Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Youtube’s traffic growth over the years can be attributed to three main factors: 1) the ease of creating and uploading user generated content, 2) the appeal of watching UGC and 3) allowing visitors to embed video into their website. The ability to easily snag code and post the video content on websites, blogs, and social portals exposed the Youtube brand to a far greater audience then those that would have come directly to Youtube.com - in fact almost 44% of YouTube users are watching embedded videos.

Youtube’s embeddable video has always been functional but other video websites, like Hulu.com, pushed the envelope in terms of functionality and user-experience. Yesterday, Youtube released 4 new features that look to increase usage and compete with other, better, embeddable players.

• High-quality start images (thumbnails) – Before you press play on embedded YouTube videos, the thumbnails for the video will be presented in high-quality. We’re pleased with the results – let us know if you agree.

• Search in embeddable player – At the close of an embedded video, along with the usual recommended videos and URLs, a search box will appear. Not only will you be able search from within the embedded player, you will be able to watch videos through the same window. That’s right, you can search all of YouTube from the comfort of your favorite blog, news, or humor page.

• Integrated video annotations – Annotations enable video producers to incorporate text information into their videos, create choose your own adventure-style stories or add links to any YouTube video. People watching videos through the embedded player can now join the fun.

• Integrated closed captions – Back in August we started allowing video creators to add captions to their videos. Closed Captions are now available in embedded videos like this one:

The key improvement is the search functionality within the embeddable player. Hulu got this right and every other video producer should take notice - allowing users to embed videos is not only good for Video SEO, but when done correctly should result in increased content discovery and direct visits.

The time and effort put into developing a embeddable player that focuses on the content and user-experience is well worth the effort.

For as long as their has been SEO in conversations there has always been one simple fact: Flash and SEO do not mix. However, a couple month ago Adobe looked to change this by announcing their planned improvements in the indexing of flash files by Google and Yahoo. Obviously any change in how flash files are indexed by search engines would have a serious impact not only on Flash SEO, but Video SEO and site design / development as well. Since that announcement was made I have not seen any significant changes, through my own testing and research, in how flash content is being indexed. In fact I have seen little evidence or talk about Flash SEO since that announcement was made. However, Brian Ussery put together an awesome “2009 Google Flash SEO” post that goes into in-depth analysis of flash indexing through his own testing and case studies. Brian’s blog post is a definite must read for anyone involved in SEO or site design / development.

Here are the case studies he put together:

• Google flash content association with parent URLs
• Google flash file pagerank
• Googlebot #anchor (fragment identifier) URL extraction
• Google flash text translation

Bottom line is that there is still a lot of uncertainty when it comes to Flash SEO, however things seem to be moving forward (slowly). My recommendation stays the same for now -  it is ok to build flash heavy sites but take into consideration the standard  SEO best practices - check out my SEO Checklist for guidance. But, keep an eye on this as things can change very quickly.

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…

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…