How does glowAI measure video performance?
August 28, 2024
When using our free outlier database, you've most likely noticed the prominent score associated with each video. Let’s explore how our scoring system works in more detail.
The glowAI outlier score ranges from 0 to 100
For each video in our outlier database we calculate a glowAI outlier score. It ranges from 0, indicating a significantly underperforming video, to 100, representing an exceptionally successful one. To make the score easier to interpret we came up with these 10 score buckets:
What is a YouTube outlier video?
Before diving deeper into how we calculate our glowAI outlier score, we first need to clarify exactly what an outlier video is.
Outliers are videos that perform exceptionally well compared to a channel’s average results. Let's illustrate this with the YouTube channel Veritasium. The channel gets on average around 6.5 million views per video. The video Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED did, however, get over 24 million views which is almost four times as many views as his channel average. It can therefore be considered an outlier video.
Why are outlier videos that special you may ask? Since outlier videos significantly outperformed the other videos on a given channel there must be reason for it. It could for example be that topic is in high demand, the storytelling engages the viewer, the title is catchy, the thumbnail is really good, or most likely a combination of them all. Outlier videos are therefore a great source of inspiration to find new video ideas that are in high demand or to see which thumbnails and titles work well in a given niche.
Only looking at the average multiple is not enough to identify true outliers
If you define an outlier only based on the average multiple you have three main issues:
- It is highly biased towards older videos which had more time to acquire views.
- A 10x outlier of a small YouTube channel that only got a couple of hundred views will have the same average multiple as a 10x outlier of a big YouTube channel that got several million views, even though the latter is a much better performing video.
- It is difficult to interpret - i.e. what is the minimum multiple to consider a video exceptional? How much better is a 100x outlier compared to a 10x outlier?
We therefore came up with our own glowAI outlier score that solves all these issues!
The glowAI outlier score measures the true performance of a video
We use time adjusted averages
For each channel, we calculate the average video performance over time. Here is an example of what an average view curve for a channel might look like:
The average video on this channel has around 100k views after one month and 180k views after one year. When calculating our multiples, we can now compare the views against the time-adjusted average. For example, a video posted one month ago which got 200k views has twice as many views as the channel's average video at that point in time.
We also factor in the absolute number of views
To capture the true performance of the video the glowAI outlier score also reflects the absolute number of views the video received. Take these two outlier videos for example:
Both of them have performed roughly three times better than their channel average. However, the left one only got 1.5k views whereas the right one got 762k views. So the right video is definitely much better performing than the left one. The glowAI outlier score takes this into account and scores the right one significantly higher than the left one even though they both have a similar multiple.
Our score is easy to interpret
Lastly, to fix the interpretability issue of classic outlier multiples we came up with a simple scoring system ranging from 0 to 100. A score of above 50 suggests that the video is an outlier and the higher the score the more extreme of an outlier it is. To receive a Unicorn status (glowAI outlier score above 90) the video needs to have at least 10 times more views than the time adjusted channel average and a minimum of 100k views.
