Judging new media by old media metrics

November 12, 2012 By

Apparently Youtube has announced it will renew around 40% of the original content channels it funded last year (paying channels up to $5 million). As reported by AllThingsD, the channels not receiving new funding won’t be kicked off Youtube – and why would they with infinite space, and the deal requiring them to pay back the investment via advertising revenue if it hasn’t already been recouped?

What sparked my interest was the comparison to traditional TV only picking up the hits at the end of a season, and the fact that the first two comments on the article both said the experiment was a ‘failure’ in traditional TV terms and because 60% won’t be continued.

I’d completely disagree, and it’s symptomatic of the ease with which we default to existing yardsticks.

 

The long tail strikes again:

Presumably Google has already made back the initial investment on the 40% for renewal, or is close.

For the remaining 60%, Google will make back it’s investment eventually – those channels will remain contributing in perpetuity until they break even.

Tail of a tail

And the creators that aren’t having renewed deals do have an incentive to keep going – the investment and news will have certainly allowed them to raise their profiles and traffic beyond what they previously had. It certainly should have done with millions of dollars being handed out. Once their investment is re-payed they get the benefits of their increased traffic and funding to go forwards with.

I’m not a Google fan boy by any stretch of the imagination, but having followed the online video industry closely for many years, things have changed with the lowering costs of bandwith and storage, and that means better opportunities for all involved to operate with a lower risk. The cost of a prime time TV network show would be far more than a Youtube channel, and if it failed, there’s no coming back – compared to any of the ‘failed’ channels which could still break out with their next video or series.

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Quora with video – marketing dream and user nightmare?

July 11, 2011 By

The value of question and answer sites has long been shared by SEO specialists in terms of linkbuilding, and to some extent in social media for relevant traffic. But Quora may have just gone a step further in terms of allowing marketing material to be provided in answers.

The site is now embedding Youtube videos in answers, and converting any previous links to Youtube videos into the embedded version.

Quora includes video

Quora includes video

In some ways that’s a good thing, considering the value of relevant videos in answering the right questions. For instance, when the question relates to music, or sport. And being able to share a Youtube video explaining a technical point could be rather useful.

But at the same time, it also means an additional amount of content for Quora moderators to try and look after to keep the quality of their site up, and an additional way for anyone wanting to quickly push out a load of irrelevant spam videos to get some extra views. After all, the big reason why Google claims Youtube needs to post-moderate videos is that noone could ever manage to watch the huge amount of content being uploaded, and then decide what can and can’t be posted.

Now if enough spammers start flooding Quora with irrelevant videos, the much smaller start-up will have a similar problem.

It also means that you might struggle to load a page with 60+ embedded videos in it if you’re on a slow connection, but that’s probably something we’re just going to have to come to terms with as every site rushes to include video due to the huge rise in both video viewing and growth in video advertising…

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Doctorow video on copyright and piracy – must watch

June 2, 2011 By

Nice video of Cory Doctorow posted by the Guardian, and popping up in my RSS feeds thanks to The Pirates Dilemma.

The timing is particularly nice considering part of the video covers Hollywood and Youtube – and the latter has announced Creative Commons licences will now be part of the service when you upload or want to find content to mashup. It’s brilliant news, and the only question I have is why it took so long to happen?

I probably haven’t spent enough time educating enough of my clients about the benefits of utilising Creative Commons – a good reminder to start doing that right now.

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From flash mobs to toast mobs?

November 18, 2010 By

It seems as if one of the industries creating more unusual advertising and marketing material has to be mobile handset makers.

e.g.

Share hosted by Wikio
Which is linked to the new HTC Wildfire, as well as setting a new Guinness World Record for toast mosaics. The phone itself is HTC’s latest handset with the HTC Sense implementation of Android, a Friend Stream to check Facebook, Flickr and Twitter at the same time, and caller ID which includes the Facebook status of the caller and other details (Something increasingly useful). There’s more detail on the HTC Wildfire, here.
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Why Twitter is right not to launch a video service

October 12, 2009 By

Reports by the Telegraph of an official Twitter video service have since been denied – and it’s definitely the right decision.

Video services have seen tremendous growth – but very few have made any money. Look at the example of Youtube, and the huge risks in terms of the costs of providing a video service, versus the potential ability to profit from it without a lot of hard work.

And how many video companies have either disappeared, or, in the most appropriate example, changed direction significantly – Seesmic was purely a video service before moving into the Twitter client arena.

And when Biz Stone replied to Mashable’s enquiries, it made it clear:

‘Haven’t read the piece but no video hosting. 140 characters of text including spaces. You know the drill!’

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12Seconds iPhone App combines microblogging and messaging

September 23, 2009 By

Video microblogging 12seconds has released 12mail, to join the existing 12cast. Neither requires you to have an existing account, and whereas the earlier application would send videos to Twitter, the new app lets you send videos directly to your friends, which has far more potential for communication.

If you don’t have a 3GS you can send a picture and record an audio message on top of that – and either way, it will be direct messaged to all recipients on Twitter, or strangely posted to a user’s wall on Facebook.

The interesting thing is that I tipped the likes of Seesmic and 12Seconds as video microblogging which would grow hugely this year, but that hasn’t really happened. And the reason is I forgot to think about users more than technology – although there are some great people using video microblogging (for example @Documentally), most people are too self-conscious to be constantly updating to camera at the moment (Although the teen users of Ustream and Justin.tv etc might well disagree).

That’s why I love the fact this operates as more of a messaging service between people that know each other – the familiarity allows me to record a quick message when I don’t want to type or I want to share something visual, without worrying that the entire world will see my bad hair day.

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Start the week with a great guide to multimedia journalism

September 7, 2009 By

There are increasing numbers of journalists and bloggers utilising every channel in multimedia to convey their stories and information, but whether you’re contemplating starting to embrace digital multimedia, or you’ve engaged in mixing text, audio, video etc for a while, you’re bound to pick up at least a couple of new tools and ideas from Mindy McAdam’s Reporters Guide to Multimedia Profiency.

It’s the single PDF compilation of her 15 excellent blog posts on the subject.

And worth reading if you’re publishing anything online, whether or not you’d define yourself as a journalist or editorial staff.

Former colleague (although we never met in person), Adam Westbrook has also been doing some brilliant guides to using multimedia and video.

And for interesting inspiration, I tend to look at Christian Payne, and spend some spare time trying to persuade friend and former colleague Angus Farquhar to spend more time doing crazy stuff and blogging about it.

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PicPosterous – iPhone app for Posterous launches

August 20, 2009 By

image

Posterous straddles the bridge between microblogging and lifestreaming, and although founder Sachin Agarwal definitely prefers the latter description, I’m guessing it’s of interest to you – both as a place to post and aggregate content, but also as a method for sending content out to other sites, such as Twitter.

In any case, it’s first iPhone application is now available, and PicPosterous provides an alternative to emailing all your updates.

You can send content, particularly images and videos, before you’ve registered for an account, which will mean one is automatically created for you, and visual content can also be added to an album without starting a new post.

You can’t forward links or plain text to the site, which is potentially frustrating, and another niggle is that you don’t have any control over your autoposting settings via the app, besides turning them on or off.

But, as always with Posterous, the focus is on keeping things incredibly quick and simple, and then building on that, so I’m sure the feature list will improve fairly quickly over time.

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BBC reminds me of two elements of consumer satisfaction

August 17, 2009 By

I’m a big fan of much of the work the BBC does online, and in general it does a very good job of providing a massive amount of content in a fairly logical manner.

But using the site as a consumer with a couple of urgent needs highlighted a couple of things which I think are good lessons for any website:

Multi-channel delivery:

I’m a huge fan of the BBC iPlayer, and the fact it allows me to watch good quality online and on-demand television. So on Sunday morning, I rushed to watch Match of the Day, having missed it on Saturday night (and with the Absolute Radio Fantasy Football game meaning I need to pay extra attention to every team this year!).

But the listing was greyed out – and with no reason given, I had to presume it was down to the licensing rights for the Premier League.

So it was a bit weird to be looking for something else a bit later, and stumble across it in the sport section! (Flaw here was attempting to browse my way to it, rather than using the site or Google search.)

The lesson: If you’re putting out content through two difference channels for whatever reason, then link between them! And always try to explain why someone can’t access something if they might logically think they should.

Reassurance:

The BBC carries a lot of event coverage, particularly in areas such as music, and especially sport. For example, it’s great to be able to watch the MotoGP series via the BBC, and also great to be able to see the full list of races (125 and 250cc) online, as my TV set-up seems to struggle with the Red Button Freeview channels.

But although it’s nice to see everything go live at the same time, as if a single switch somewhere brings everything to life, unless you’ve got Freeview and the website running at the same time, it isn’t that impressive. And the fact the online feed wasn’t listed from the MotoGP page of the Sport section until the video went live two minutes after the listed time meant that I probably wasn’t the only one frantically refreshing the page to see if it would appear or if there was a problem.

The lesson: If you’re covering an event that starts at a specific time, why not have a page and link ready and live in advance, which can provide a bit of reassurance for internet users? That way, we can relax knowing that everything will go live at noon, for example, rather than worrying that there’s a technical fault with 1 minute to go. Whatever happens afterwards, we’re already stressed and less likely to enjoy and appreciate your hard work!

 

I’m still a huge fan of the BBC, and there are hundreds of sites which could have been used for the same points – the reason it stood out for me was that I was a completely powerless consumer. Reinforcing the final lesson – always look at your website as a consumer trying to achieve something.

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Twitter is the best source for users to engage with video

August 4, 2009 By

Twitter seems to be the best source of traffic for online videos, according to a new report from online video service Tubemogul (Found via Mike Arauz).

The average time spent viewing a number of 6,763,690 video streams linked from Digg, Facebook and Twitter, from six top video sites, showed Twitter users spending 1:58 minutes watching, compared to 1:14 from Facebook and 0:58 for Digg. (Graph from the Tubemogul report).

 

image

As Tubemogul point out, Twitter allows one-sided (asynchronous) following, and therefore you can filter your incoming noise more effectively than Facebook or Digg.

But as Mike adds:

‘a network of relationships built primarily on information shared, and only secondarily on personal relationships to the other people, is a more potent information sharing network’

And I think he has a very strong point – I’m connected to family and friends on Facebook that I might have a lot of love and affection for, but it’s balanced by a constant stream of invitations to install apps I’d never touch etc.

But in general the Twitter users I follow are people whose interests are of a relevant interest to mine, and are far more likely to post things I’d like. (Speaking of things I like, Mike’s got a very effective visual way of posting which I definitely recommend).

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