Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

The monetization of traffic goliath YouTube has been a hot topic ever since Google bought the online video destination a few years back. This week YouTube made two big announcements in regards to new revenue streams that not only make business sense but more importantly doesn’t impact the user-experience.

On Wednesday YouTube announced YouTube Sponsored Videos, basically the same sponsored links strategy tied to Google web search but specific to YouTube content. “Sponsored Videos is a self-serve advertising platform that will allow you to promote your video to the audience you are interested in reaching in an easy, effective, democratic, and affordable way. Then, when people use YouTube to search for videos, YouTube will display the most relevant, compelling videos alongside the search results. These videos are clearly labeled as “sponsored videos” and are priced on a cost-per-click basis.”

Here is the offical video explaining how Sponsored Videos works:



Yesterday YouTube also announced that they will be serving overlay ads in their embedded partner videos. This obviously wont have the same impact as YouTube Sponsored Videos but is a strategy that makes sense regardless of how much revenue it adds to the bottom line. Up until this announcement was made YouTube only ran overlay ads against partner videos running on YouTube, allowing the monetization of partner videos no matter where the video is being played is a win-win for both YouTube and the content producer.

TechCrunch just posted leaked screenshots of  Brightcove’s latest web-based video distribution platform - called Brightcove 3. The new platform will give video publishers more options and a better, more intuitive user-experience.

About Brightcove: “Brightcove empowers content owners—from independent producers to major broadcast networks—to reach their audiences directly through the Internet. At the same time, we help web publishers enrich their sites with syndicated video programming, and we give marketers more ways to communicate and engage with their consumers.” “Most importantly, we give people the freedom to easily find, watch and participate in a broad range of video content—when and where they choose.”

Some of the new feature of Brightcove 3 include:

• New dashboards
• New video customization features
• Expanded advertiser options
• Ability to create multiple renditions of videos in different standards and bit rates

Check out the rest of the screenshots at TechCrunch.com

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.

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…

I have been a huge fan of Hulu ever since they launched in private beta and continue to view them as the trend setter when it comes to all aspects of online video. Last night I was online watching full episodes of my favorite shows on Hulu.com, something I do on a regular basis, and saw something that I have not seen before - not just on Hulu, but anywhere else online. Before an episode of The Simpsons started a screen came up giving me the choice of how to view this video in regards to advertisements (see screenshot below). I could either watch the full movie trailer of “Ghost Town” and then have no commercial interruptions or watch the video with normal commercial breaks. This is an absolutely brilliant move by Hulu to not only increase the value of their ad placements but also engage the user on a whole different level.

When it comes to professionally produced long-form content it is a widely accepted practice to force ads however the website sees fit. This after all is premium content so commercial breaks, overlay ads, or any other form of content monetization is viewed as a necessary evil. However, by giving the user the option Hulu is creating a automatic engagement with the website beyond watching videos….choice, regardless of what it ecompasses, is a powerful thing.