Archive for April 2015

Jutze 52 #17 – Gnomes Running Through the Forest

This is a quick folk instrumental tune. The title came about when I set the music to the video.

#17 Gnomes Running Through the Forest

(music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

Vlogbrothers View Statistics

Scroll down for nice plots! Watch the video here!

This is a summary of the YouTube statistics of videos by the Vlogbrothers – Hank and John Green. The raw data were kindly provided by kitchensink108.tumblr.com. I focus on two dependent variables:

  • Who made it? Hank-only, John-only, or both?
  • The second variable of interest is the Date. In other words: When was the video put online?

The data set already contains a few interesting variables:

  • The view count (Views)
  • The number of Likes
  • The number of Dislikes
  • The number of Comments

The three latter numbers co-vary (all rank correlations > .7) with the total number of views, so looking at them all separately would be repetitive and boring. So instead I will look at:

  • The view count – most of the time I’ll plot the natural logarithm of the view count because of a few outliers (more on those later)
  • The Likes per View ratio (overall appreciation)
  • The Likes per Dislike ratio (unambiguous appreciation)
  • The Comments per View ratio along with the overall number of comments
  • The length of the videos is not that interesting because most clock in just under 4 minutes. (NB: Longer videos were not included in the original data set.) There is just not enough variation. So I’ll just have one quick plot at the end.

Speaking of plots, most of the analysis will be graphical. This is pretty much a census, so there’s no need for statistical testing. Also, it’s all quite exploratory.


Here we go: Who tends to have more Views?

Here is the median view count for each brother: Hank: 256k, John: 286k, both: 347k. This means that 50% of Hank’s videos have more than 256k views, and the other half of his videos have less than 256k views. So John’s videos tend to get more views, but still less than reunion videos. You can also look at the means (M) and standard deviations (SD) – but there are some influential outliers that impede the interpretation of the numbers (Hank: M = 378k (SD = 537k); John: M =467k (SD = 1112k); both: M =367k (SD = 183k)).

This plot shows the view count changes across time. The solid line is a median band. It indicates how many views a video needs at a given point in time to have less views than half of the other videos.

Scatter Plot: ln(Views) by Date

Each gray point represents one particular Vlogbrothers video. When I add the linear trend (actually, it’s a log-linear trend), it becomes clear that newer videos tend to get more views:

Scatter Plot: ln(Views) by Date

And this is the same plot with some additional Nerdfighter-related dates:

Scatter Plot: ln(Views) by Date

Did the movie version of The Fault in Our Stars lead to fewer views? I don’t think so – this is mostly speculation, anyway. There could be many reasons why Nerdfighters might be watching fewer videos (CrashCourse, SciShow, Tumblr, jobs, kids). Personally, I think that the more recent videos just haven’t accumulated as many views from new nerdfighters who go through old videos (and from random strangers).

Here is another version of this plot, this time with separate lines for John and Hank:

Scatter Plot: ln(Views) by Date

My interpretation would be that the view counts of Hank and John didn’t really develop differently.


So far, so good. Now what about actual appreciation? When I look at the median values for Likes per View, Hank’s videos are liked by 2.3% of viewers. John’s videos are liked by 2.2% of viewers. Reunion videos are liked by 3.3%; Nerdfighters seem to like reunion videos!

Here’s the longitudinal perspective – again no clear differences between Hank’s videos and John’s videos:

Scatter Plot: Likes/Views by Date


Being liked is one thing. But how about the Likes per Dislike ratio? Here are the median values: Hank’s videos tend to get 78 Likes per Dislike. John’s videos tend to get 126 Likes for each Dislike. And reunion videos trumps them both with a median of 177 Likes per Dislike. Here’s the longitudinal perspective:

Scatter Plot: Likes/Dislikes by Date

There were even more Likes than Dislikes during the past few years. This development occurred especially for John’s videos.


Enough with the appreciation – how about Comments? An eternal source of love, hate, fun, and chaos they are. The overall tendency (i.e., median) is that 0.5%-0.6% of viewers write a comment. Let’s look at the longitudinal perspective of Comments/Views:

Scatter Plot: Comments/Views by Date

The number of Comments per View has declined over the past two years; possibly due to the integration of Google+ and YouTube or the new sorting algortihm for comments.


Finally, here’s a quick overview of specific types of outliers. Videos that elicit a lot of comments are mostly about the Project for Awesome:

Scatter Plot: Comments/Views by Date

The videos with the highest view count all deal with animals:

Scatter Plot: Views by Date (with titles)

The last couple of plots brings us back to the length of the videos. Here are the titles of the shorter videos.

Scatter Plot: Length by Date (with titles)

Not much to say here. And it seems as if Hank keeps making slightly longer videos than John:

Scatter Plot: Length by Date (by Vlogbrother)

That’s all. DFTBA!

PS a day later: I turned this post into a video. The initial text along with the analysis commands are listed in this Stata do-file.

Jutze 52 #16 – Frösche

Dies ist ein Lied aus dem Archiv, wie Kenner vermutlich anhand des Videos erkennen. Vor langer Zeit schrieb ich ein Lied mit dem Titel “Hugging Frogs”. Irgendwie kam ich auf die Idee, den Titel zu übersetzen und ein neues Lied (mit komplett anderem Text) daraus zu machen. Ich möchte damit gar nicht alle Pärchen, die öffentlich Zärtlichkeiten austauschen, anklagen. Es gibt nur manchmal diese Mischung aus Speichel und Amphibiengeräuschen, bei der ich an Frösche denken muss.

#16 Frösche

Ich weiß, eure Liebe ist neu und ihr mögt einander sehr
Ich weiß, eure Liebe ist toll und ich sollte mich nicht beschweren
Doch immer, wenn ihr in der Öffentlichkeit seid
Treibt ihr es für meinen Geschmack ein bisschen zu weit
Denn wenn ihr euch küsst, ist das fast so erotisch wie Frösche, die sich umarmen
Wenn ihr euch küsst, ist das fast so erotisch wie Frösche, die sich umarmen

(words and music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

Jutze 52 #15 – Cleaning

This song was put together in a hurry. I had big plans but not nearly enough time. I wanted to make two songs, a funny one with lyrics and a moody instrumental – one would have been put on the left stereo channel, the other on the right stereo channel. I had no idea how to write such a thing, which was the first obstacle. Then, I failed to come up with any lyrics beyond two simple lines. Yep, the ones that are repeated below. Saturday came and went, Sunday came and I used the final hours of the evening to commit this recording, making up the song on the fly.

#15 Cleaning

It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it
It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it
It’s a dirty job but it pays the bills
Cleaning gravestones at Père Lachaise
But when the next of kin do not pay it slowly turns into a mess

Rest in peace while leaves fall on your grave
Rest in peace while birds shit on your grave
Rest in peace while tourists bring you flowers
Cleaning gravestones at Père Lachaise
But when the next of kin do not pay it slowly turns into a mess

(words and music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)

Jutze 52 #14 – Arlington Afternoon

This song happened after I listened to the pre-Creedence Clearwater Revival recordings of Tommy Fogerty and the Blue Velvets. I wrote an instrumental song with lots of reverb on the lead guitar; after all, my vocals don’t suit the early 60s pop music style. The video has a different lead guitar track as I re-recorded it while filming. The title has no particular meaning. I just liked it.

PS: Since I installed a podcasting plugin, there are additional (albeit broken) links at the end of each old 52-second song post. Please ignore them.

#14 Arlington Afternoon

(music by Johannes Schult 2015 Creative Commons by-nc 4.0)