Every so often I like to take a bit of time and look at some data about how people interact with the web. There are a ton of opportunities to study user behavior online.
Pomplamoose: covers vs. originals
After looking through a few of the videos from Pomplamoose on YouTube, I began to notice a few patterns. The most striking trend was that the duo’s covers of famous popular songs – by far their videos with the highest number of views – tended to have a much higher ratio of dislikes to likes than their original songs. I was curious whether this was due to the videos’ popularity or whether it was simply because users liked their original songs more than the covers.
I grabbed the statistics for Pomplamoose’s videos from YouTube, plotted them, and made a couple of interesting observations.
Pomplamoose’s three most popular videos are all cover versions of popular songs (“Single Ladies” by Beyoncé, “Telephone” by Lady Gaga, and “Beat It” by Michael Jackson). Those videos also happen to be three of the four least-favorably rated videos by viewers (the fourth another cover of a popular tune, “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing“). The four videos range between 88.6 to 91.5 percent of raters that chose “like” as opposed to “dislike.” No other video by Pomplamoose rates under 95.4%.
In short, Pomplamoose’s four videos that have a less-than-95% favorability rating are all well-known covers, and none of their three videos that have crested three million views exceed the 95% mark.
It’s important to note, though, that Pomplamoose’s cover videos don’t always attract the lowest ratings on their channel. Their most-liked video happens to be a cover of Mark Owen’s “Makin’ Out.”
Another view: Julia Nunes
Pomplamoose is a bit of a unique case. They often produce cover versions that vary quite a bit from the original version of the song, and that difference may attract lower ratings from fans of the original artist and arrangement. To provide a different view of the covers versus originals question, I pulled in some data from well-known YouTuber Julia Nunes.
Julia’s videos are all over the map. Her two most-watched cover videos – “Build Me Up Buttercup” and the Counting Crows’ “Accidentally in Love” – are actually rated quite high, both around 97%. Her two lowest-rated videos are two original songs, both of which have received over a million and a half views.
Final thoughts
Using Pomplamoose and Julia Nunes as examples, it seems as though it’s difficult (but possible) to make videos that are both extremely popular and near-universally liked. In both cases the most popular videos also have relatively low view counts. There doesn’t seem to be a clear association between covers, originals, and liking, but the majority of original songs tend to be less-watched but more-liked. That may speak to the value of devoted fans that watch a greater variety of videos on a channel as opposed to people who stop to watch a cover of a song they already know well.
Before making any generalizations about popularity and favorability, remember that this is all data from YouTube. Julia Nunes’s most-liked video is a clip of her singing as the Cat in the Hat in a school play. It’s a weird crowd on the web.
