Gadgetory

there are three big companies in the industry that has the power to command coverage whenever they make a move MD and Vidya and Intel when one of these companies Dan's making announcements at another event like last week's Computex it's always huge news and dominates the coverage cycle for at least a full day or two we see this at least once a year so they'll often host their own launch events separately until decided to start pushing X 299 at Computex this year right alongside and these X 399 and we encountered a unique behavior no one really watched the X 299 coverage we'll talk about why today before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by Corsairs new at t1 race chair which is a $350 gaming targeted chair using a bucket style race seat the chair arms have four directional movement for configuration to your liking and has a bonus they use rollerblade wheels learn more at the link in the description below we already criticized Intel and it's marketing language in our initial coverage of the x-series CPUs for example when they use the phrases extreme mega tasking in marketing slides or self cannibalize their own product lines like the non-case cube part claiming that case keys are required for VR gaming that was all discussed as was the requirement of the new x-series CPUs for 12k gaming we talked about all that but the coverage still did pretty well and looking at the comments most of you agreed with us or if not agreeing directly with us you were still voicing concerns about the new product line and about X 299 and X series of parts specifically normally like KB like X which we'll talk about in a separate video so there's a lot of criticism going on with Intel right now but still you would expect follow-up coverage like X to 99 to do decently under any normal circumstances and by normal we're mostly looking at the past several years of product launches but there's a few big differences this year from those previous launches one of which of course is and these presents in the market now with CPUs especially really shaking things up for Intel sort of walk through some of that there are a couple of other items that also we think affected the viability of coverage of X to 99 parts and caused us to change our publication priorities in the middle of Computex to make sure that the high performing items were published first one of the first videos we shot was our X $2.99 motherboard coverage at gigabytes suite and that was prioritized for media publication because of the good viewership on our initial x-series product announcement video the video that gigabyte x99 motherboard walked through only garnered around 12,000 views total since publication last week and at first publication we were sitting at around 6,000 views one hour then new kenton card teardown which was a day older was doing more than 30,000 it was doing significantly more per hour which are all stats that we look at to provide some perspective on how we shoot a show like Computex to really make sure everyone understands what the process is like behind the scenes so at copy decks we might shoot something like four or five videos in a day maybe upwards of six but often tapers out around four or five and then we obviously have a limited amount of time left in the day for editing those videos and for getting them onto YouTube so at that point we face another challenge how many videos do we push onto the YouTube algorithm before we lose faith in its ability to distribute them all and still get decent viewership across all videos because obviously you don't want to load everyone down with a whole bunch of videos all at once if YouTube is not actually going to distribute those and make sure there's even viewership so that's a concern as is time so that means that we have to prioritize things now going into a show just leaning on experience for one doing this for almost 10 years now you lean on experience to figure out what should perform well and you also look at trends in the industry and part of this is looking at competitions so we might look at what other people that you watch are publishing and then decide from there okay these are doing well for them these aren't doing well for them well shuffle our priorities and make sure that the things that perform the best go up the soonest because you need to make ROI on a really expensive trip obviously but you also want to make sure that you're covering stuff as a creator or a journalist or whatever early enough in the process that it's still relevant to everyone in this trip that seems like it would obviously be X to 99 and as soon as we learned it was going to be on the show X 3 99 those seemed like the very clear winners in terms of good viewership and what happened was we actually ended up pushing cases ahead of X to 99 explain why in a moment which cases always do pretty okay but they do okay almost regardless of when we publish them because cases just kind of have a really reliable and kind of predictable viewership where people will pick it up over time whereas something like a new CPU or a new GPU has a really limited window where it's interesting to everyone and then it falls off because all the information available to the product has been disseminated up until the point where you just are waiting for a review to get more information so going into the show expecting X 299 to perform well meant that we encountered something a bit different than expected obviously we have case coverage that did better than X 299 videos we even had a vlog do two times more views on some of our X two nine nine videos and we never do vlogs and our content was exactly in line with all of our other coverage so that wasn't it either as soon as we were able to get gigabytes to let us film the X 299 board we ran over there got the video shot and online within an hour so if though minutes and that content piece has now done double of what the gigabyte $2.99 video did publish a bit before the X 399 video and the 399 video was only one motherboard here's a look at stones view stats for X to 99 and X 399 the public numbers this gives an idea for the popularity trend between them and shows us something that we started noticing for Intel earlier this year their new stuff just isn't as popular that started with KB Lake and it's continuing here and we think that's for a few reasons and before rolling into though is just to kind of give some more context this video is supposed to help you understand one what we kind of look at behind the scenes when we're making content because it's kind of interesting but to look at why X 299 is just not that popular for this coverage cycle compared to normally in fact it was bad enough that originally our plan was everything X to 99 and what we could get of x3 99 when we learned it was there goes up first and as soon as that first gigabyte X to 99 video hit I told Keegan okay all that stuff I said about X to 99 forget it it waits till the end of the show we'll publish Coolermaster first publish the MSI laptop stuffers all the other videos you saw on our Channel those moved head of the msi x-29 coverage I was published later ACS $2.99 and whatever else you may have talked about to the point where we ended up as soon as gigabyte X 399 1 5 ee 99 as fast as possible because we saw the viewership what's quite good so the reason for that I think there's a few there's a few theories here that are valid for this one of them is that I think people might just be bored of Intel and the reason for that is because you look at Intel's performance over the last several years is not news to anyone they generally have a pretty predictable performance weep of maybe five to seven percent in something like gaming FPS maybe you get some more out of single-threaded performance or some really specific application but for our audience you're expecting five seven percent certainly not any more than ten when overclocked and things like that so for that reason it's easy to see why people might be bored of Intel because they might just expect well I know the performance of X 99 and it's CPUs so I can kind of figure out what X to 99 and it's CPUs will look like as well that's one potential reason this might be contributing to the limp readership in X to 99 where everyone sort of thinks they know what to expect which is valid and then the other end of the possible theories of why performance is lower on $2.99 versus almost everything else is that AMD has been stealing some of Intel Thunder lately Intel has not had to compete in a long time in fact I think that they have forgotten how to compete in some ways you look at their recent marketing materials for the upcoming CPUs that kind of tells you why but ambi is now putting pressure on them in multiple markets and the main one that's interesting for now is thread Ripper because suddenly h EDT is challenged and intel hasn't faced that for a very long period of time at this point and so the big thing there is that because Intel is being challenged it means that viewership is going to be more split people have a finite amount of time to watch things if they're interested in AMD and X 399 they might not watch Intel and X 299 they are not necessarily mutually exclusive or crossover audiences so that's part of the challenge to this coverage the viewership of the coverage I should say is being pulled away from Intel and some of these markets and to be fair thread Ripper looks quite interesting for this one versus a GDP from Intel so we're definitely and we'll be testing and reviewing both stay tuned for all that but it's it's a pretty clear path that they're going down in terms of competition between the two companies now another thing that we saw that's interesting and kind of potentially hurts or helps Andy it's hard to tell exactly depending on what you're posting as a creator or journalists or reporter and that one other thing is we saw a few comments for people to ask things like and it's completely fair to ask then it X 399 just come out why are you talking about X 299 and that's where it's interesting because AMD decided clearly to name their processors or their chipsets things that were somewhat relatable to Intel the incumbents devices so with chipsets you get X 399 clearly it's after X 299 Intel wasn't going to use it anyway because if you look at their naming schemes 58 $79.99 and they're going to skip 100 and go to 299 so they're probably go to 499 would be the next guess but not use 399 so Andy took that spot and then Andy also did there be there X 370 and there be Series boards that are similar in name number especially to Intel's B Series boards so it creates some interesting confusion but also means that AMD immediately has a part in the market where people can look at it knowing Intel for five years now or more knowing Intel stuff they can look at Andy and say I understand what that is and where it falls in the products back and how it should perform and what features it should provide based on my knowledge of these other things that I've been using for years so that makes it easy to make a linear transform sort of between one company or the other but it also means that for newcomers to the market they have a challenge of I don't know what any of this stuff means I haven't built the system in seven years or whatever so 399 looks like the newest the highest number it's in the X series why are we talking about that's one thing that's potentially helping Andy it could also hurt their viewership though because we have to specifically use the word thread Ripper in either thumbnails or titles to make sure that people didn't confuse the two we didn't want people for example seeing x-29 Intel coverage and expecting all X Blanc 99 to be Intel if they were actually interested in AMD safe to make sure there's not a chance to miss read one very important number in the title and skip the video because they don't want to see it because they're not interested in Intel so you name it X 299 thread Ripper or put the title and the thumbnail or something like that so there's all really interesting stuff it's kind of behind the scenes look the biggest thing I wanted to point out was that for the first time in a very long time we're seeing really interesting performance metrics in terms of views where a for-sure guaranteed high view count item a motherboard and a new platform launch and a new CPU launch is not necessarily the best performing thing there's one outlier here our deleting coverage of the 7900 X was by far our best coverage from the show but that's that had a few things going for one we deleted a processor that's not released but that helps a lot - we had their Bower in the video featuring their Bower in the title that helps brand viewership and then three we criticized them selves for the Tim usage kind of questioned why solder isn't used to spoke to their Bower certainly an expert in it so that also gets interest so that's the outlier we're okay it's a much different type of content than anything else that we shot at the show so it'll perform well but the other stuff not so much I mean we have I view numbers here HD six to ninety nine eighty five hundred views as of this filming MSI 299 seventy one hundred gigabyte X 299 and that's the interesting one to be shot two gigabyte things was about twelve thousand gigabyte X 399 20,000 and a CX 399 21,000 so for Asus that's 8500 to 21,000 and both of them were one motherboard featured and they're both flagships gigabyte was 12 to 20,000 as of right now and the gigabyte one was a roundup of all their x-29 and boards versus the one 399 and to be fair that was somewhat exclusive when we first filmed it because we were just among the earliest to see the board but you get the idea so I think that kind of gives a behind-the-scenes look it's to two parts this video one you get a behind-the-scenes look at how we do these conventions because we don't normally talk about it I don't think a lot of people do you're so focused on getting the content out you don't really care to talk about how you're getting the content made and how you prioritize things and things like that but - it also shows that there's a pretty interesting market brewing between Intel and AMD where Intel now is facing the normal level of criticism for things that they do but they are also facing some heat because Andy can come in and take advantage of that those criticized aspects of Intel to hed t line as I said in the news announcement 4 X $2.99 on the new CPUs X 3 CPUs Intel should have if they have the opportunity to double down on things like the 77 Hart K which they are still uncontested there for people who want the highest possible FPS gaming platform if you're doing 144 Hertz or something they have they have competition but it's not as good as the 7700 K and they start struggling once you look at production as we talked about in all the reviews or double down on the G 45 60 where they're also doing really well because MD has no r3 yet and the r3 might not be as cheap at the 45 60 instead or I guess one more alternative fix the i-5 lines that it makes more sense price-wise and performance wise instead what they've done is double down on h EDT because that stuff is all made so it can normally is made for about 18 months by the time you buy it or in the process of being made I should say they double down on that and now they're facing thread Ripper which is what rise and performs well in so interesting market let us know your thoughts below on all this and why you would prioritize watching one video versus another like if I gave you an option and we put X 2 9 9 X 399 and a case video in front of you and you can watch - which - do you watch right now if you only have time today so that's what I'm curious about as always you go to patreon.com/scishow and Excellus that helps out directly we post some articles on there sometimes that our patreon only where you can see some of this behind-the-scenes stuff more directly in a direct written form to the patreon backers storlock gamers nexus dinettes grab a shirt like this one and subscribe tomorrow I'll see you all next time you