The Video View
- About
- Video news elsewhere
- formats in search of audiences
- how short is short?
- Is Hulu more important that Time Warner Cable?
- last.fm and smartclip tie the knot
- MLB.com added to Little Roku
- pre-rolls to help YouTube turn a profit
- UK Commercial TV viewing shows an upswing
- what are the differences between in-stream and in-page video ads?
- why the JK wedding is a successful viral
- Why you need to be using video on your site…
- YouTube finalises revenue share for video partners
- YouTube to turn profit?
Archive for category regular
Vimeo vs YouTube – David vs Goliath?
Posted by vaughan in regular, technology providers on November 11, 2009
For those of us with enough grey hairs to remember the great browser wars of the 90s some of the recent developments in online video platforms may start to sound a little familiar. If not – bear with me and hopefully I’ll make my case.
from Miss Rogues Flickr Stream
The biggest anti-trust case that was brought against Microsoft was due to the fact that their browser – Internet Explorer – was bundled into the operating system (wikipedia article). This killed off competition as Netscape and Opera fumbled for the keys to the castle while IE was safely ensconced in the great hall eating, drinking and having a ball. IE now has competition and its market share has been steadily dropping as Firefox, Safari and Chrome nibble away at its lead through performance and usability improvements. Microsoft has a dominant position in terms of operating systems for PCs and abused that to stifle innovation at rival companies.
I read this article and it got me thinking. If YouTube is already embedded into a phone or into the new Chrome OS when it debuts, then does that put a rival such as Vimeo into difficulty. There is no doubting that YouTube has a dominant market position with a 40% market share (via Mashable and ComScore). This doesn’t seem dominant until you factor in the fact that the next largest video site has a 2% market share. What YouTube does and says changes the market, for the most part this is beneficial to the user – I like HD, I think annotations are interesting and I like the idea of skippable pre-rolls. In the long term however they are building an unassailable lead that really doesn’t need to be assisted through the bundling of the YouTube player into devices and future operating systems.
I like Vimeo, I think that their product is excellent, it is uncluttered and the place where most people serious about video production place their showcases. Their playback is excellent and the HD seems to be as good as you can make it on a computer screen. Is there a case for bundling Vimeo into an OS? Probably yes. The iPhone population and the Vimeo clientele would seem to form a pretty coupley venn diagram and soon you should see an app for Vimeo. Every android phone comes with YouTube as an embedded app, every Apple TV comes with the ability to watch YouTube videos and the iPhone comes with a YouTube app installed. Does any other video site have the clout of YouTube? No. Can any other video site sign the partnership deals that YouTube can? No. Does that put YouTube in a dominant position? Absolutely, it does.
As a wise man who used to run Sun Microsystems once said ‘Innovation happens elsewhere’, it might be Vimeo, it might be Facebook, Metacafe, Dailymotion or any of the other video sites that out-innovates YouTube in the medium to long term but in the current market YouTube will find it quite easy to maintain its market share.
But as Valuev found out, if you are the biggest guy in the ring, with the heaviest weight and the longest reach then in the long run you can still get beaten by the little guy, even when he’s broken his hand on your head in the second round.
Originalskateboards’s Channel
skateboards are cool. i however cannot skate.
Video is a big cornerstone of Yahoo!’s strategy
Yahoo has embarked upon a major marketing campaign to try and increase it’s presence and relevance as an online media giant. One of the areas that they are intending to focus on is video and while their numbers seem a little small in comparison to YouTube it is worth remembering that a higher percentage of Yahoo!’s content is professional and therefore good space to advertise around.
Yahoo! have also gone through something of a revamp of their web properties, mail has a new interface, Flickr is now ‘from Yahoo!’ and they are starting to tie them all together. Given the well publicised deal with Microsoft on the search advertising side it is clear that Yahoo! has to do something to differentiate itself, they are masters of the display advertising market and it would make sense for them to focus on video. They are a little late to the game but in their case I think that this means that maybe they can learn from other’s mistakes and get such critical things right as frequency capping, targetting and reporting that they have for standard display advertising.
Take the knife, don’t take the knife…
It is rare that videos on the internet take advantage of the fact that a story can be made interactive and non-linear. Too often we watch a story that has been shot in a traditional way that fails to take advantage of the fact that if it is on the internet then the creators can get the viewer to interact and change something. Marketers are starting to become aware of the power that this has as the viewer becomes engaged.
In this campaign for the Central Office of Information, each video has the option to change what happens next, as a colleague of mine once described it – ‘it’s like one those books that you read as a kid where at the bottom of the page you had the option to …. turn to P54 to fight the wizard or turn to P17 to run and hide’. As you progress through the videos the viewer experiences the effect that each experience has on the main character. The implementation is a little clumsy but then this campaign was designed to run on YouTube rather than a dedicated site to maximise accessibility.Of course – there has to be a payoff – the COI is not selling knives, I can’t click to buy anything but there is a reward at the end of the story. Naturally I can’t spoil it for you – you’ll have to discover the right way through the video maze.
In a previous post I talked about a recruitment campaign for the army that works on a similar line – for this campaign 30 minutes of video was shot specifically for the web experience whereas only a small portion of that was for the TV campaign, this turns the usual ratio on it’s head and is a sign of things to come.
Stats that prove that I’m right
I have been saying for a while that the technology and the platform are not the reasons why people use the internet – it is for the content or the ease of communication. There is a metaphor used in sales training – ‘the customer doesn’t want a drill, they need a hole’ – in other words who cares about the platform – it’s about what you want to do with it.
The increase in time spent on community is enormous and reflects the amount of time spent on social networking, I can see that this will carry on increasing as content consumption becomes a more of a community activity.
If you want to get data like this to your inbox then register over at Silicon Alley insider.
Veoh court date sets interesting precedent
If a user uploads a piece of content to a video sharing site and that content is deemed to be an infringement of copyright then who is to blame?
If you are Viacom and the site is YouTube (before it implemented more control) then YouTube is to blame. If you are Universal Music and the site is Veoh then apparently Veoh is not to blame. A nice article from Adage describes the relative merits of the court judgements here.
It is a challenge to see how technology can be allowed to do it’s thing without upsetting the people who own the right to make money from the content that is being shared. After all if I make a video in a public space and there happens to be some music playing in the background for which I don’t have the online rights then who would be in the legal firing line if I uploaded it? The site should have checked to make sure that I had the rights and that they weren’t in contravention of any pre-existing agreements, I should have checked as the video creator/uploader that I had the rights or the content owning company can just let it go and hope that I don’t represent their music in a bad light.
The fact is that the ‘ostrich syndrome’ hasn’t worked out well for music, newspapers or TV. Unless these content owners figure out a way to let people interact with their content in a way which makes it easy for people to use it on purpose or accidentally then how will we ever know which side of the law we fall on. I am not an apologist for piracy, I gladly pay money for content but it has to be easily discoverable, easy for me to pay for it and in a format that makes sense. These aren’t new arguments but still the content owners aren’t meeting the needs of their customers – the public.
Need a guide to video marketing?
Need help with figuring out exactly how to use online video to your advantage? Then you should get your eyes over to the site of an agency over in California – Videoarmy, they seem pretty switched on and have some really useful info – like this Guide to Strategic Video Marketing.
The guide has lots of facts and figures which will help you to justify your activity and ideas about how you can maximise your return without being patronising. Well worth a read.
VAST, VPAID, VAUGHAN*
Posted by vaughan in regular, technology providers on September 8, 2009
via Admonsters
The IAB in the US has been working with some of the luminaries of the the online industry to try and make standards available which help the whole video advertising value chain to get along in the hope that this will allow the market to move on with technology discussions and move us forward to discussions of the creativity that the formats should allow.
Why are standards important? Without them the whole business just becomes too complicated to be worth it, with them the efficiency increases – campaigns online quicker, creatives better able to use the channel, reports more consistent and containing better data. This is a benefit for advertisers looking for the lost or dispersed TV audience, the media owners who are hoping to maximise the payback on their content and the agencies who try to deliver better results every time.
In order to make it as easy as possible – VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) makes it easy for an ad-server to deliver an ad into a player, the response from the ad-server follows a standard format to let the player know what is coming – is it linear or non-linear, will there be a companion banner, etc.
VPAID (Video Player Ad Interface Definition) makes it easy for the video player to understand how it is supposed to work while the ad is playing so that the content isn’t compromised and also tells the ad what size it needs to be to maximise the use of the space available.
Many of the large online video technology companies are involved in the development of the standards such as Freewheel, Eyewonder, DoubleClick and Eyeblaster along with the video media owners Turner, Hulu, MTV and Google. Hopefully the Digital Video Committee can keep the momentum that they have been building and get everyone along for the ride.
*As for VAUGHAN (Video Advertising’s Ungainly Group Hug Afficianado + Note-taker) – I have trademarked it but will licence it to the IAB when they run out of others. (Gag suggested by a certain Mr Philpot – now of AdForm)
How do you know if your video is working?
If you are not someone who cares about how well your videos perform then stop reading now. If on the other hand you are one of those people that is using video on their site to promote something or are sending videos out into the wilds of the internet in the hope that they will be viewed by thousands of people before bringing you untold riches then read on.
The great promise about using online marketing is that you can measure the success or failure of your campaign and therefore optimise the content, placement, reach or frequency to maximise what it brings to you. I am sure that the vast majority of advertisers entrust these activities to their ad agencies who perform them diligently and therefore squeeze every last conversion from their advertising dollars. In the real world it can be hard to find time to make sure that everything is working or budget to re-edit a video or make sure that the video is in the right place with the right call to action. So if you are using video how can you measure, track and optimise this?
Eyeview Digital provide a platform to help companies to make and manage their videos and then provide detailed reports on how they’ve performed. This helps the site to test and tune their video to provide the best performance, how long is too long, male or female voiceovers, big flashing red arrows or the subtle approach.
In an ideal world this kind of testing would be happening anyway but Eyeview have a tool which will help sites to maximise the benefits of putting video on there in the first place. You can try their quiz here to see if you know it all already, I won’t reveal my score, I should have done better!
If you are in the business of releasing your videos into the wild and are curious to see where they perform best and what happens after people have seen them then Tubemogul may be able to help you out. They provide a simple system which lets you distribute your video across multiple channels with a single action and then tracks the success of that video. They gather the statistics from the video sites and provide you with graphs showing viewership, drop off over time, traffic sources and many others.
This is especially important given the recent news that YouTube is planning on partnering more with video producers who publish viral content (Techcrunch write-up here). Traditionally this has been a no-go area for YouTube who have not wanted to sell advertising around amateur content that carries a higher risk of causing offence or being disrespectful to the brand. If you are a content producer and can now gain some financial reward for your work from YouTube then having another system to monitor the success of your video must be a good thing.
In the same way that the search marketing industry (SEO) required tools to control and monitor text ads across multiple search engines (frankly the need for this has decreased with the demise of several of the search engines) Tubemogul allows you to perform a similar function across multiple video sites.
Of course you could just carry on regardless and hope that your videos are being successful for you but wouldn’t you like the peace of mind that you are getting the most out of them that you can?
good creative + good format + good media = good advertising
A recent piece over on the E-consultancy site got me thinking. Good advertising happens when a good creative idea is delivered in a interesting and appropriate format in media that makes sense for the message. This is not rocket science – it has been happening since God was a boy.
Some of this is still getting figured out though for online video advertising. Unlike TV where depending upon location the ad is a 10/15/20/30 second long message or regular display advertising where a banner usually has to fit the IAB guidelines, there are maybe still too many variables when it comes to in-stream advertising that it is hard for the industry to get it’s head around them, what format, what length, pre/mid/post roll. Do you want companion banners? What if the video is played full-screen? How much interactivity should there be? Is it long-form or short form content? Is the content professionally produced? How many times should the user see the ad? Should we allow them to skip the ad after seeing it once? ad infinitum…
The best creative can often be found where the constraints are narrow – not broad, display advertising has come on leaps and bounds since the market figured out that having thousands of pop-ups was a bad thing. This has been a growing period during which the media owners have had to decide upon the value of their media and to try not to de-value it with too many ads. The creative teams have had to work with what they had and maximise the use of the space, the creative gallery from the IAB shows how this can work (although in my humble opinion the default answer of ‘pumping the majority of the effort into a microsite’ is a bit unadventurous). The media buyers often play a numbers game where they have to splat as many people as possible to get the required response rate but this is getting more focussed and targetted as the industry develops and advertisers get more sophisticated moving on from the altar of the click-through rate.
With in-player video advertising (as opposed to in-banner) the different parties need to pull together to see what works, what doesn’t and what is the most efficient way to use the space, what constraints to impose and what metrics are important (check Dean Donaldson’s blog for more on that). Maybe when that is all decided upon we will be able to stop talking about the technology and the formats and start talking about the creative idea which is what good advertising should be about.
