Category Archives: Yahoo Video

Blogs on Video, book, Future of Online Video, Online Video, popular videos, Video Business, Video Sites, Viral Video, Yahoo Video, YouTube

YouTube Versus Long Tail

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Want to get your stuff seen? Should you obsess with YouTube or go for the “long tail“? Let’s explore this important debate, and obviously the right answer is “do both.” But don’t hold your breath waiting for a million views on YouTube, or kill yourself getting your video on the homepage of some niche blog that gets 20 visitors a day.

crocodile long tailWhen you look at the share of online videos by comparing various major players, you’ll find YouTube dominates — whether you’re measuring via ComScore’s roughly 1 million panel or Hitwise’s 25 millionish data via internet service providers). YouTube’s slice can vary, depending on your data source and how you define the pie (for instance, including MySpace or not).

Although YouTube is indisputably the biggest with more views than the next several largest sites combined, this recent press release by ComScore puts things in perspective. Although more than 90 percent of my average video views occur on YouTube, that’s not representative.

Together we all viewed 9 billion videos online in September. But only 2.6 million of those were seen by 70 million people via Google/YouTube (representing 28.3%). (Note that more than 38 million people viewed approximately 360 million videos on MySpace.com, yet MySpace TV accounted for 766,000 viewers and 1.1 million videos. But aren’t some of these YouTube videos?).

When you’re looking at pure-play online video sites, the cliff drops sharply after that. Just 4 percent for Yahoo and 4 percent for Fox. Then the other major networks are in the low single digits.

So here’s the interesting thing. Only about 50% of the views are coming from the top 10 sites. That means the rest of the industry is hyper fragmented… aka the “long tail” of video.

Pandemic Labs (a “revolutionary marketing agency”) has a blog that criticized my recent AdAge article’s statement: “The vast majority of online viewing occurs on YouTube. Putting your videos on a bloated-product.com site is the online equivalent to running television commercials on a kiosk hidden in an abandoned cemetery.”

Says the blog: (Nalts) is unfairly sidelining some very powerful sites and not taking into account the power of viewer targeting which is crucial to viral success for marketers. The wording of this lesson accidentally makes it seem like YouTube is the only site worth seeding a video on, even though that is probably not what he meant to imply. Pandemic Labs has a network of over 50 sites that we use to seed videos. We don’t use all of these sites for every campaign, but it is critical to the spread and success of viral videos to reach specific target audiences on larger sites such as Break, Metacafe, and Kontraband, all the way down to small sites like SuperDeluxe, JibJab, and Dorks.com.

The Video Long TailFair criticism- don’t forget the long tail. While I don’t advocate trying to create a new video destination if you’re a brand trying to market (fish where the fish are), it is worth remembering that a viral-video marketing campaign is bigger than putting all your eggs in the YouTube basket.

Bottom line for you “scanners”: There’s a lot of viewing taking place on smaller video sites and blogs, and it’s much easier to get featured on them. More importantly, you’re now targeting. Para exampl  a view of my video for Holiday Inn Express is worth far more on travel sites than YouTube. Just don’t under estimate the labor associated with getting quantity of views on smaller properties, and watch that “point of diminishing returns” very closely.

advertising, book, Future of Online Video, google video, Making Videos, metacafe, Online Video, Profit, Revver, Video Sites, Yahoo Video, YouTube

Online Video Sites and Monetization Status

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TubeMogul’s blog did a nice summary of the online-video sites it feeds, and provides user feedback about the site and monetization status (whether you can make money on the sites). You can also read the “Zagat’s”-like report as a PDF. Thanks to Mark from TubeMogul for bringing this to our attention.

book, Future of Online Video, google video, Making Videos, metacafe, Online Video, popular videos, Video, Video Business, Video Online Tools, Video Sites, Viral Video, Yahoo Video, YouTube

The Best Tool for Uploading Your Video to Multiple Video Sites

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Nearly 9 months ago I begged for an alternative to uploading my videos manually to multiple websites. But shame on me. I’ve been uploading to dozens of sites for nearly two years, and we’re talking about nearly 500 videos. So that translates to several thousand times of doing the mundane “title it, describe it, tag it, upload, and wait.” Rinse, repeat.

Solutions have gradually developed, and all but one of these is free. So why have I waited until today to change this forever?

  1. Very few credible solutions have emerged in this space until recently. I’d even spoken with developers to create a custom web-based application that would focus on simplifying uploads and cope with site-specific criteria (monetization requirements). The potential here is enormous because content-creators would make that site a regular stop, which would give power to the tool to permit less popular sites to receive content.
  2. Most of my recent videos have been YouTube-specific and I’ve let my presence on other sites fade. Still, there are always a few that could have life beyond YouTube. And when I focused on Revver and Metacafe I made decent money for a short period. Ultimately my Revver and Metacafe dollars have dwindled as Revver views are low and few of my videos have hit the criteria for revenue-sharing on Metacafe.
  3. Ultimately I’ve distrusted non-credentialed “uploader” applications because of the risks I may take. Do they keep a copy of the video, and what rights might they assume on them? More importantly, the mystery company owns YOUR passwords of each video website. Do you want them being able to change payment preferences in your Revver, Metacafe or YouTube settings?

It’s time to overcome this fear.

I’m starting with what appears to be the leader in the space: TubeMogul. I neglected to mention them in a recent post that sited two players, and I heard from you WVFF readers and from the company.

So here’s the current landscape of players. I am not brave enough to try them all, and in some cases I list the “deal breaker” that turned me away.

TubeMogul

  • tube mogulPros: Hands-down winner of the space.  Registering and password process made me feel safe.
  • Cons: Limited sites supported:  YouTube, Metacafe, MySpace, Yahoo, Revver, AOL Video, DailyMotion, BrightCove. Interface was frustrating because the process of defining the sites to monitor is very different from identifying the sites for uploading. This required me visiting each of the sites for various information at different stages: e-mail, password, URL of my video page.
  • Note: The site asked if I wanted to store the passwords, so I’m hoping I won’t need to teach it again. The status feedback hasn’t yet changed on the videos I uploaded an hour ago.

Vidmetrix

  • Pro: Simple interface, good analytics, easy to add account to site via interface.
  • Con: Too few sites supported – deal breaker until developed. They are exclusively allowing Google Video, Metacafe, MySpace, Revver, Veoh, YouTube. Typos on site and lack of contact information also made me weary to try.

HeySpread

  • Pro: Nice interface from developer that seems legitimate.
  • Con: Deal breaker: You need to remember your passwords, because they’re used in the “session” but not databased. This may have been to quell concerns about sharing passwords, but it seems like I’m just as vulnerable for password theft whether it retains them or not. And it’s a huge inconvenience.

Veoh

  • Pro: By uploading on Veoh, you can also add Google Video, MySpace and YouTube to the sites that receive the video. This is, to my knowledge, the only video site that provides that unselfish functionality.
  • Con: Veoh is supposed to be a revenue-sharing site, but I haven’t made a penny on it in the months and months I’ve tried it. It’s frustrating to even try uploading directly to Veoh on that basis. Not a deal breaker but seems like a waste of time.

VideoPostRobot:

  • Pro:  Best diversity of sites. Supports: AOL Uncut Videos. Youtube, Google Video, Bolt, Putfile, Metacafe, Yahoo Video, MSN Soapbox, Myspace Video, Revver, Livevideo, Stupidvideos, Break, Brightcove, Grouper, Zippyvideos, iFilm, Veoh, Flurl, Blip.TV. $1 trial and downloadable application may simplify storing and using (although does present challenges for traveling uploaders).
  • Con: $19.95 is a deal breaker when there are free alternatives. Lack of company contact information and poor grammar on website makes me fearful to even try it.

Bottom line:

VideoMogul wins for easy upload features and strong statistic monitoring (its origins). The site is free, and fairly intuitive (although the user interface could use some simplifying). Ideally I’d like to set up my upload and monitor sites once, and then have a simple interface for each time I post or review statistics. I’d also value alerts for when a video happens to move. For example, if my Revver video got more than 100 views, my Metacafe video made it into the hermetically sealed “Producer Rewards” program, or I made my first penny on Veoh.

AOL, Google, google video, Yahoo Video, YouTube

Is Soapbox a Zune? MSN Launches YouTube Competitor

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soapbox.jpgIt’s been in talks since September 2006, but MSN finally launched a public beta of SoapBox (source: DigitalTrends). Although MSN has about 10% of the search market (compared to Google and Yahoo’s combined share of more than 80%), it does have the advantage of being backed by the world’s largest software company. While the world probably doesn’t need another user-generated video site, Microsoft might make Soapbox fly with sheer marketing might.

There actually are some features that make Soapbox unique:

  1. Soapbox allows users simultaneously to watch videos and browse for new ones on the same screen. Something nice for those of us with vADHD. The result, however, is less of a community feel and more of a broadcast feel (like Yahoo! Video or AOL Uncut).
  2. You can upload more formats than most sites: AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV, MPEG1/2/4, 3GPP, or DV file formats. And get this. While it’s uploading you can continue to surf the site (that’s extremely rare).
  3. You can view them on Window’s Media Player (that still around?) or Flash. No Quicktime.
  4. The interface is ‘perty (albiet not user centric). The player controls are very smooth. Videos appear to stream rapidly, but we also know that not many people are using it yet.

And now for some complaints.

  1. When you select a video, the URL doesn’t change. That makes it difficult to link to specific videos. Only a savvy user will realize that you have to select “share” and copy the URL manually. So, for example, I can share this video of William laughing. But almost thought the feature was missing.
  2. In a similar flaw, the URL doesn’t change based on the section of the site you’re in. So I can’t send you directly to the comedy category.
  3. Sniff, sniff. I don’t smell any advertising revenue sharing. Hisssss.
  4. No Quicktime viewing. Windows Media? Isn’t that obsolete?
  5. Can’t download videos.
  6. The comments are buried. Half the fun of YouTube is the dialogue around the comments. But Soapbox takes more of a broadcast model like Yahoo Video or AOL Uncut (where people almost never comment). We’ll probably see very little community build around Soapbox.
AOL, BlipTV, google video, Making Videos, Online Video, Revver, Search, Video Business, Video Online Tools, Video Sites, Video Software, Yahoo Video, YouTube

Submit Your Video to Many Video Sites at Once

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laptops.jpgI’ve been long begging for a technology that allows amatuer videographers to populate multiple video sites with ease. You may like the popularity of YouTube and the money from Revver, blip.tv and Metacafe. But you can’t afford to miss sites like AOL Uncut, Yahoo or Google Video since they do deliver volume. I think I speak for most video makers that my LEAST favorite part of video is manually submitting it on sites. And I invariably forget one or two.

A number have people have confided in me certain new businesses that address that unmet need — I will not reveal specifics of these in respect to their need for secrecy. As you can guess, some go after subscriptions, others charge a flat fee, and others are targeting high-end publishers to charge a premium.

Marquisdejolie recently shared that Veoh uploaders can automatically populate their YouTube, MySpace and Google accounts with their videos. That’s brilliant. Something I’ve urged Revver to do for months.

This is how I see this market playing out:

  • The progressive, smaller sites will use this as a value-add to attract content. The larger sites (with maybe the exception of YouTube/Google Video) have no incentive to facilitate this.
  • Some software players will try to make a business model on this separately. You’ll register at a site, and they’ll take care of all the form requirements of the most common video sites. While I’d probably pay a modest monthly fee to avoid an hour of work each day, most will resist that.
  • Someone will build a free shareware application to do this. However the video sites might change their specifications or make this obsolete.
  • Ultimately there will be a hybrid free/paid tool. For free you’ll get, say, 20 uploads a month to various sites. For a minor ($10-$20) fee you can have unlimited uploads to a broader base of sites.
  • To avoid commoditization these tools will offer additional value-add functionalities. For example, they’ll get your video search-engine optimized, Digged, etc. And maybe they’ll discover additional value-add services that provide video junkies more time to focus on creating instead of posting and publicizing.
advertising, AOL, BlipTV, Blogs on Video, book, Future of Online Video, Google, google video, GooTube, metacafe, Online Video, Revver, Video Advertising, Video Business, Video Contests, Video Online Tools, Video Sites, Viral Video, Web 2.0, Yahoo Video, YouTube

Top 10 Online-Video Predictions for 2007

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sit.jpgI pulled out my crystal ball this morning, and I’m predicting the most significant online-video highlights of 2007.

I’ll be citing these selectively at the end of 2007 (only those in which I was right).

Okay I didn’t use a crystal ball. This video tells a better story about the process I used to arrive at these today.

  1. Online video and television collide then converge. We’ve seen small steps toward this, but they’re trivial relative to what will happen in 2007. We’re first going to see some territorializing between online-video players and larger networks and media distributors. Then we’ll start to see great partnerships between major networks and online video sites, as well as deals with Verizon, Comcast and TiVo that give online video creators much broader exposure.
  2. Consolidation of online video sites will increase exponentially. Eventually there will be only a small hand-full of sites (GooTube, AOL, Yahoo) where people upload videos, because those sites will gain critical mass and cut exclusive deals upstream. Almost every industry starts with hundreds of players, consolidates to a dozen, and finally matures with 2-3 major entities. Small sites will get acquired or fade. There will still be niche sites like Break.com and special-interest sites.
  3. amanda.jpgViral video creators will “cross over” to television. We saw Amandon Congdon make the leap from Rocketboom to ABC recently. People with talent, like ZeFrank, will land a short segment on The Daily Show or some other television show. Ultimately this will make ZeFrank’s bloated ego explode — something we hope occurs live on Good Morning America. A few name-brand stars will decide they can move online without the hassle of networks. I don’t see any of these succeeding initially, but as the audience for “online video” surpasses (in some areas) television viewers, it will be hard for them to resist.
  4. Many television shows will develop online manifestations. This will include “behind the scenes” shots, extended storylines, and interactions with the show. Some shows will invite submissions by amateurs and even cast amateurs to participate.
  5. Consortiums will form for economies of scale. Viacom/Fox/NBC/CBS are already toying with an anti-YouTube play. This is as impossible to resist as it is to achieve airlift. Other consortiums will succeed. I see groups of independent online video amateurs forming copperatives to market their content to networks, or networks organizing the coops. Shows like RabbitBites will have higher odds of moving to mainstream when connected with similar content.
  6. Select amateur video creators will begin to make a full-time living without “crossing over” to television. Metacafe‘s CEO Arik Czerniak recently told me he anticipates his top amatuer creators will make six-figure incomes in 2007. I think he’s right. I’d also watch for people earning high revenue via Revver if the company rapidly expands its viewer base through affiliate/syndicate partnerships.
  7. crystal_ball_juggling.jpgA major news story will break via live (or close to live) footage by “citizen journalists” holding cameras. Remember the impact of the Rodney King footage? Consider how more of these we’ll see now that so many of us are equipped with cell phones that record video. And eventually we’ll see live footage from a cell phone in a major news story — a robbery, hostage situation or natural disaster. If the reporters can address the nation live via satellite, why can’t the amateur videographer via a video-enabled cell phone? It will look like garbage, but it will be horrifically real.
  8. Marketers will get smarter about how they gain consumer mindshare through online video. The self-created viral videos will give way to more creative partnerships between brands and top video creators. These deals will be efficient for marketers, and highly profitable for video creators with low budgets. We’ll see increasingly fewer $250K viral video series created by agencies, and more low-budget, fun videos that were inspired by amateurs but get the media support of advertising budgets.
  9. lonelygirl15.jpgReal vs. fake will be a major 2007 theme. People don’t understand that some videos are designed to be “story telling,” and others are real footage. LonelyGirl15 was an example of a deliberate ruse, but many other “are they real or not” videos are endlessly dissected by comments. This will catch media’s attention, since they’ll enjoy raising viewer concerns about the integrity and validity of this threatening medium.
  10. The “big boy” sites are going to start sharing advertising revenue with select creators like some smaller sites (Revver, Metacafe, Blip, Brightcove, Lulu). That means Google, YouTube, Yahoo and AOL will finally realize that good content means eyeballs. And eyeballs means more revenue.
advertising, book, popular videos, Revver, Yahoo Video, YouTube

Video Creators Exposed for Cheating Their Way to Popularity

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cheat.jpgHaving plenty of people viewing your YouTube videos has achieved such social status that prominent YouTube creators are “cheating.” In this video Redskulled describes the simple method to inflate total views on your video, and identifies some of the “famous” YouTube cheaters — and shows the crude and simple ways to cheat.

Consider, then, the sites that share ad revenue, and the deeper incentive to cheat. Since the creator and the video site are often paid on total views, we can imagine that many views of videos are, in fact, browsers automatically refreshing (instead of new eyeballs). Even sites that earn on click-thru (instead of impression) are vulnerable.

Eventually advertisers will demand that the sites identify and take action of fraud — just like Google is supposed to be policing click fraud. As an example, we evaluate our Google text ads not on cost per click-thru, but on a “quality formula” of what the visitor did on the site- and whether they visited select “quality pages.” If I see clicks without quality page views, I smell “click fraud.”

There are lot of ways to catch cheaters:

  • Do the views come from the same subscriber?
  • Did views skyrocket in a certain period with a steady instead of random growth rate?
  • Did a user view more videos in a period than possible?
  • Is the ratio of views/subscribers dramatically off norm?
  • Is the ratio of views/comments off norm?
  • Are all of the views (regardless of the username) coming from the same IP address — or a masked IP?

Still, it will take a while for reported views to approximate actual views. Why?

  1. The technology is like radar detectors. When the video site or advertiser (police) finds a new tool, the cheaters (speeders) have already moved on to something new.
  2. The cheaters benefit the video site in the short term. Even cheat views can create revenue. Although eventually this will undermine the site’s credibility with advertisers, it’s a quick fix for cash flow and to satisfy nervous VCs.cheat1.jpg

I have advertised on video sites, and have seen lower than average “click thrus” to my “call to action.” That suggests there may be a problem.
Some sites have identified and corrected click fraud. Revver, for instance, is paid not on views but on the click of an ad frame. Earlier this year I noticed some of my videos exploding. Turns out it was click fraud from someone benefiting from affiliate earnings from my video. Revver reconciled and I watched my earnings go down for a sad period.

Click fraud and viewer cheats is unethical, and arguably illegal if it creates artificial revenue for the creator. Here’s hoping more Redskulled folks identify cheaters and keep ’em honest.

advertising, book, Future of Online Video, google video, Video Advertising, Video Business, Viral Video, Yahoo Video

When Will Preroll Ads Die?

It was a rhetorical question, but I hope preroll goes the way of pop-up ads soon. This Clickz reports that the industry consensus is that pre-rolls aren’t the solution. Kevin Newcomb reports from AdTech NYC:

At present, many marketers are simply porting their TV ads online to run as pre-roll. They’re doing that not because they think it’s the most effective way to market in the online video medium, but because that’s what their organizational challenges allow them to do, Janet Balis, senior VP of sales development for AOL Media Networks, said during a “TV 2.0” panel at Ad:tech. “Most are looking to buy 15- or 30-second pre-roll, not because it’s the most interesting thing people want to be doing, but because there are real challenges to transitioning online. A lot of people want to innovate, but it’s challenging to do that on a broad scale,” Balis said.

ruprick.JPGDaniel Blackman from Google has it figured out. Contextual persistent branding. Say it with me three times. Contextual persistent branding. Contextual persistent branding. Contextual persistent branding.

Oklahoma, Oklahoma, Oklahoma!

Common, guys. It’s so simple. Wrap compelling branding and “call to actions” around the videos viewed by your target audience. Compel them to interact, and greet them with an entertaining video. THEN you can hock your goods.

P.S. Steve Bryant is in the same place. See ReelPopBlog.