Thousands of hours have been spent by resort employees this winter creating thousands of videos. Despite the efforts, the vast majority of these videos have less than 1,000 views. Many less than 100. The simple question I wanted to answer today was what common content elements do the most popular ski resort videos on YouTube have? I’ll cover the promotional elements that lead to bigtime view numbers later. I analyzed the 3 most viewed videos from many of the top 20 or so most popular resorts on YouTube (based on total views) to find patterns. Here’s what I found:

Story
More than 70% of the most viewed resort videos told some sort of story using on camera interviews or narration. More than sweet powder turns, more than triple corks and technical rail tricks, the video told a simple, yet engaging story that the viewer could relate to. Seems that powder turns look more or less like other powder turns. Stories, however, are tough to duplicate. Stories make your content unique. Editing itself often told the story as much as the narrator.

Celebrity
One that surprised me was how many skiing celebrities were featured in each resorts most popular videos. Checking the video stats, many of the views came from the video appearing in the “related videos” column next to other videos of this celebrity. Just under 75% of the videos I looked at featured a ski celebrity.

Events
Events were also a big one. Approximately half of the videos were footage of some sort of event: contests, opening days, unique things going on at the resort, new lifts opening for the first time, or even summer events like Sunday River’s Wife Carrying Championships. Events unque to the resort may be a better way to describe this. Standard opening day, pond skimming, or big air contests rarely showed up at the top. Dew Tours, massive powder dumps, etc., did.

Quick Example – Tom Wallisch Breckenridge Go Pro Edit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhHBr7bjyVA
Over 2,100,000 views, this simple video features an event (Dew Tour), a ski celeb (Tom Wallisch), and editing the story elements. No actual narration here, but the way it was edited gives a simple progression of being at the start line, taking some runs, and ending in the finish area with a fist pump. This wasn’t made by a resort, but if Breck had put this together, they would have a lot more than their current 500k total video views for all their videos combined.

If these elements are the ones that combine to give your video the best chance of getting attention, getting shared, and getting viewed, maybe when you have the opportunity to combine them, that is the time to bring in a local film crew to make it right. Also of note, is that alone, these elements were rarely enough to have the content quality to get major views and attention. Combined? They’re golden.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.