On the 17th April, Vevo put out a press release that was picked up by various media. The story was about the state of Vevo’s service, and video services in general, in Australia. The claim: Vevo’s reach is 23% bigger than all the catch-up TV properties online.
The digital world is full of numbers. You just need to read any article about piracy to see that these numbers have an agenda. And how easy it is to make a headline that sounds good.
So here are the four TV catch up services that have been included in their survey – Channel 7 (through Yahoo7), Channel 10, Channel 9 and SBS. This excludes ABC’s iView and Foxtel’s Go (Full disclosure here – I work for Foxtel, but hey we were not included). These figures come from Nielsen, the all conquering ratings company, and they can’t get what they can’t get.
But is it fair to compare Vevo to these services? And is reach really a true metric of this?
I say no to both counts.
Vevo’s reach is now 123% the size of the catchup TV properties combined.
1) Music vs TV
Vevo is about music videos. It’s not show prgramming.
But you can argue – hey, what is it that is taking up Australia’s attention? and sure, it’s fine to say people are moving away from (catch-up) TV, and we have more options. But those options include YouTube. And Angry Birds. And any streaming video. (I recently watched a great hour long interview Conan did with the Simpsons creators. It was awesome).
Australia’s streaming video options are pretty low. We don’t have Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, BBC iPlayer or a myriad of other services. What we do have is a black screen and the words “this video is not available in your country” (including the odd Vevo video, to be fair).
Comparing a streaming video service to just catch up TV is to say bread sells more than caviar. Both can be eaten, but they are eaten for different reasons and different occasions. and this is catch-up TV – plenty of folks are still tuning into their TV sets.
Catch Up TV and Music Video – they don’t compare.
2) Reach
Reach is how many people you get to. Is it unique views? Or number of streams? Either way, the form of the content is so vastly different.
The last season premiere of doctor who had a record breaking 80k views on ABC iview. That took 80k man hours to watch. 80k views of Gangnam Style – that takes 6k man hours to watch. You can simply watch more videos.
Vevo themselves claim their average is 15 videos, and 60 minutes use a month. That means one TV show a month, is their average use. And so, the fair comparison, in per hour usage, the VEVO should be divided by 15. Suddenly Vevo’s time spent is 8.2% of the combined catch up TV channels. I can play with numbers too.
Reach is deceptive, when one player has lots of short content and the other has longfrom. It’s points counting, but comparing cricket runs to soccer goals.
So here’s the point. Vevo’s not wrong. They need to make money. But it’s these little bullshit press releases designed to get a cheap headline that really piss me off. Because misinformation ruins us. We could be so far ahead – we as Australians have such a thirst for technology. But big companies are misrepresenting us, and that showing of bullshit trickles down to us all. That a company like Vevo is willing to send out such an openly decieptive numbers, to try and get a cheap PR win, hurts us all. It poisons conversation. It skewers public perception. It’s a blatant lie.
Be careful of numbers – and whose behind them. 23% of statistics are made up anyway.