Trends Q: Have resort video ratings increased along with the increase in video quality?

This year will see a record number of resort video series created with quality that, even five years ago, was virtually non-existent in resort marketing circles. This improvement, however, is not specific to travel. So has the increase in quality outpaced the expectations from viewers in terms of video ratings? That was our question. Here’s our answer.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at 25,000 mountain resort YouTube videos uploaded since 2006. We grouped these videos by the year they were uploaded and found the average rating (1-5) for each group. Here’s how it looks.

After an early high point in 2006 when adoption was low (only 53 videos were uploaded that year), the average rating stayed below 3.0 from 2007-2011. In 2012, however, the average rating jumped to 3.5 and has stayed at or above that level ever since.

What This Means
Though quality is subjective, we were expecting to see an uptick in ratings right around 2011/2012 at the point when we felt that resorts began seriously investing in video as a medium. Sure enough, that’s exactly where a large jump took place.

What was interesting was how consistent the ratings were both before and after the jump. After staying within 0.17 for five years, the last three have only seen a spread of 0.10 after a single-year increase of 0.63 from 2011 to 2012. While there may be other factors at play, it seems the extra effort has been noticed and appreciated by viewers.

Next Week, Another Insight
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