The Long Tail of the Greenpeace Nestlé Orang-Utan video

Home The Long Tail of the Greenpeace Nestlé Orang-Utan video

10Everybody probably knows or at least heard about the Greenpeace anti-KitKat Nestle campaign, started in march 2010 (see this analysis by Jeremiah Owyang, or watch this Prezi). The video, quite bloody and blunt, in which we see an office-guy eating a KitKat-Orang-Utan finger (Greenpeace wanted Nestle to stop the use of palm oil from companies that are trashing Indonesian rainforests, pushing orang-utans towards extinction). Nestlé immediately demanded that the video be removed from YouTube   citing copyright infringement. YouTube agreed and removed the video—  thereby creating a stir that got traditional media outlets interested in the story.

Yesterday evenening, via Tweetdeck I saw a tweet from @markvark (Mark van Norden), who was citing our Steven van Belleghem about the Greenpeace Kitkat-movie with the above link to the Vimeo video. That’s an old movie, I thought. But I clicked and was wondering how many views on Vimeo this particular “version” of the movie (there are of course more versions to be found on the web everywhere, also on YouTube, again).

700 weekly views
I saw the massive amount of a total 528.000 views. That’s a lot, but clearly not all because this ‘crisis’ was worldnews. But what’s even more interesting in my opinion, is that the video is still being viewed, a year and 4 months since it was first published on march 17th by Greenpreace. To be more specific, over the last 30 weeks, this video alone was viewed 698 times, weekly. In the chart below (we love Vimeo for the displaying of the stats weekly and I was bored yesterday evenening so I did a little “excelling”), you can see what happens with a video of this nature.

In the chart above you can see the views of the first weeks (week 1 – 12 ) of the video being online. In week 1, the video received 235.000 views, in week 2 it was 120.000, in week 3 it was 49.600 views. On average, since the video was published, it received 7.173 views weekly. In the chart below you can see the views developing from week 13 (june 2010) till yesterday, july 14.

Lessons learned
So…. what’s the lesson learned here? Of course we can elaborate again about the way Nestle dealt with the crisis, that they weren’t social media savvy enough to cope with all the criticism on Facebook, that you should…. anyway, that’s already being said a thousand times and especially on a good metalevel by Owyang.

Before I started ‘doing the math’, I didn’t think that 700 people were still watching the video weekly. There’s a huge LongTail-effect of the movie(s) and that might be just another warning for companies that see themselves dealing with a huge amount of negative online buzz. When Nestle hadn’t demanded YouTube to remove the video in the first place, the Greenpeace campaign might not have even been succesful.

Big thanks to Jeroen Laarman for the helping out with my big friend Excel.