After the Party is over … it still goes on!
Following the GGI2014 conference, 18 of the 20 presentations were posted on the
GGI YouTube channel. The first presentation went up on Oct 20th, the day after the end of the conference, and videos of the other presentations were posted each weekday over the subsequent 3 weeks (ending on Nov 12th). One of the presentations (Lecture 18, Cynthia’s video on
Reconstructing Irish-Caribbean Ancestry) was delayed due to technical difficulties and was posted on Nov 25th.
It is now 7 weeks since the first video was posted and the viewing figures are really quite incredible. In this relatively short space of time, they have been “viewed” over 8500 times for a total of 113,454 minutes - that’s 78 days and 18 hours. This is 3 times the viewing figures for the same period last year indicating that the second year of the conference appears to have been even more popular than the first.
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Over 60% of the audience is US-based. This probably reflects the huge Irish diaspora in the States and the fact that so many Americans have Irish ancestry. However many of the topics have general appeal to a wide audience and this will also account for their popularity. The fact that we are able to bring these presentations to a much larger audience than just those who attended the 3-day event in Dublin is a fine example of how modern technology is making a huge impact on the practice of genealogy. Ten years ago this sort of thing would not have been possible.
Exactly 80% of the audience are over 45 years old (no surprise there) but the majority of viewers are male (56%). This in contrast to figures from last year where most viewers were female, which is what you would expect given that most genealogists are women. So what’s causing the men to come out of the woodwork all of a sudden? Was it this year's focus on the Irish clans (
Brad Larkin)? Or Brian Boru (
Cathy Swift)? Or the excellent presentation by
Michelle Leonard on World War One?
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Most of the Traffic Sources to the videos come from websites external to YouTube (24%), with 16% from the GGI YouTube channel page, and a surprising 11% as a “video suggestion” from YouTube itself - Thank You YouTube! It’s nice to see that the videos were deemed worthy of such a suggestion (with which, of course, I whole-heartedly agree).
The vast majority of videos were watched on the YouTube channel itself but 11% of the time they were viewed on other websites in which they had been “embedded” (such as this website).
Most of the time, the videos were watched on a computer (77%) but the popularity of tablets (such as the iPad) is clearly evident as 12% of views were on these devices. Even the humble mobile phone was a popular choice for viewing the videos (7.7%) … but some viewers went to the other extreme and chose to enjoy the presentations in the relative luxury of their living rooms watching it on TV (1.5%) … it's well for some!
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Another interesting piece of information was the data relating to audience retention. This was the average length of time that people viewed each of the presentations and averaged just over 13 minutes (or 24%) per presentation, which I find relatively high. To me this suggests that most viewers were not just people who happened to come across these videos in their web browsing, but were people who targeted these videos for viewing and persisted in their attention for a considerable amount of time. Two of the presentations that held people’s attention the longest were Cathy Swift’s presentation (
Emerging dynasties in a maritime world: hunting for Brian Boru’s genetic legacy) and Daniel Crouch (
Genetic analysis of the People of the British Isles project). This is not at all surprising as both were excellent presentations.
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The impact of these presentations has been much greater than the conference itself and reaches an audience that would otherwise be unable to attend the lectures and listen to the speakers. The YouTube channel has attracted 130 new subscribers over the past 7 weeks alone, so the customer base for these videos is growing, and hopefully will continue to do so. Posting videos is a very good way to engage audiences and spread the word about genetic genealogy. It would be great if more conference organisers would do this as it is an invaluable resource that serves to educate people long after the conference is over.
But what were the Top Ten videos? You’ll have to tune in next week for another exciting installment …
Maurice Gleeson
8th Dec 2014
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