Tweet it takes them to Twitter and suggests a pre-defined tweet for them, which the user can edit and then post.  This functionality is similar to what you might see on any blog or video site.”

Assuming he’s being straight with me (which I do) there was no hacking or underhanded chicanery involved in these tweets. The users shared them on their own accord. This explains why they all have identical text and bit.ly links as well as the odd “via web” source. He suggests that TechCrunch, Mashable, and others do the same.

Chuck Hollis agrees in the comments below, comparing this to the paid advertisements that some blogs (including my own) include. He goes on to suggest that it’s not so bad to pay a company to promote a video online in order to make it go viral, presumably as long as it’s not in “a blog or a focused community.”

Let me be straight: I have no problem with banner ads in general (as long as they’re not misleading) and jumped to the wrong conclusion about Sharethrough. But the core question remains: Why would an enterprise-focused company like EMC to promote their products with viral videos that apparently appeal mainly to teens? The CHiPs video was “liked” 23 times, “disliked” 10 times, and drew 22 comments with almost 250,000 views. The Andrade video has almost 415,000 views but only 25 “likes”, 6 “dislikes”, and 44 bizarre mostly single-word comments.

If these videos really appealed to people, wouldn’t they be commenting more? And if they were really hitting their target, wouldn’t the comments mention something (anything) about EMC or its products? Setting aside the issue of whether or not the method promotion is valid, surely the result isn’t what was desired. I return to my closing statement from the previous article: Isn’t fresh sushi better than canned spam?