State Of Online Video Ad Market

From the recent VideoNuze Summit event held in Manhattan last Tuesday.
Reported on Streaming Media.com

 

Recapping where the evolving online video advertising market is going. Summit organizer and VideoNuze editor and publisher Will Richmond stated that much of the growth is in mobile and set-top advertising:

"Online video advertising has continued to explode in the last year. One big change is the embrace of new devices, particularly the iPad, which has been a real game-changer. This trend will only accelerate, particularly as connected devices like Xbox, Roku, Smart TVs and others proliferate," said Richmond.

As advertisers are seeing higher completion rates on set-top box ads, noted Ed Haslam, senior vice president of marketing for Yume thanks to their full-screen takeover. He also noted that viewers are becoming more comfortable with living room devices.

"What consumers are starting to do on these devices is explore," said Haslam. He noted the value in placing ads next to set-top search results and detailed a Toyota campaign that created a branded app for connected TVs.

Consumers are largely using their iPads in their living rooms, which Haslam calls the most fragmented place in the house, due to multiple demands on the viewer.

As more premium video moves online, advertising is following. The current usual system of one ad per break will soon be a thing of the past.

"Ad loads are going to move to full broadcast ad loads because it makes sense," noted Marc DeBevoise, senior vice president and general manager for CBS interactive.

The summit alternated between group discussions and one-person case histories that offered more depth. Joe Feczko, senior vice president of marketing innovation and integration at Macy's department store told how the retailer is keeping its image fresh by using online video as a creative canvas for branding. Shoppers can now scan in-store QR codes to see videos offering tips, training, and how-to information. The results have been "wildly popular with our customers," said Feczko.

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YouTube Stats Tracking Tools You Should Know About

From Film/TV Reviewer Chris Atkinson who writes for ReelSEO.

Chris shares some useful information for optimizing your video SEO

 

 

 

 

Google Analytics is a great tool to figure out the activity surrounding your channel, where you might need improvement, getting the most out of advertising, mobile views, etc.  But maybe you'd like a different opinion.  Maybe you don't like the way the stats are displayed.  Maybe you'd like some other kinds of information, not only about yourself but other channels, and how you might compare to them.  Well, Google Analytics, as powerful as it is, isn't the only game in town.  There are several other tools and websites you can use that use the statistics in a different way and interpret them differently.

A Sampling of YouTube User/Channel Statistics Tracking Tools

Here are a few that you should know about.  Many of these sites rank channels differently, sometimes markedly different.  It all depends on what they weigh as most important.  They all have different methods, and it will be some combination of views, subscribers, comments, engagement, and so forth.  What's important is what works for you.

VidStatsX

VidStastX might have the most exhaustive amount of information on the site.  While many tracking sites are all about what the top 100 YouTube channels are and maybe separate them into categories and sub-categories, VidStatsX also goes into ranks for individual videos.  Want to know what is really trending today, rather than rely on that suspect YouTube "trending" page you can click on?  VidStatsX has a page dedicated to top viewed videos for the day, week, month, and all-time.  Each video has a rank that points to engagement or likeability.

VidStatsX has a trademarked tool called FutureRank that projects how a channel will perform over the next 7 days all the way up to 90 days.  I think this site breaks down every single way you can break down a video: by genre, by favorites, by comments, ratings, and views.

If there was one knock for me personally on VidStatsX it's that the data is so dense, it's all that seems to populate the page.  It's a bunch of numbers and straightforward charts, with a presentation that isn't all that attractive.  There are occasional thumbnails representative of videos and channels that spruce the site up, but for the most part it can be overwhelming to look at.  But for pure stats, VidStatsX has got them all.  Here's an example of a stats page they have, this one for YouTube's Top 10 Viewed:

SocialBlade

SocialBlade (who we interviewed last week) is mostly about tracking channel figures, and it also breaks them down into categories and "top" lists.  They have their own ranking system, so while the normal things like views and subscribers count, they have their own formula.  So above all this site is about comparing top channels, and it breaks it down by country and category.  Here's an example list, using top viewed and top subscribers:

Again, it's a bunch of charts and numbers, so not much in the way of looks here, but a simple, basic tool to show who's who in YouTube.

ChannelMeter

ChannelMeter has the nicest design of these three.  It doesn't give you an automatic set of lists like VidStatsX or SocialBlade do, it just has a simple search field that you can type a channel name into and then it gives you a nice group of graphs to work with on that channel.  Statistics are separated into subscribers, channel views, and video views, and you can change the graph to show an incremental or cumulative presentation.  The range is anywhere from today to 3 months.  You can change the stats to "table" just like the above sites do, but it's nice to have graphic representation here.
ChannelMeter is a good tool to see what YouTubers were upset about in May, as you can see subscriber data fall dramatically in that month for just about everyone.  Here's a look at Philip DeFranco's sxephil channel and his subscriber data for May:

That came from YouTube's spring cleaning that occurred, taking out dormant accounts and you know, being YouTube.  That kind of graph makes the raw data clearer, it gives it meaning.  You can go to VidStatsX and find this kind of data but this kind of presentation makes one question why such a change occurred.  When you compare the graph above with other big channels, the picture becomes clear: "Something (not entirely the channel's fault) happened."

One thing about ChannelMeter: if the channel is somewhat new, you might not be able to find it right away.  And some rather well-established, though not well-viewed, channels don't have complete data.  So that's a bit of a flaw in this site.

Really, in all, if you're very much serious about your channel and want to get some awesome data, you can probably learn something from mainly Google Analytics and then all three of these sites, and comparing each one of them could give you your own raw data to work with so that your channel is optimized.

Quotes Of Note

That some achieve great success,

is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.

                                                  Abraham Lincoln

Quotes Of Note

"What Happens In Vegas Stays On Facebook!"

Mike Curtis-Founder Of HD For Indies upon his return from this years NAB (National Association Of Broadcasters) show.

Adobe Releases 2012 Video Ad Report

Here are some useful findings regarding how online video advertising is being received.

The Video Advertising report analyzes consumer behaviors around online ad engagement providing media companies and content owners with insight to identify increased ad revenue potential. The study tracks how viewers’ response to online ads around video content is impacted by content type, length of video stream, ad format, placement and device, and indicates growing similarities between the consumption of video ads online and traditional broadcast commercials.

KEY FINDINGS:

1.  Mid-roll video ads, the most engaging commercial position, easily out perform completion rates of pre-rolls and post-rolls. With an 87% completion rate, mid-rolls are performing close to 30% better than pre-rolls.

2.  Completion rates on mobile devices are the highest of any environment at 94%, suggesting that mobile viewers are highly engaged and willing to watch ads as part of the content experience on the go.

3.  Live content is king for advertisers. Video ads are in general more successful when included in live content than with video-on-demand (VOD). The completion rate during live content is 85%, 23% higher than with ads in VOD.

The big message here is in the performance numbers. Online Video is in full swing reaching broadcast performance rates!

Shortcomings of the Nielson Rating System

   by Alan Walk

This originally ran on Digiday and was picked up by IPTV News. Co-authored with KIT COO Alex Blum.
We picked it up from an email from KIT digital. Interesting perspective on the ratings king!

TV is a hugely successful $60 billion industry. It’s also built on a jury-rigged measurement system that’s a bit of a joke and needs to be replaced for the potential of the modern media world to be fully realized.

Nielsen ratings have admittedly come a long way from handwritten diaries, but they’ve still become antiquated as our viewing experience shifts from broadcast television to over-the-top services like Netflix and Hulu. This sea change of Internet meshing with TV presents a golden opportunity for anyone with the smarts to step up and figure out a better way to mine the resulting avalanche of consumer-engagement data that is now becoming available. Nielsen guesstimates shouldn’t be OK anymore.

With IPTV, it’s possible to track exactly how many people are watching any given show and where and when they are watching it, and it can break down the results by geography, gender, interests, household income or any other factor someone may find of interest. (And that’s today: the social TV systems currently being rolled out will allow individual family members to simultaneously check in from the same TV set, making data even more accurate.)

This opportunity will be realized by those content creators, advertisers and merchandisers that have the courage and vision to finally dispense with the ways of the past and embrace this new paradigm in order to optimize both viewer engagement and advertising spend. Make no mistake: Inertia is what has prolonged Nielsen’s rule.

As linear programming goes the way of the 8-track, your ad buy will need to adjust for the fact that there is no logical sequence to when viewers see your ads. There’s also bingeing: If someone is spending the evening catching up on season two of “Glee,” how do you adjust the ads they’re seeing to account for that? You’ll also need to provide synchronized second-screen experiences. So that if your commercial is playing on the main screen, there’s a way for someone to use the Web-based second-screen device to get more information, in a way that does not ask them to actually stop watching TV and pay attention to your product — a mistake made by far too many advertisers during this year’s Super Bowl.

Improved ratings and the move away from a broadcast model bring up yet another critical issue: Who will be buying all that valuable new ad inventory — the traditional TV media-buying services or the newer Internet-advertising ones? Each has unique strengths, and while the big TV-buying shops have had Web-focused divisions for a while now, neither has demonstrated that it can handle the myriad demands of the new viewership model.

That leaves the media-buying world ripe for the emergence of a new player, a service that positions itself as the experts on this new, post-convergence world. This new player will intuitively understand that the demise of linear TV gives consumers greater control over what they’re watching and gets why that will shake up the video-content production game the same way the rise of blogging and Internet-based newspapers shook up print journalism.

More importantly, they’ll understand that media itself can no longer be split by Internet ad spend and TV ad spend: With social TV and the convergence, they are now one and the same. So the job of the new generation of media planners and media buyers will be to understand social television and how the video message on the primary screen interacts with the Web-based message on the second screen and what consumers are expecting from each.

The potential offered by these consumer-driven changes outweighs sticking with the old way of doing things because “that’s how it’s always been done.”