May 02, 2006

YouTube Claritas PRIZM NE Profile - Urbanites Dominate

Today I am speaking at the Claritas Precision Marketing Conference in San Diego, and
am enjoying being surrounded by serious data lovers, as well as sunshine and water. In light of this conference, I thought I should take a look at the Claritas PRIZM NE segmentation of YouTube, since there has been a high level of interest in online video in recent months.

There are 66 segments in PRZIM NE, and they are determined by income, age range, and location, among many other factors. The 66 segments are grouped two ways: by lifestage (young, family, and mature) and social group (urban, suburban, small city, and town and country, or rural). I find that social group is often the most revealing way to create a picture of visitors to a website. Below is the segmentation by social group of YouTube, with U=Urban, S=Suburban, C=Small City, and T=Town and Country. The 1 is the highest income group, and income levels descend from there. So we see that You Tube is over-indexed in the Urban segments, particularly with the mid-income and lower income users in the social groups "Midtown Mix" and "Urban Cores," while the Town & Country segments are under-indexed. For descriptions of the segments, click here.

It is often revealing to compare the PRIZM NE segmentation of two websites, as I have done below with YouTube and Google Video. Here we see that Google Video has more users in the Town & Country segments than YouTube, and has a lower percentage of Urban users. What other questions can we ask of the data that might reveal differences in the user base of these sites?

Below is a comparison of the age breakdowns for YouTube and Google Video. We see that there is a big difference in the 18-24 and 55+ age bins for these two sites. YouTube received 36% of its traffic from users 18-24 in this time period, while they only accounted for 19% of visitors to Google Video. Another 19% of visitors to Google Video were over 55, while only 6% of YouTube's visitors fell in that age group.

This demonstrates the importance of understanding who is visiting your site versus your competitors. I've seen client cases where what Hitwise data showed was different from what was expected, and their competitive landscape changed based on this information. The more data points you have on who is visitng your site and your competitors' sites can dramatically impact your online marketing and content development efforts, and this data should be monitored on a regular basis.

Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 11:58 AM

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