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By Andrew Wallenstein
No better place than the Internet for HBO to release a new documentary set in virtual reality. "Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator: A Second Life Odyssey," which premieres on Cinemax on May 15, will also be shown on Cinemax.com and on the Second Life virtual area Cinemax Island. In addition, HBO will tease "Molotov" in the coming weeks with an iTunes podcast and sneak peeks on Cinemax’s YouTube page and Cinemax On Demand.
By Andrew Wallenstein
Alas we hardly knew ye, Firebrand, the soon-to-be-defunct website where the cream of the commercial crop got an online/TV showcase. It launched last October with the financial backing of NBC Universal (the New York Times reports the venture "burned" through at least $30 million), but with little traffic traction to show for it, Firebrand has been tossed on that scrap heap in the sky along with ThisJustIn.com, another conglomerate-backed (Time Warner) entertainment site that went nowhere fast.
Here's what I had to say about Firebrand when it first launched.
Really? $100k a month in ad revenue? That's sick. And my friend Andy Plesser earns about $15k creating his vlog about online video part-time.
The TVWeek article also rolls out a "no duh" spotlight on how to make money off your videos -- Step 1: Get a sustainable topic. Step 2: Get advertising. Step 3: Get an audience -- which is only slightly more logical than the 3-step program espoused by the Underwear Gnomes.
By Andrew Wallenstein
Can't make up my mind as to whether Firebrand, a new TV/online content venture that consists entirely of commercials, is a brilliant pomo masterstroke or a futile exercise in corporate hubris. On the one hand, commercials are those things I used to watch before I got Tivo. But the only reason I skip them is that 97% are awful and have no relevance to me.
But if you curate the best and make them accessible in a slick interface...sure, why not? Just don't pat General Electric and Microsoft, which launched Firebrand, too hard given I doubt they would have had the cojones to try this had Time Warner's TBS not already deployed a variation of this concept, VeryFunnyAds.com, and seen some success.
Semi-transparent adverts will appear on the bottom 20% of the frame and appears after the video has played for a few seconds.
This is late notice, but if you're in NYC tonight I'm moderating a panel discussion hosted by the International Radio and Television Society foundation. The panel is called "Traditional Media Meets the Digital Challenge," and includes the following panelists:
The panel will be held at Leela Lounge, 1 West 3rd Street (corner
of Broadway) near the 6 at Bleecker Street and the N, R, W at Prince St.
I've got plenty of fun questions to ask the panelists, including (broadly) the importance of video in terms of revenue, the place of affiliate television stations in an online video world, Google's importance/threat to the online video and advertising markets, other forms of digital initiatives (USAToday's focus on social networking, Time's recent purchase of FanNation, Sports Illustrated's VOD channel), metrics for understanding the success of video, the place of videoblogging and reporting in traditional media sites, and the importance of mobile content. I might also ask them about Twitter, just for kicks.
If you have any suggestions for questions, leave 'em in the comments.
This marketplace suffers from a dearth of data. Viacom's lawsuit against Google is a direct result of this acute lack of real numbers.
For example, nobody knows:
So I guess we can all take a page from Donald Rumsfeld's playbook: You sue with the knowledge you have, not the knowledge you wish you had. And in this case, that's exactly the point.
Click the image above for a full screen view.
In celebration of the 2007 NCAA tournament, and with a hat tip to "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything" (which we haven’t read but hear is super good), Reel Pop presents the Final Four of Online Video. Collected here, part one in the four-part series, which we're calling "Pain and Simple": Among the various ways to amuse yourself online, watching people maim themselves (and others) ranks well for lowest effort and highest reward. From nut shots to happy slaps, errant trampoline bounces to face plants on concrete, the Internet, it seems, was made for schadenfreude.
We'll be pubbing three more of these brackets before March 16th, when the NCAA Final Four starts. Whereas this bracket concentrates on stupid and painful videos, the next brackets will feature famous folks' faux pas, rapping/karaoke/cover bands, and insane stunts involving expensive machinery.
Interesting piece in the New York Times today about amateur auteurs and where they choose to syndicate their videos.
This quote struck me as odd:
Loyalty does count for something, Mr. Robinett said. "If YouTube stays on top, would you like to be the loyal guy who stuck it out, or the one who ran from here to there to be popular?" he said.
Personally, I'd rather be everywhere. In an online video world where there are no contracts, loyalty is a sucker's bet that gives you no advantages. In return for not getting paid directly for your work, you're able to publish yourself everywhere online. Why would you handicap your own exposure, the very thing you've set out to gain?
Blip.tv announced today its new customizable ad engine that allows videobloggers to insert their own clickable advertising graphics and clips in their videos. The first partner is MAKE magazine.
The more I hear about Brazil, the more I think it's a Joe Francis-sponsored Disneyland.
The lede in this article from Folha Online says it all: "The profession might be the oldest in the world, but the marketing being used is pretty new." That marketing would be the Video iPod, which women on the Brazilian site mclass use to advertise their services. The site added MP4 downloads six months ago so that customers can compare videos or brag about their exploits.
TV networks are tapping into a younger, more affluent demo when they make their shows available online, according to a recent study from Nielsen Analytics and Scarborough Research.
Among the "findings" are items you already know: People who pay $3.50 for a small latte also pay to download movies and watch them around other people who have also paid $3.50 for their own small lattes. Causing those of us who steal movies and watch in the comfort of our own home to have no place to sit when we buy our own $3.50 lattes. But then, I guess that's the karmic circle of life.
Related: There's this homeless dude at the Astor Place Starbucks who hangs out in the window and watches Grey's Anatomy on his portable DVD player.
It wouldn't be a Super Bowl without Anheuser Busch's Budweiser ads. This year, the beer company has teamed up with NASCAR's Dale Earnhardt Jr. in what looks like a parody of a Mad Max chase scene.
Some b-roll, behind-the-scenes footage of the commercial has been posted on YouTube. It's not the most exciting clip, but it serves its purpose: to build even more anticipation for the famously extravagant commercials that appear during the annual game. Emerald Nuts plans to follow a similar pre-game release strategy this year as well.
This is a few weeks old, but interesting, so I'll reblog: AdBrite launched a new video player earlier this month that provides some good advertising options for bloggers:
There's a bit on the new video player on Techcrunch. The video explaining the player is below.
CBS and YouTube are in cahoots to turn YouTube into a big after school special. To that end, at CES yesterday evening the network and the video-sharing site announced a contest:
If you had 15 seconds to tell the world whatever you want to, what would you say? Whoever says whatever they say best gets their work featured during the superbowl.
While being featured during America's only remaining pan-demographic media event confers eternal fame -- just ask Janet's nipple -- the irony is that
YouTubers (and the rest of the vid-sharing wunderkind) have been
telling the world whatever they want to for over a year now.
Browsing through the 140 entries thus far, it's hard to suppress a chuckle. There's this guy, doing a fabulous Tara Reid New Year's countdown impersonation. And this guy, who looks like both the Pope and Abraham Lincoln. I'm a big fan of this Street Fighter parody.
There are quite a few anti-war messages, like this one:
And the requisite pimp-my-cute-kid video:
There's also no shortage of world peace videos, which I don't see making the cut, if only because no other countries in the world watch much American football.
The title of the video, dear reader, is "Jessica Simpson nipple slip on tv." Extra points if you actually wait till the end of the video to see a boob.
There as a lot of commotion yesterday about MySpace's page view count passing Yahoo.[1] But that metric means a whole lot less today than it did six to eighteen months ago.
Why? Because new page display technologies and the growth of multimedia have actually caused the number of pages needed per viewing session to decrease. Yahoo, to take a common example, rejiggered its home page this year to display more information without the need for a page refresh (and corresponding extra page view). MySpace, on the other hand, is built in such a manner that requires a new page to load every time you click a button. Some people call the site a "click factory."
Yahoo made sure to warn reporters and investors about this dynamic back in May when they were planning to launch their new site. And Steve Rubel recently predicted an ad shakeout as Web properties move away from the page view metric.
Add video to this mix and it gets more complicated. If a site, such as CNET TV or the New York Times, offers multiple videos per page, and the audience watches each video in turn, a better measure of their engagement with the site would be "average time per user."
This is only to say that advertisers need to judge site performance by a more robust metric than simple page views. Unique visitors, time spent on site, video loads and load times and heat maps are only growing in importance.
FWIW, my headline for this post reminds me of a good Dandy Warhols video:
[1] A page view is the measure of how many times a complete HTML page is requested and loaded. This is different from hits, which refers to the number of times individual files within a page (such as JPEGs and GIFs) are loaded.
YouTube has changed its layout for pages that contain CBS videos and is allowing CBS to censor "profane, unconstructive criticism." Most of the comments for those videos now appear on a separate page.
The layout change is not an entirely new development; a video's comments have always been broken off to separate pages (past 10 or 20 comments or so). And the layout change for CBS is part of a larger overhaul of YouTube's interface that hides more of the interactive features behind dynamic areas of the page.[1]
But by allowing CBS to erase profane criticism and banish comments to a less-trafficked page, YouTube is placing the desires of its content partners before those of its users. The change makes YouTube more similar to a broadcast network than a community portal. No doubt, that's what CBS wants. And YouTube stands to benefit too: They get good will from their corporate partners -- who are threatening either legal action or an online alternative -- and they clean up the main video page, where the high dollar advertisements are likely to appear.
I expect small changes like this will occur more and more often. Whereas the networks have been on their heels these last 18 months, Google's purchase of YouTube has put them in an excellent position to demand more concessions from the video-sharing site.
[1] Many of these changes, like hiding a video's awards behind an expanding section, are good for the user experience.
On Monday Night NBC Nightly News aired just one minute and thirty seconds of commercials for the entire newscast, sponsored solely by Philips. The rest of the time: Extra coverage.
The response: Unadulterated love. (Well, perhaps adulterated by MSNBC, but you get the point.)
What's this have to do with online video? Muchas muchas. As advertisers flock to online, their chosen destinations are sites like YouTube, videobloggers like Ze Frank and Galacticast, and news shows like Rocketboom. And what models are those sites and shows choosing? Single advertiser sponsorships.
Several reasons for this: The videobloggers have a small amount of inventory but a very loyal audience, making single sponsorships more attractive to advertisers. And of course videocasts don't really have commercials per se, making sponsorship deals more feasible.
Sure, videoblogs aren't TV, but as the online world grows, we'll only become more accustomed to that interactive experience. What we're seeing right now is the confluence of online and offline viewing paradigms, at least as far as advertising goes. We're getting used to the idea of sponsored content again.
Remind you of anything? Yep, the halcyon days of television, when it was common practice for an advertiser like, say, Campbell's Soup, to sponsor an entire program.
They say that advertising is America's own folk art. That's an anachronism. Advertising is now the admixture of reality. Good news? Bad news? Do we even notice it happening? Ask Kent from Rocklin, California, who e-mailed NBC after the sponsorship test.
"It's about time a network step up to its responsibility for public service, and NBC has taken the lead here."
There you have it. Corporate sponsorship = public service. What a world.
Every few years or so we adopt some new animal as the symbol for All That is Huggably Cute. Baby deer, sleepy kittens, killer whales, whatever -- it changes with every Disney movie. But lately our anthropomorphic tendencies have taken a turn for the surreal. Go ahead and admit it: Somewhere deep in the sparkling Epcot center of our brains, we all have a fetish for penguins.
Yep, the au courant object of our fauna fascination manages to not only be the cutest, aw shucks faux bird in the southern hemisphere, but also a cuddly totem of our modern ennui and a symbol of our porno-inspired sexual omnivorism.
I'm not even kidding. Time was we used giant rabbits to symbolize our furry id. But that was before we became intimate with Adam Sandler's penguin-addled subconscious, or were introduced to two lesbian penguins in the Central Park Zoo, or became infatuated with those stubborn and sturdy birds waddling across a frozen wasteland in March of the Penguins. Oh, the tragic comedy! Oh, the existential malaise!
But no worries: If the penguins' Darwin-esque struggle gets you down in the mouth, take solace in the charming, soda-swilling penguins in those Coca-Cola commercials, or the all-singing, all-dancing penguins in Happy Feet. Ah, penguins. Truly the silly putty of symbolism.
On the heels of all this comes Bob Saget's latest project, a mockumentary called Farce of the Penguins, in which we follow a horny penguin and his pals during their annual mating ritual. Instead of Morgan Freeman's papa bear narration we're treated to a voiceover from the godfather of parody, Samuel L. Jackson. Think The Aristocrats meets National Lampoon's meets American Pie but, natch, with penguins.
Below, a recently released promo trailer for the movie, produced by Special Ops. Safe for work, but just barely.
Comic and author John Hodgman, who has recently garnered a modicum of publicity through his appearances in Apple's "I'm a PC" commercials, has been translated into Japanese. Or rather, the Apple commercials are now airing in Japan.
I wonder: Apple's ads backfired in the US, as many viewers empathized with Hodgman's droll everyman character and grimaced at Justin Long's too-clever-by-half hipster persona. Did Apple correct the personality balance in the Japanese market?
(via The Publishing Spot) HarperCollins is using fake ads on YouTube to promote neocon author Michael Crichton's book "Next," a near-future thriller about gene therapy run amok. Take a look:
Follow the prompt in the video and you're taken to NextGenCode's Web site and, clicking further, a faux blog dedicated to genetic research (and cleverly filled out with backdated posts). Alarum, meta-cultural irony seekers! Fake ads promoting a real book with a fictional plot about cloned people!
The Journal calls the marketing plan a hoax, but that's ascribing too much narrative depth to a transparent scheme that isn't intended to fool the doggedly curious but to coddle the easily bemused. In other words, Truman, we all know we're not looking behind the stage set -- Interaction is just as an extension of suspension of disbelief.
I gave a short presentation[1] at a publishing company's editorial summit recently, and part of the discussion revolved around the idea of pre-roll advertising. My thesis: Pre-rolls are not a good idea, and they will frustrate your viewers.
The reason is simple: Pre-roll advertising is contrary to user expectations. Users on the Web allocate attention. That's all they do. (We also buy shoes from time to time.) So when a user clicks on a link, they're making a decision to pay attention to something. Inserting a pre-roll ad subverts that process and forces a user to watch something they don't want to watch. It's like changing your TV channel to CNN, but being forced to watch 30 seconds of Lifetime before you see Lou Dobbs.
But, you say, pre-rolls are the best way to ensure viewers are being exposed to ads. We can't give everything away for free! No, you can't, but if you frustrate your users you won't be giving anything away at all. What's more, pre-roll ads seem to be the lazy man's approach to advertising on the Web. Advertisers make pre-rolls because it doesn't require much effort to port their TV ad to the Web. Yet it takes users extra effort to get past them.
So don't shovel your ads in the front of videos. There are plenty of other options. You just need to think about it.
[1] My first presentation before a large audience since my excellent report on To Kill a Mockingbird, Mrs. Bruner's 4th grade English class, circa 1980-something. Although, that court room during college was pretty packed too.
Marketers are creating their own TV shows, movies and online programming to endear themselves to brands, says reporter Louise Story in The New York Times.
Why? Because they're balancing out their marketing budgets, and understanding the media generation is too savvy to engage with old school commercials. There's nothing more annoying than seeing a product placement on America's Next Top Model -- that foundation is so dee-vine! -- and then watching as the show cuts to a commercial of the same exact product.
I think we've all been seeing articles like this for years -- at least since BMW Films launched in 2001 -- but the Times article mentions a bunch of branded content. It's a useful list:
The article's kicker includes the phrase "ubiquity is the new exclusivity," which, I swear, we've heard before somewhere.
Reporting on the Streaming Media West conference is like being embedded with the 101st Greek chorus division, which only repeats one phrase: "I don't know."
What's the business model for online video? I dunno. What's the right way to advertise with video? I dunno. Who's on first? Dunno, dunno, dunno. The bottom line? There's no bottom line.
So for those of you hoping that Google's purchase of YouTube would bring some order to the online video marketplace, think again. The acquisition may justify the business value of video aggregation (at least to some), but it doesn't begin to answer the pressing questions about advertising, syndication, sales and search that the industry is grappling with now.
First, online video has a findability problem. Finding distributed video is much more difficult than finding Web pages. When you do a Web search, you're searching for text on a page. But when you search for video, you're searching for media described by text. If those descriptors -- known as metadata -- aren't there, or if the metadata is incomplete or innacurate, your search is going to return bad results.
Heck, even if the metadata is good, the search engine can't interpret whether you want professional, first source content or amateur analysis.
A simple search for NASCAR (what? I'm from Virginia) on Google Video returns an EA sports commercial, crash footage, and an amateur talk show. A similar search on Yahoo returns two music videos, some amateur footage, and an ABC news show.
In an effort to solve this problem, video search company Blinkx analyzes contextual information surrounding a video (the video en situ, as it were) and then apply descriptions to the video.
Another promising company is Podzinger, which arguably has the best speech recognition software. Then there's Motionbox, a video-sharing platform experimenting with "deep tagging" of video to help you find a precise moment in a long video.
Beyond search, there are other business needs in the online video value chain that need to be satisfied. National and global advertisers like Avenue A/Razorfish, for example, need to buy inventory in large chunks. And despite the success of YouTube, which serves 100M+ videos per day, there aren't a lot of sites which can offer a large audience.
"Agencies need to operate on scale," said Hunter Walk, product manager for Google Video, in response to a question about amateur video producers disintermediating large portals. "So small buys on small sites won't work."
Advertisers also face roadblocks from different advertising methods on different sites -- pre-roll, post-roll, adjacent banner, etc. Avenue A/Razorfish director of emerging platforms Jeremy Lockhorn says they're also hemmed in by both the lack of inventory online and questions regarding the frequency of repeated video ads. By way of example he mentioned the ABC media player, which can irk viewers by showing the same 30-second advertisement multiple times during a show.
Closely related to the unknowns in advertising are the unknowns on the sales side of the equation. Video syndication is a very popular form of content distribution these days, but most sales teams are compensated based on traffic to a destination site, not traffic to an external destination.
And then you've got the problem of user-generated content and Hollywood. It's a new romantic ideal that an unknown like Brookers or Ask A Ninja will be discovered online and handed a plush compensation package from a studio. But unfortunately, the question of who owns the content and who gets a cut of the profits is still unanswered. Every service which distributes a video obtains certain rights.
"The person who shot the content owns it, obviously," said Chris O'Brien, CEO of Motionbox. "We have some rights too, though, to store it and tag it." Motionbox also submits some of their content to NBC, "but NBC has their own set of rights that they claim on the content."
All these unknowns just skim the surface of questions facing the online video marketplace. The wild west days of video sharing may be ending, but there's still plenty of dust yet to settle.
Anyone who followed YouTube phenom lonelygirl15 as she skyrocketed to fame, or watched as self-made stars like Brookers or the Lonely Island trio found mainstream outlets for their work, understands that Hollywood has begun to use online video sites as a new kind of talent pool. These days, talent is less likely to be found at an open audition in Los Angeles than, say, performing karaoke in their bedroom in Worcester, MA.
It's a phenomenon that New York startup blip.tv is hoping to take advantage of.
"It's definitely clear to me that the Hollywood world is beginning to see sites like blip.tv as the farm teams of talent," said blip.tv COO Dina Kaplan from her 3rd-floor loft office in Manhattan's Chinatown.
While some sites try to capitalize on the online video boom by aggregating as much content as possible -- copyrighted or otherwise -- blip.tv is taking a more personal approach. The real value, according to Kaplan, is in the videobloggers themselves.
Like YouTube, Blip.tv is a combination destination and syndication portal that helps videobloggers publish their work both on blip.tv and on other sites. Unlike YouTube though, blip.tv isn't interested in promoting music videos, network television shows, or other previously published and copyrighted work.
"We try very hard to promote a culture of sharing original content," said CEO Mike Hudack. "Don't get me wrong, there's a market for piracy, but we're very careful to steer our users away from that. We just don't need it...In some ways it does put you at a disadvantage, but there's also something very attractive about the higher quality you'll find."
Blip.tv isn't hurting for quality shows. Perhaps the most famous videoblogger using the site is Amanda Congdon, who approached Blip.tv before her Amanda Across America tour.
Blip.tv is also a second home to shows like Goodnight Burbank, Something to be Desired, and the war videoblog Alive in Baghdad.
Blip.tv works like you'd expect it would, with some additional features. Videobloggers upload their work to the site and create a subdomain. The blogger can then choose to syndicate his or her videos to blogs or other sites. Starting tomorrow, users will be able to cross-post their work directly to MySpace. The new video will then be automatically announced in the bloggers' friends' MySpace bulletin space.
The MySpace feature is just one of several new features that Blip.tv will be rolling out on Saturday. Perhaps the biggest change will be the site's new homepage, which will attempt to provide an experience more akin to a television network's site.
Hudack said they're making the homepage change out of consideration for their role as editorial gatekeepers, while trying to retain the site community's independent attitude. "We're sort of removing the heavy hand of the studios," he said.
Saturday will also mark the introduction of several new advertising models on the site. Hudack and Kaplan said that new advertising deals will allow bloggers to choose between different types of advertising, from pre-roll to post-roll to contextual banner ads that appear alongside the videos.
They noted that on blip.tv, whether to apply advertising to a video is at the blogger's discretion.
So far, Blip.tv's traffic stats -- about 1 million page views per month according to comScore -- seem to indicate the site is still struggling to attract users. Hudack and Kaplan say, however, it's not their intent to be a destination site.
Blip.tv has also recently partnered with video mashup site Eyespot (which also recently added new features), and the company provides the underlying technology for CNN's user-generated video site, CNN Exchange.
By positioning themselves as a conduit for new voices, Blip.tv hopes to become something of a talent powerbroker in the online video age.
"The talent, they're not just going to jump at the opportunity to be on TV anymore," said Kaplan.
"I mean, I'm not saying they're going to turn down millions of dollars, but it'll take a lot more to make them jump from a medium that lets them play by their own rules."
On my personal list of advertising slogans held in extreme disfavor, "Kodak moment" ranks near the top, somewhere between the reprehensible "not your father's oldsmobile" and Bartles and James' "thank you for your support." Why? I dunno. Because they've colonized my mind and I can't get them out.
So it was with a good deal of foreboding that I started watching this YouTube video about Kodak. I don't know if it's an actual Kodak advertisement. If it is, it's one of the funniest advertisements I've seen in awhile, and it uses the hyperbolic language of a culture steeped in irony to deliver its message. If it's not a Kodak advertisement, then some lonely guy has gone to a lot of trouble to express his admiration for the brand. I'm not sure which is scarier.
Either way, any advertisement that says Kodak has been "quietly pumping their patented brand of awesome" and is about to "turn the schmaltz up to 11" has my vote. Thank you for your support.
p.s. Given the techie geek speak in this video, and given its length, I bet this was a video made for a photo industry event. If you've got any more details about the video, let me know.
G'morning true believers. Here's what's happening today:
MySpace quietly added a new section called Video Space to the homepage and user profile pages this weekend. The move boosts the visibility of videos on the social network and may help it compete with YouTube's dominant share of the market (46% vs. MySpace's 23%). The move will also ensure you see more half-naked teenagers every day. Online video: Now powered by that shirtless dude.
Grouper, the video-sharing site bought by Sony this summer for $65M, has begun to ship its uploader software with Pure Digital's disposable digital cameras and video cameras. The software allows quick upload of video to Grouper or Google Video. The deal was in the works before Sony's purchase.
Techcrunch briefly reviews five video download stores, noting that iTunes is a Mac user's only friend. (I downloaded two Battlestar Galactica episodes last night.) MovieLink has the deepest category, Guba has the best prices.
A group of media companies have teamed up to study copyright issues on YouTube. News Corp., General Electric's NBC Universal and Viacom are using the study as pressure to wring favorable partnership terms with the company, according to execs.
CBS' O&Os have made a deal to syndicate 10 to 20 local news clips to Yahoo on a daily basis, the first deal of its kind between the locals and a national portal. The affiliates and Yahoo will split ad revenue.
Gavin O'Malley at Advertising Age interviews a few media buying execs and concludes the advertising market is reacting positively to Google's acquisition of YouTube.
"With the likes of Google, we do have a deeper comfort that people that understand our programming guidelines are involved in the buying process," said Sean Finnegan, U.S. director of OMD Digital.
Jeff Lanctot, GM of Avenue A/Razorfish said YouTube is working steadily toward a more solid business model.
"The first phase was getting untargeted banner [ad] inventory on the site, which was a good start," he said. "The second phase, which they're in now, is filtering the video content enough to know what content is offensive and what content violates copyrights. The third phase -- and where Google's expertise is going to prove invaluable -- is in understanding the actual content of the video in order to contextually target ads." By Mr. Lanctot's estimation, this third phase is roughly a year away.
The entire media world is in a tizzy today after venture capitalist-cum-uber-blogger Michael Arrington posted a rumor that Google was in talks to acquire YouTube for $1.6 billion. Wow. That's like if Voltron merged with Devastator. Or if Sumner Redstone combined with Barry Diller to form God. I'm agog.
We'll skip the feasibility of that valuation number (and how that will affect valuations of Facebook and other sites) and look at why Google would buy YouTube:
There are also several reasons why Google wouldn't buy YouTube. Chief among them is that Google already has a competing product -- Google Video -- and they've spent time and money partnering with content owners on that platform. For that reason alone, I don't see this acquisition happening.
Google does want to make video more integral to the user search experience. But they also seem to be less interested in acquisitions these days, and more interested in making their existing products work together.
p.s. According to Hitwise, YouTube has 47.07% of the video-sharing market, while Google has 11.09%.
The WSJ covers how different media companies are approaching the question of whether to pre-roll their free video, and how long those ads should be. The deets:
I would suggest that the decision of whether to run pre-rolls or not depends on the way your users interact with your site. If most users are clicking through furiously, viewing multiple pages/videos during a session, then pre-roll ads would seem to be a bad choice since they mess up the flow. But if you have a transactional model where viewers tend to watch one video then leave, pre-rolls may not be a bad idea.
I would also suggest that it's possible for companies like YouTube to randomly insert pre-roll ads during a user's session.
Personally, I think Google's strip ads above videos are more functional. The ad stays in place throughout the video, but it never messes up the flow.
Fox has released more shows to its Full Throttle page on MySpace. Available shows include “Bones,” “Prison Break,” “Standoff,” “Vanished,” “Talk Show With Spike Feresten,” “’Til Death,” “The Loop” and “Justice,” among others.
You have to download a video player to watch the shows. Despite that small annoyance, I like the Full Throttle experience better than NBC's 24/7, but less than ABC's Media Player.
NBC CEO Jeff Zucker spoke at Mixx and Prez of digital media Beth Comstock spoke at OMMA. Zucker: Content is king. Comstock: But the monarchy has been overthrown by a republic of user-generated content. Paging Mr. Metaphor, Mr. Extended Metaphor...
ABC announces that its media player has some big name advertisers. Mastercard, Proctor & Gamble, others pay $100k to $200k per quarter. ABC reached an affiliate agreement Sept. 13th and relaunched the player on Sept. 23rd.
Fox pulls Clinton interview video from YouTube, then apologizes for doing it.
Billionaire investor and dot-com veteran Mark Cuban says only an idiot would buy YouTube. He reiterated my point from two weeks ago: As soon as a media company buys YouTube, they'll be sued into oblivion.
Michael Rosenblum starts hiring in Washington, D.C. for his new, "node-based" video journalism project.
The founders of Digg launched an online video company from their ratty couch in San Francisco.
Video syndication service VideoEgg gets $12M in funding.
MTV plans to stream the final episode of "Two-a-Days" on MTV.com, and won't air the finale on TV at all. Great strategy to hand off show's audience to online properties.
Jupiter Research says TV will lose $7B by 2011 from ad-skipping and other factors. VDavid Card: "We advise media planners not to cave in to TV and Nielsen's talk about new live-plus ratings. If stuff is time-shifted, a lot of the ads will definitely be skipped."
The genius of the Internet -- beyond porn, free videogames, and porn -- is that everything can be measured. If you don't believe me, just ask NBC CEO Jeff Zucker, who said at the Mixx Conference: "The genius of the Internet is that everything can be measured." See? Told you so.
Unfortunately, that measuring ability doesn't extend to company valuations. The big brouhaha today is whether MySpace could be worth $15 billion in the next few years. For the purposes of this blog I wouldn't mention what an analyst says about MySpace, except that MySpace's value is implicitly tied to YouTube's value and a lot of that has to do with how video is consumed.
All of this bickering over value and traffic leads to mass confusion among advertisers. Is ABC really streaming 16 million streams? Does StupidVideos.com have 854,000 unique users (Nielsen) or 5.1 (internal calculations)? Who knows?
The confusion gets even hairier when you understand that the traffic analysis firms we all rely on -- comScore, HitWise, Alexa, Nielsen, etc. -- each rely on different samples to extrapolate data, and that data conflicts. With some exceptions, Wall Street analysts making big predictions rely on that data too (although they throw in a lot of important biz data, such as partnerships).
For example: Alexa data is based on people voluntarily installing a toolbar in their browser. Hitwise data is based on information from several ISPs. That's a better system, but it's also biased towards those particular ISPs, and some corporate marcomm guys will tell you that Hitwise is biased against corporate traffic. ComScore and Nielsen are both panel based. They each have their strengths; I'm told Nielsen is better at measuring technology sites.
In sum: It's hard to trust traffic stats, and even harder to make a clear valuation in the echo chamber of online punditry. And when there's uncertainty in an online video site's traffic, that uncertaintly can be passed through to uncertainty in the company's valuation.
Anyway. If you bothered to sit through this tired rant, please rest your eyes on the Daily Show's segment about how political polling data is also completely bonkers.
VideoEgg, the video syndication service that recently signed deals to provide several social networks with video capabilities, just tied up $12M in funding from several VC firms.
According to BusinessWeek, the investors include Starbucks Chairman Howard Schulz, Maveron, and August Capital. VideoEgg first received funding last January. In August the company announced they would start inserting ads in about half the videos in their streams.
After about a year of constant buzz, the online video marketplace seems to be churning out a lot of deals and investments. Yahoo's acquisition of Jumpcut was one such, as was Warner Bros' hookup with YouTube earlier this month.
Advertisers are claiming online video ad spots are climbing above TV, and comScore says over 106.5M Americans viewed online video in July.
Advertisers shouldn't be worrying. The market for video online still has a governor on its engine, what with two of the big video sites -- YouTube and Google -- not yet selling pre- or post-roll ads on videos.
ABC garnered some big-time advertisers for the re-launch of its media player, AdAge reports, and the advertisers are paying $100k to $200k per quarter for the privilege.
The advertisers, which include Mastercard, Proctor & Gamble, and Red Lobster, are intrigued by the interactivity of the ads and the ability to track when people are interacting with their brands.
ABC said a few months ago that 87% of people who use the media player recall the ads they saw and interacted with.
Previously:
And now for something completely gnew.
Warner Brothers and YouTube hooked up. YouTube to use software to filter WB copyrights, WB to approve/disaprove use. Meanwhile Cingular will sponsor a battle of the bands on YouTube and the winner will appear on Good Morning America.
CurrentTV launched four broadband channels on YouTube.
Microsoft launched its video-sharing app, Soapbox, in private beta. Here's a pretty good review from Rafe at CNET.
AOL releases Tara Reid's Incubus direct-to-download. Good for online video, bad for Tara Reid? Honest question.
ABC relaunched their media player. So did NBC. I think ABC's works better and looks purty.
The New York Post reported that YouTube thinks it's worth $1.5 million. Dunno if I'm amazed by the large sum or the fact that the Post actually reported something.
VideoEgg partnered with several social networks to provide video capabilities. Don't dig for gold, sell shovels.
A few months I wrote a column for Publish.com about ABC's Lost, and how the show represented the first hyperlinked television narrative. Today a blogger named Chartreuse showed me how Paris Hilton is the first hyperlinked human being.
About Lost: The genius of Lost is that it speaks to that self-centered, Truman Show-esque id in all us, an id that believes everything that happens around us -- on our little "island" of experience -- holds meaning. It's like immersing yourself in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, or the Crying of Lot 49, or David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. There are no accidental connections.
Chartreuse carries that idea over to Paris, who has the ability to relate any casual experience to a brand.
Paris makes herself visible to brands by constantly referencing them. When arrested the other day for a DUI, she slipped in a seemingly innocuous reference to a fast food chain. She didn't manufacture the situation (marketing 1.0), she manufactured the endorsement (marketing 2.0). She is, in other words, a walking hyperlink.
If you think Paris' apparent endorsing moxy isn't a big deal, consider that in today's ever-connected online world, every reference is easily catalogued, disseminated and dissected.
My friends in marketing and PR (the shame!) sit watching their Bloglines account, their Technorati links, their IceRocket results. They wait for Google Alerts to tell them why their ears are burning. And we bloggers watch our referrer logs, scanning the inbound links for news, good or bad.
Carry this idea forward into online video, and you see the viral power inherent in online communication. In a system where every word is a link, every word is an advertisement.
Below, an interview with Paris. In Japanese. Somehow, she sounds smarter when I can't understand anything.
And now for something completely gnew.
Warner Brothers and YouTube partner. YouTube will make it possible for WB to approve or deny videos if those videos have a WB song in them. Opens revenue doors for YouTube, but possibly makes them more vulnerable to lawsuits, too.
Microsoft launched its video-sharing app in private beta. A me-too effort that could benefit from the MSN brand.
AOL offers free syndicated video search and announced that the new film "Incubus" will be available for download one month before it's released on DVD.
MySpace's share of the video-sharing market continues to fall. Google Video posts a slight increase, YouTube continues to outperform.
Google and Apple are reportedly talking about video possibilities. Google Video + Apple's iTV = boomshackalacka.
Video-sharing service (not site) VideoEgg will be providing their tech to several social networking sites, including Dogster, Tagged and Hi5. Helps social sites without a video component attract or keep users who want it. Unattractive people still out of luck.
White House puts anti-drug videos on YouTube. I'm still snoring from D.A.R.E. class. They should start producing straight edge video diaries or sponsor a user-generated video contest.
Amanda Congdon, nee of Rocketboom, starts her Amanda Across America video tour. Nice gal. I hear she's in talks with HBO.
Scott Kirsner explains new licensing opportunities for movies and music. eBay for licensing music and video rights, anyone?
NBC now streaming Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip at NBC 24/7. Amanda Peet makes mouths happy.
NBC also going ga-ga over online marketing initiatives (including YouTube), while CBS marketing prez Schweitzer says it's all about the "Outernet." Contrare, it's all about you never using that word again.
ABC's Iger says says movie downloads on iTunes will bring in $50M in incremental revenue in the next year. Says ABC isn't just TV, it's a platform.
News Corp's Murdoch says there's no need to distribute Fox content to other portals. Huh? Aren't Vanished and Prison Break showing on that much-heralded 40+ site network?
MTV will launch Virtual Laguna Beach, a virtual world where viewers of the show can interact. What, LA's not fake enough?
HBO cancelled Lucky Louie, but I'm really hoping somebody buys it and puts it online, like VH1 did with Love Monkey.
The White House announced today that it uploaded several anti-drug videos from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) to YouTube.
Most of the videos have been viewed about 1,000 to 2,000 times so far. This Washington Post article points out that videos promoting drug use are slightly more popular. Check out the ONDCP profile.
I think it's a great idea. I think a better idea would be to hire a straight edge punk kid, put him in front of a webcam, and let him mouth off about why being straight edge is so cool. Or let him do karoake to Minor Threat. Adapt the message to the medium and you'll get more views.
There's so much news coming out this week (welcome to September!) that it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. One bit you don't want to miss, though: NBC's broadband alliance and syndication deal with units of several other media giants. Or, as NBC Universal TV Group president Randy Falco said, "We're going back into the broadcasting business on the Internet."
The deets: NBC will syndicate videos to other Web sites, including those of competitors. The videos will be preceeded by pre-roll advertisements, and the major advertisers signed so far are JP Morgan Chase and Proctor & Gamble. Partner Web sites include CNET (geeks!) CBS Corp's CSTV (jocks!) and Forbes.com (polo!).
This is a big deal, and it's heartening to see a big media company get on this. Other companies have been exploiting video syndication in the last year, albeit with different models. Reuters, for example, started syndicating their video last year on publisher sites. The Associated Press followed suit last March. Google recently began testing video ads with Viacom. VideoEgg has been syndicating user's video for some time. And video-sharing sites, of course, have demonstrated that fans are all about embedding video on their own sites.
Fred Wilson says this is a game changer, and eventually he thinks the Web will be a more compelling video interface than iTunes. Not sure what he's smoking. While syndicating video that's seven minutes long is certainly neato and a great bet on the future of short-form advertising, iTunes is aimed at more long-form content and downloadable content at that. Two separate paradigms.
Will NBC's alliance help them compete with YouTube? I don't know, and I don't think that's the right way to angle this. They've already got a partnership in place with the video-sharing giant. And the draw of YouTube is the sharing aspect.
Have another opinion? Let me know in the comments.
File this under heartbreak. Lonelygirl15, subject of many a breathless paean and love letter on YouTube, has been outed as a fakester.
Lonelygirl15 is (was?) a video diaryist on YouTube who started appearing over the summer. As her story unfolded, we learned that she was homeschooled by religious parents and surreptitiously webcasting her diary. It was a modern day version of every emo boy's dream: A lonesome girl, beautiful and intelligent, yearning for someone to understand her.
She didn't fool everybody. As uberfans are wont to do, they investigated every clue as to the origin of this WB-ish waif. Even the New York Times covered lonelygirl15 -- could there be a more erotically suggestive name for teenage fanboys? -- in an article a few weeks ago, in which they suggested that she was an advertising ploy. The LATimes makes more headway in an article today -- the Times' reporters link Lonelygirl15's creators to Creative Artists Agency.
Also today, the always insightful Danah Boyd links to the creators' admission that Lonelygirl15 is a product of filmmaker experimentation.
Whoever the creators are, lonelygirl15 is a definite milestone in the evolution of video sharing communities.
What are daily headlines without a little bit of context?
Below, a timeline of major online video deals and news events from May 2005 until August 2006. I'm sure I missed a few here and there, so leave your suggestions in the comments.
And to the left, a graphic depicting a few of those events and where they occured on YouTube's page views graph. (FYI, I guesstimated the August 2006 traffic number b/c full data wasn't available from comScore at the time.)
May, 2005
June, 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
