Posts Tagged ‘youtube’

Experian Hitwise statistics show social networks attracted more traffic in May than search engines. Social networks accounted for 11.9 percent of U.K. Internet visits, compared with 11.3 percent of visits to search engines. Read the rest of this entry »

The home and search results pages of YouTube’s mobile site will now serve up advertising, announced the YouTub Biz Blog. With a traffic increase of 160 percent in 2009, YouTube decided it was the right time to expand advertising opportunities from its Web site to its mobile site as well. Mazda was one of the first advertisers to jump on board. The ads are full-day banners, introduced after several months of testing. While it can be sold as a YouTube banner package, we’re not clear on whether a business can purchase mobile-only.

Time Warner Inc. and YouTube just announced an online video distribution agreement that will give consumers access to an extensive variety of short-form content owned by Time Warner, including clips from movies, television shows and news programming. The agreement will allow Warner Bros. Entertainment and Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. to program videos on YouTube using a Time Warner embeddable player.

YouTube will host the content made available from a wide range of Time Warner-owned television shows and movies. In addition, Time Warner can create separate channels for its key participating brands and sell ad time on YouTube. Warner Bros. Entertainment and Turner Broadcasting will work with YouTube to offer packages of targeted advertising, supplemental marketing and branded channels. Time Warner’s properties will share ad revenue with YouTube.  YouTube also will feature Time Warner content in marketing and promotional campaigns, including display ads.

“This partnership with Time Warner will provide our community with some of the most popular video content produced,” said Chad Hurley, co-founder and CEO of YouTube, in the announcement.  ”We hope to build on this deal and look forward to a long and productive relationship.”

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.

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.”

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.

Coldwell Banker has launched a YouTube channel to promote its listings. The most interesting part of the new service, though, is that Coldwell is using dynamic IP lookup, which brings up local results when visitors first open the Web site.

In addition to listings, the channel includes videos about specific communities and neighborhoods, plus real estate news and advice.

Other real estate brokers that are on YouTube include RealEstate.com and Century 21 which earlier this year dropped TV spending in favor of online only (see our report here).

The A.P. doesn’t get social media. That’s the only conclusion one can make from a recent blunder in Tennessee. The Associated Press apparently sent a “cease and desist” e-mail to WTNQ-FM for posting videos from A.P.’s official YouTube channel. The problem: WTNQ is an A.P. affiliate.

But more than that: all of A.P.’s YouTube videos have the standard embed code, which encourages anyone to link back to the videos. And oh yes, linking is a good thing in terms of increasing viewership, something one would think would be in the A.P.’s best interests. Nevertheless, A.P. accused its affiliate of stealing “licensed content.”

The AP subsequently released a statement on the matter: “There was a misunderstanding of YouTube usage when the Tennessee radio station was contacted by the Associated Press regarding the AP’s more extensive online video services. No cease and desist letter was drafted or sent by AP to the station at any time. The AP was trying to offer the station a superior service for their needs.”

Think video is hot? It’s not just about what you watch. It’s what you search for too. ComScore is reporting that searching for video on YouTube accounts for a quarter of all Google search queries in the U.S.

ComScore’s monthly qSearch report breaks out the number of searches conducted on YouTube. If it were a standalone site, YouTube would be the second largest search engine after Google. And, to drive another nail into Yahoo’s downfall, more searches are done through YouTube than through the former search engine high flyer.

The numbers (from Christa Quarles of Thomas Weisel Partners):

– YouTube generates 2.7 billion searches in the U.S., up 8.5 percent from last month.
– The number is up a whopping 114 percent from 1.3 billion in Nov. 2007.
– YouTube represents 25.4 percent of all U.S. Google site searches (vs. 17.4 percent last year).

Oh, and in case you were wondering, ComScore also addresses non-YouTube searches on Google. The company’s search market share (not including YouTube) stood at 63.5 percent vs. Yahoo’s which dropped slightly to 20.4 percent. Microsoft pulled up the rear at 8.3 percent.

YouTube users can now see how many unique visitors are watching their videos. It may seem like an obvious feature, but up until now, YouTube’s analytics platform only displayed the number of views which made it impossible to know if all the traffic was coming from a wide audience or just a few devout fans.

To access the feature, visit the YouTube Insights page for the video in question and click ‘Show Unique Users’ under the “Views” tab. A yellow line depicting unique views will appear alongside the standard green line showing absolute views.

Analysts from eMarketer weigh in on how the next year in online marketing, e-commerce, social networking and more will unfold. Here’s a quick overview.

Online ad spending

Analyst David Hallerman predicts online video ad spending will run counter to overall economic developments, and rise by 45 percent in 2009 to reach $850 million. Even though advertisers are increasingly budget conscious, they agree that the best way to woo online audiences to open their shrinking wallets is through “messages that reach their hearts and minds – hence more video.”

Search marketing

Hallerman also says that search marketing spending will grow by 14.9 percent in 2009, to $12.3 billion. He calls search marketing “recession-resistant” as it is highly measurable and advertisers will increasingly look “secure and effective methods to combat fear in an economic meltdown.”

Total ad spend

Finally, Hallerman comments that total U.S. Internet ad spending will increase to $25.7 billion in 2009, an 8.9 percent growth rate. While that will be the lowest year-over-year increase for online advertising ever, it will still be more than nearly all other media.

Demographics: multicultural ads ascend

Lisa E. Phillips says that multicultural marketing will be on the upswing in 2009 with more African-Americans and Hispanics going online. More language and culture specific messages will be required.

Retail e-commerce: big declines

Jeffrey Grau has gloomy news: online retail sales (excluding travel) will grow by only 4 percent in 2009, although he notes that online sales growth was already on a downward slope as the number of online buyers approaches saturation. Most retail e-commerce sales growth in the future will come from increased spending by consumers who have long been online buyers, he says.

E-commerce for social networking

EMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson believes that e-commerce will be a growing revenue stream for social networking sites. She expects both MySpace and Facebook will enhance their self-serve advertising systems to sell real world goods and services.

But at the same time, she also predicts tough sailing for smaller and niche social networks, many of which may need to shut down or be acquired by larger players. Marketers that have built their own social network platforms will need to migrate them to existing services.

Since Facebook is already a de facto business networking site (because of the number of businesspeople who use it), Williamson says the company will develop ad programs aimed at B2B companies and that will directly affect existing business-focused networks like LinkedIn.

Twitter may have turned down Facebook’s all-stock offering in late 2008, but it will still end up being acquired, Williamson predicts. And the company that buys it will use the Twitter infrastructure to offer targeted marketing and analytics to advertisers.

Traditional media will continue to hurt

Carol Krol weighs in on newspaper advertising which, not surprisingly, will continue to decline in the new year more than any other medium. Industry-wide cutbacks will continue, and there will be more consolidation. “The industry was limping before the recession; expect more newspaper companies to become casualties,” she writes. Also look for more newspapers to reduce their publishing frequency similar to the Christian Science Monitor, The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, she adds.

As for TV ad spending, it will decline 4.2 percent to $66.9 billion in 2009. And YouTube will start to carry full-length television programs supported by ads, in keeping with the company’s Q4 2008 announcement. Other online streamers will follow suit.

You’re searching for a video about a new Prius on YouTube and what comes out on top? A sexually explicit video of a scantily clad woman and the aforementioned Prius. It’s not porn, but neither is it exactly family-friendly stuff. Now YouTube is trying to clean up its act.

The video streaming company says it will apply a “stricter standard for mature content” and will demote sexually explicit or graphic videos from its “most viewed,” “top favorited,” and other popular pages.

YouTube is not alone in cracking down. Build-your-own social network Ning – which now has hundreds of thousands of networks – is going even further, banning “adult social networks” entirely even if they are by the books legal legal.

The reasoning is simple. The advertisers both Ning and YouTube are trying to lure don’t appreciate the sexy content. Ning CEO Gina Bianchini explains in a blog post that “adult social networks don’t pull their own weight. Specifically, they require other social networks to work harder because they don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs.”

Bianchini also pinned the decision on the economy. “In this recession we have to be relentless in providing the most compelling service in the most efficient way possible. Therefore, from a practical perspective, the only practical answer we see is a clear elimination of adult networks.”

Ning’s new policy goes into effect on January 1, 2009.

YouTube has launched an intriguing new ad program, one that could potentially turn around the video king’s lackluster revenue options. YouTube members can now buy keywords to place paid links on YouTube videos or channel pages.

The system works like a stripped down version of Google’s AdWords. You enter keywords, your text, and the price you’re willing to pay. You’re only charged when someone clicks on the link and, like AdWords, the actual price will be determined by auction.

The new program is logical for YouTube and its search engine parent Google, and has the potential to generate a lot of money. YouTube has a lot of search inventory and viewers search the site more than 2.5 billion times per month.

YouTube has posted a video by Matthew Liu, project manager at the company, demonstrating how the system works complete with screen shots.

To see the program in action, type in “advertising opportunities” into the search box at the top of every YouTube page (or just type in http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=advertising+opportunities&search_type=&aq=f).

In our test, an ad for Facebook appeared. Video links can also appear on the right side of the page.

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that YouTube will launch live streaming at its November 22 “YouTube Live!” event. That would put YouTube in competition with already existing live streaming sites UStream, Justin.TV, Stickam and Mogulus.

Nevertheless, the question remains: why? Live streaming is both very expensive and hard to monetize. Yahoo just shut its service down. A Google source told Silicon Valley Insider that if just 10 percent of YouTube’s users adopted live streaming, bandwidth costs would go up 20 percent because live streaming clips tend to last longer than the short video clips typical of YouTube and they also require data to pass both ways.

It’s also hard to make any money off live streaming. Why would a company want to advertise on content that is entirely uncontrollable? Perhaps YouTube will only allow paying customers to use the live streaming service. But that would go against YouTube’s whole ethos. More on the story when (and if) it breaks on later in November.

In an unrelated announcement, YouTube will reportedly start serving ad-supported, feature length films as soon as next month. The report is from CNet. It’s not a simple move.

How about DRM? YouTube videos now are actually downloaded to your computer to play. Will all the studios place nice? Canadian film company Lionsgate has only agreed to give YouTube access to short movie clips. Can enough ads be placed into a streaming movie to make it profitable without annoying viewers? Lots of questions. Let’s hope YouTube and parent Google have some answers.