Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Youtube has been busy the past couple days launching new features, yesterday came the video upload enhancements, today they announced some new features to their YouTube Insights tool. Youtube Insights enabled video uploaders access to detailed information about their videos. The new feature takes video insight one step further by showing actual traffic details and user interactions of the video itself. This new feature called “Hot Spots” allows video uploaders to see details like what part of the video people dropped off and what part people watched over and over again.

“The Hot Spots tab in Insight plays your video alongside a graph that shows the ups-and-downs of viewership at different moments within the video. We determine “hot” and “cold” spots by comparing your video’s abandonment rate at that moment to other videos on YouTube of the same length, and incorporating data about rewinds and fast-forwards. So what does that mean? Well, when the graph goes up, your video is hot: few viewers are leaving, and many are even rewinding on the control bar to see that sequence again. When the graph goes down, your content’s gone cold: many viewers are moving to another part of the video or leaving the video entirely.”

So what does this mean? Well for the average user uploading random clips this probably doesn’t mean that much. However, for anyone that works on building a viral campaign or social media strategies the new insight can give a tremendous amount of detail on why a video is popular and can lead to a better (and more popular) video production in the future. Basically this should be treated by anyone interested in driving more views to their video like any optimization technique used for other web elements.

You can read the entire announcement over at the Google Blog.

The biggest issues most video uploaders have with YouTube has been their file-size limitations, lack of multiple upload functionality and restrictions on inputting metadata during the upload process. Well, those issues will soon be a thing of the past…today the YouTube team has announced the release of their new video upload interface into public beta - the new video file uploader had been in private beta for a few months.

The new video upload features:

• The ability to enter in metadata (Video SEO!) during the upload process.
• The ability to uploaded multiple files at one time through the video upload interface.
• File-size upload limit has been increased deom 100MB to 1GB.

This is a smart, and predictable move, by Youtube on so many levels. Obviously this increases the functionality and usability of YouTube. However, the most important benefit of the new features are the increased level of monetization this allows. By giving users the ability to upload a video as large as 1GB, Youtube expands past the short-form UGC content and gets more into long-form content that is easier to sell against.

Of course we all know this just means we will see longer clips of guys getting kicked in the nuts…

Google took the offensive today in defending its partnership with Yahoo by launching a “Facts about the Yahoo-Google advertising agreement” website. YahooGoogleFacts.com (nice domain) sole purpose is to squash any fears about anti-competitiveness / ad monopolization the partnership would create through putting all of the details on the table.

Highlights from the website include:

• Facts about the deal
• What people are saying (testimonials)
• What the deal means for advertisers
• Why the deal is good for competition
• Terms of the deal
• Voluntary delay for regulators
• The below document that covers the partnership in specific detail:

For a company with Google’s size and power it surprised me that they felt the need to put up what basically is a public relations portal….too me this says that they aren’t  confident the deal will pass government review. The website covers the basic facts people would be interested in, however it lacks exact details of when, how and where.

To mark their 10th anniversary, and trying to do more good and less evil,  Google has announced a new “social good” initiative titled “Project 10^100″ or 10 to the 100th power. Project 10^100 is about reaching out to the community to come up with ideas that will change the world in a positive manner. Anyone can submit their world changing idea (by Oct 10th) to the Project 10^100th website, then starting January 27th Google will post the top 100 ideas that the public can vote for - with the the top twenty going to a advisory board who will pick the eventual winner. Google will be committing $10 million to seeing the top projects implemented. Check out the video below for more information.

If you are looking for best practices in regards to building an online video destination look no further then Hulu.com. Since Hulu launched in private beta last year it has become the gold standard for what a video website with professionally produced content should be - from content, to ad monetization, to social syndication with their embeddable player,  Hulu has gotten it right from day one while other competing services have missed the mark. Today Hulu announced feature enhancements which will further increase their user engagement.

The new features of Hulu include:

• Show recommendations
• Topic specific discussion forums
• Actor based search
• Genre-based channel browsing

The timing of the new features come not long after rival video aggregator Joost announced they were going away from the downloadable app and going all browser with a focus on social networks. Hulu doesn’t go as far as Joost but does take some of the wind out of their sails with their new community features. Along with the new features listed above, Hulu also launched 17 new content channels including comedy, horror and anime.

Bottom line is that there are no shortages of online video destinations - whether UGC / professionally produced or short-form / long-form. The power of online video, especially when you factor in Video SEO, is not being lost on the masses. However, the majority of these video destinations focus either on content with no long-tail benefit or make the user-experience a complete disaster. Hulu has the content people want to watch and has focused on the UI so that content discovery comes naturally: content + discoverability = winner.

Watch and learn…