Here’s an easy way to see if a video has potential to get a lot of views.

Let’s say you find a video, “The Elders of Mocko Comedy Show Episode 6”, on YouTube that you find intriguing.

You watch the video, and it’s pretty funny!! Not to mention that it doesn’t have a lot of views yet, so it’d be a cheap buy on VideoSlush.

What now?

One of the easiest ways to peek into the future is to look at the author’s past.

When you get to the author’s page, scroll down to see if he/she uploaded any videos in the past.

Well, looks like his previous videos were duds. Views-wise at least. The best video had 1,415 Views in 1 month, that’s an average of about 47 Views a day.

Unless the author starts a giant PR campaign, or if Perez Hilton puts the video on his blog, or YouTube decides to feature him, I think Mocko Episode 6 will probably get no more than 47 average Views a day as well…

That said, sometimes viral videos seem to take off for no apparent reason either! But looking at the past will usually give a good indicator of the future.

Because YouTube and VideoSlush update at different times, good old fashioned arbitrage is possible!

Here’s an example:

Notice in the picture above, Tyson’s Trip to the Oprah Show has 95,182 Views. The blue line in the chart also shows that Views have not updated for a bit as well.

At this point, you may be tempted to sell the video, if you are holding the video. Or if you don’t own the video, is this a potentially good buy?

Click on the embedded video! Let’s see what’s going on with Tyson’s Cat on YouTube.

Well, well, well… Looks like Tyson’s got 191,000 Views on YouTube! This is almost 100,000 Views more than VideoSlush is showing! Looks like YouTube updated before VideoSlush did.

It’s time to take advantage of this and buy, buy, buy in VideoSlush!

As you can see, when VideoSlush updated the Views, the Price shot up along with it.

Now you’ve arbitraged Oprah’s video on VideoSlush! Well done, SlushMaster.

There are many ways to assess whether a video has potential to go viral.

The first thing to do is to check when a video was uploaded to YouTube:

Here’s an example:

This video was uploaded to YouTube back in May and recently added to VideoSlush. Unless a catalyst happens (the video gets featured on YouTube, gets linked to from a big site, etc), it won’t get enough Views to push the price up.

Look what happened to its price after it was added to VideoSlush:

“Windmills of your mind” had over 6400 Views (Blue Line) when it was added to VideoSlush.

The Views by Hour bar chart shows that the video is gaining between 1 to 30 Views per hour. Some hours don’t have data, because YouTube doesn’t update every hour.

Price (Green Line) steadily declines because the video isn’t getting enough Views to push Price up. Once Price gets in this state, it’s almost impossible for it to shoot back up.

One of the biggest lessons here is that videos newly uploaded to YouTube have the potential to get discovered and take off rapidly, while older videos that never took off usually continue to languish in eternal doldrums. Anything over 2-3 days is “old” in the online video space! Remember, all bets are off if an older video gets featured on YouTube or gets linked to from popular sites.

This simple tip should help you avoid losing some Slush!