A not-so-known fact outside the online video world (and sometimes inside it too) is that quite a few of the videos that we see go viral from brands, have paid seeding ie. the companies pay for a group of people to see their video.

This not only gets the ball rolling on the whole viral video phenomenon, but also allows the effect that “if there are a lot of view than it must be good” on other people and blogs/media, or “why have so many people watched this? I’ve got to see why…”. Of course, there is a lot of debate and controversy in advertising and the online video world as to if seeding money is well spent or not.

But now, a new study from the Jun Goup shows that campaigns that used paid seeding see a “post-view action worth up to 30.1 percent more than what they spend on their campaigns”.

They call it “earned media” and define it as:

as a series of actions that users initiate after watching a social video. These post-view actions include Facebook page visits, brand page visits, store locator usage, coupon and recipe downloads, Tweets, e-mail shares, replays, and clicks to watch more videos – all of which are measured by Jun Group’s Voyeur analytics dashboard.

How this study was conducted was: a monetary value was placed on each action based on conservative industry data (for example, a click on a brand’s Facebook page, was valued at $1.00, a low end of pricing for cost-per-click advertising). Then, 7.9 million video views for brands were analyzed in videos that ranged from 15 seconds to 3 minutes-long, where people opted-in see them in exchange for virtual goods or currency.

What they saw was that the average social video campaign delivered 30.1 percent of additional media value above-and-beyond the media spend. For instance, clients that spent $100,000 received over $130,000 of value on average.

The most popular “earned media action” was a Facebook page visit, which represented 62% of all post-view activity. Surprisingly for the study, tweets were the least popular action (about 1% of all activity), which is kind of odd and counter-intuitive.

Overall, these are good numbers and a proof that video seeding works, but we need more of these studies to get a more overall picture.

Nonetheless, one key thing is always essential: you have got to have one online video produced in the first place, in order to be able to seed it! :)