Top 10 Searches on IntroCave
Search only makes up a little over 2% of our traffic (this is—users who enter a search term in the header to try to find a specific type of intro video), but it's one of the few places on the site that can actually answer the question: "What do users want?" I thought it would be fun exercise to run through each of our top 10 search terms through 2018 so far and talk about how we can use that knowledge to get better intro videos on IntroCave.
Results: 0
The real #1 is the word "free". This has less to do with the content of our intro videos and more to do with the fact that everyone likes free stuff. Preview renders at low quality are always free on IntroCave, and these free intros are suitable for use in comps. To remove the watermark and upgrade the quality to either 720p or 1080p, there's a small fee that helps keep our servers running (and pay for the cost of rendering all those free videos). There may be a way to offer more free content in the future (such as a free video of the week), but nothing is currently planned.
Rank: 10
Results: 0
IntroCave currently has no car-themed intro videos. This will be one of the first categories of intro video we tackle once we get done updating the keywords and descriptions of our current catalogue. I see two ways this could go. The first would more centered around the technology of cars: engines, wheels, pistons. I think it's more likely that users searching for car themed intro videos are interested in SPEED—racing and street racing intros could be used for a lot of different kinds of content.
Rank: 9
Results: 2
While any video can be customized by uploading your own MP3, we should definitely add more content that is specific to music channels: intro videos over audio recording equipment, instruments, and performances.
Rank: 8
Results: 3
Though we primarily focus on videos that can be used as short intros to other content, there are other types of videos on the site (for example, this image gallery video is one of our best sellers. In the future I'd like to have the videos better organized by type so that it's much easier to tell whether a video is best used as an intro video, an outro video, a gallery video, or another type of video.
Rank: 7
Results: 79
The most common types of intro videos are LOGO, LOGO + SUBTITLE, TITLE, and TITLE+SUBTITLE. In a future update, we plan to organize these a little better so users can filter based on the content they want to place in their intro videos. (until recently pagination was broken on search pages, so only the first 12 were actually browseable—whoops!)
Rank: 6
Results: 7
Glitch intro videos are some of our most popular videos and regularly in our best sellers list, but it's still a bit surprising to see it pop up in the top 10 search terms. These all make great intros and work well for any gaming and technology channels, so definitely expect to see more of these in the future.
Rank: 5
Results: 2
Ideally this would return all the same results as "gaming" (see below). This will be part of the content update that is currently in development.
Rank: 4
Results: 0
I think it would be awesome to have some Minecraft intro videos. The same goes for Fortnite intro videos, which is a search term that is shooting up the charts but not yet in the Top 10. Because these products are owned by Microsoft and Epic respectively, it's pretty much impossible to have officially licensed intros. My first instinct is to just commission a few voxel-styled intro videos, but targeting specific games is really tough. Users and content creators both know their games extremely well, and any sort of knock off content is going to be immediately recognized as such.
Rank: 3
Results: 1
There's currently only a single video that's explicitly tagged for news (a red spinning globe), but I see this more as a genre of intro video suitable for making announcements or updates. These videos are more often used as transitions within a longer video and not always as an intro video, but I'd like to start getting more of them on the site.
Rank: 2
Results: 5
Because of the way search term matching works, there's a bit of overlap here between "fire" and "fireworks." We've got a few intro videos that hint at at flames and fire, but I plan to add more intro videos that contain real fire and flames on top of cool particle effects.
Rank: 1
Results: 4
Gaming is one of the most popular types of content to stream and create videos for, so it's no surprise that "gaming" takes the #1 spot. Though there are currently only 4 results for this search term, this is more of a data problem than a content problem. One of my first major projects (currently underway) is to go through our catalogue of videos and update all the keywords to be more relevant. Expect to see more videos that are good for gaming in the future.