Quantifying YouTube Keyword Opportunities — Whiteboard Friday

So firstly, search volume, now this might be useful for Google. It’s not actually that useful for YouTube.

One, we have no way of actually knowing the search volume on YouTube. Google doesn’t provide this information. There are tools that claim to be able to offer this. But in reality, what they’re offering you is kind of an approximation based on other variables. Nothing that actually reflects the genuine search volume.

And more broadly, for most channels that get lots of views, the search is not the means in which they capture most of them. They will capture most of those views through other aspects of the YouTube platform, with search being perhaps one of many systems and feeds in which they can actually generate views across their full channel.

So search volume only tells us part of the story. So we need to think slightly differently for YouTube. So instead of thinking about search volume, we can think about a different metric.

Now what we have with YouTube, that we don’t have with Google, is information about the amount of people that have watched a given video, the age of that particular content, and also the number of subscribers. And we can use these particular variables to tell us a story that we otherwise couldn’t on Google.

So for search volume, the metric that we should care about, the analogous metric is MMVV, which stands for median monthly view velocity.

Now we get this metric by essentially finding the top 100 videos for a given query, looking at how many views they have got per month, and then finding the median. So the median, rather than the mean, because that removes the outliers. And this is going to tell us really what the demand is for a given keyword over time, taking into account all of the different areas in which views can be captured from the YouTube platform.

So that’s essentially how we’re going to measure demand.