Short form video, YouTube and others
The latest Metacafe / Frank N. Magid Associates survey concluded that short form video is crucial to garnering and keeping an online audience. The July 2009 survey concluded that the top five most popular categories of online videos were all short form: comedy, music, consumer-uploaded video, news stories and previews of movies.
YouTube, long the short-form video king, is moving from its go-it-alone stance to a partnership in The Pool – a long-term research project of VivaKi, the multiagency digital consortium devised by Publicis. The Pool’s focus is on establishing a standard ad format for online video. Along with YouTube, new partners include Denny’s, Walgreens and WalMart. What this may mean for monetization of Google-owned YouTube is hard to say, but The Pool concept might be a good one for other online publishers who need to increase traffic and audience through short form video.
Hyperlocal is coming to YouTube
Hyperlocal is coming to YouTube. The Google-owned video-sharing giant has invited the more than 25,000 news sources listed on Google News to become video suppliers. The site is also promoting videos from ABC News, The Associated Press, Reuters and other outlets.
YouTube’s hyperlocal trick is to match your location with news from your area (in YouTube’s case, that could mean as far away as 100 miles). Through its “News Near You” feature, the site is already distributing hometown video from dozens of sources, and says it wants to add thousands more. Ultimately the goal, speculates The New York Times, is to engineer newscasts on the fly.
So far, most of the videos on YouTube aren’t coming from mainstream TV outlets. You’ll see panoply of college newspapers and radio stations and amateur filmmakers. But that doesn’t devalue the potential. And of course homemade video from Iran already made news when distributed by YouTube last month.
To date, nearly 200 news outlets have signed up with YouTube to post news. Google search results now show YouTube videos alongside news articles. News providers split the revenue from any advertisements that appear with them.
The new YouTube program shouldn’t run into the same controversy that has plagued Google News recently: news outlets sign up as explicit partners.
For newspapers, distribution of video news via YouTube could have additional revenue opportunities: links to classifieds pages can now be embedded directly into videos. These links could be keyed to the specific content of a video (a review of a new car could like to the automotive classifieds). Or it could be a more generic link back to the publisher’s classifieds section (or for that matter wherever the paper wants the link to go).
That might be the first revenue-generating application of YouTube’s new program. But newspapers should keep their eye on the program and, we’d suggest, jump in early to grab mindshare and credibility in the brave new YouTube news world.
Viral Marketing + Online Video + Classifed Ads = Best Job in the World Campaign
You probably heard about this – and may have even secretly applied for the job: it’s Tourism Queensland’s multiplatform ad campaign for “The Best Job in the World.” Basically, the campaign used classified job and display ads to kick off web traffic to a site advertising a dream job – hanging out on your own tropical island near Australia, and blogging about the experience. The ad campaign disguised as a reality-TV and multimedia contest has won Golden Lions at Cannes, as well as 3 Grand Prixs (Cyber, PR and Direct) for its innovative way of building an international sensation and enlisting User-Generated Content to further its message.
What’s new here is the YouTube video that shows how they conceived and executed the campaign – check it out here. The video shows how they blended elements from several different media platforms – branded Twitter, branded Facebook, and its own YouTube channel - to do what so many advertisers dream about: ignite a viral marketing campaign, where your users become your evangelists. Obviously, the internet is littered with notable failures to leverage the social media and sharing power of the web. The video tracks how the campaign built to the point that it attracted 35,000 video applications from more than 200 countries, as well as countless hours of “earned media” publicity in virtually every language on earth.
If you really want to feel envious, check out the blog of the lucky winner of the contest.
The larger point is that print classified ads still retain a great deal of power – and that when they are employed correctly, they can kick-start a revolution even in the newest of “New Media.” Of course, the strategies needed to successfully execute these kinds of campaigns are still more of an art than a science, and obey a totally different set of rules than ad campaigns in traditional media.
YouTube videos to now link to external sites
Big news from YouTube that has major implications for media publishers. Tomorrow, the video sharing company will allow advertisers to place semi-transparent pop-ups over videos that link directly to a Web page.
It’s the first time that YouTube is allowing links on videos that leave the YouTube environment; before this, you could link to another YouTube video but that was it. If you wanted to externally link, you could do that only from a link on the right side of the screen, not from within the video itself. That also made it beyond the reach of embedded videos.
The potential is enormous. For classified publishers, a video on a particular item – be it a home, vehicle or job posting – can link directly to the listing on your site. Ditto for news publishers. And of course it makes huge sense for other types of advertisers and brands as well.
The product’s official name is the “Call-To-Action Overlay.”
Driving traffic away from a site is not necessarily the best way to generate more revenue. So why is YouTube doing this? One reason: you have to be a paying YouTube advertiser to take advantage of the new service.
How will you use (and yes, you will) this new feature? Post a comment on the blog below.
China blocks Twitter, other sites prior to June 4
Thinking of tweeting during the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre? Keep your iPhone to yourself. Chinese authorities have stepped up censorship ahead of the sensitive June 4 anniversary.
Twitter has been blocked along with Hotmail, Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, Flickr, Blogger, LiveJournal and Huffington Post.
Print media has not been immune either. In recent days, subscribers to The Economist magazine, the Financial Times and South China Morning Post found Tiananmen-related pages ripped out. And on TV, BBC viewers found the screen turned black on any reference to the event.
Google said access to YouTube in China had been restricted for several weeks now.
China has the world’s most intensive system of Internet censorship including automatic filtering plus active scrutiny by real life “cyber-police.”
Publishers can now embed branded Google News, YouTube
Google has launched a new service – Google Web Elements – that allows publishers to embed branded versions of the most popular Google products, such as Calendars, Maps, Google News, YouTube Video News, Presentations, Spreadsheets and Google Conversations, directly into their Web pages.
What this means for publishers can be seen on Google’s Web elements page where content from The New York Times is featured in both the News and YouTube News channels. Publishers can embed that data in their Web sites where it’s branded with The New York Times “T” symbol, a more attractive option than simply displaying a YouTube video that has no indication of its original source before the clip is played. There’s also a “Google Web Elements” link along the bottom of the box.
For now, there’s no advertising embedded in the Web Elements features.
Is Google’s new program a response against recent complaints by newspapers that Google News aggregates their content without attribution? Even so, it’s a powerful new way to increase brand awareness beyond the publisher’s Web site.
Google presented the new Web Elements feature in San Francisco at last week’s Google I/O conference.
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