EyeView's Blog

Flash Vs. HTML5 - Video On The iPad

Now that the iPad has arrived (although not specifically here, unfortunately) it’s time to look again at the impact it will have on the consumption of online video.

YouTube had its iPad app ready at launch after running on the iPhone since the early days, but of all the major TV networks, only ABC was geared up only on to stream its shows to the new device.

Netflix surprised everyone with their iPad app available in time for its launch, allowing you to stream from your queue and even continue from where you stopped watching on your computer or TV.

The New York Times suggested recently that Hulu is working on its iPad app, but that it is looking to try a subscription-based model for the first time. As loathe as I am to begin paying for content I could previously get for free, I can’t think of a better time for content distributors to introduce a paid service. A new device designed to make consumption easier and more enjoyable may be the incentive people need to change their attitudes to paid content.

So far, so interesting for content for entertainment purposes. The real issue arises around video as the key advertising medium for web browsing.

Apple is infamous in its rejection of Flash, Adobe’s omnipresent video ad delivery format. That means that unless a site has been specifically tailored for presentation on the iPad you will probably simply not see Flash video, Flash banners or any other Flash powered element when you browse there.

The alternative standard, HTML5, is a markup language that obviates the need for Flash all together. Jan Ozer at the Streaming Learning Center has taken the trouble to benchmark both Flash and HTML5 to see where the advantages lie. It’s worth wading through the techno-babble to see Ozer firmly reject Steve Jobs’s assertion that Flash is a CPU hog.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, writers like Dan Rayburn and Sarah Perez delve into the business politics of Jobs’s comment to suggest there is more at stake than mere CPU usage.

The debate continues, but if, as I suspect, the iPad becomes the key consumption device for disposable media like news and periodicals, then something will have to give. I’m not betting against Apple, but I’m also sure that Adobe will not give up ground without a fight.

Online Video Stories Of The Week

Over at Online Video Watch, Corey Kronengold comments on Brightroll’s announcement that they have been profitable for the past 12 months. Corey is not entirely trusting but he acknowledges the positive message this sends to the industry.

At comScore, December’s video viewing figures showed a new entry in the top ten video content properties as how-to syndication platform, 5min.com, hit 30 million US uniques for the month.

Fierce Online Video’s Jim O’Neill satisfied continued demand for iPad stories with a piece on Hulu’s rush to become iPad-friendly in time for the tablet’s launch or soon thereafter. There’s no doubt this story will run and run and the implications for the future of online video have yet to be fully determined.

At ReelSEO, Mark Robertson was delighted to report on the efforts of many of the online video platforms to support SEO as part of their offering. YouTube has been the de facto search engine for video until now, so it’s great to see these platforms supporting the indexing of video across all search engines.

Finally, today, no review of online video this week would be complete without mentioning the Superbowl. In what was a fairly lackluster year, the stand out commercial for me was this one for Snickers featuring Betty White (now with added Abe Vigoda). Geriatric genius!

Imitation Is The Sincerest Form Of Flattery

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What they mean is, when someone pays attention to you and respects what you do enough to reproduce one of your original ideas or activities you should be flattered. And we usually are.

Last July, before the release of his New York Times bestseller, Trust Agents, I approached Chris Brogan with an idea for a Twitter giveaway. I proposed that we give away 50 copies of his book on the day of its launch to the first 50 people who tweeted about a brand awareness campaign we were running. The campaign centered on our Video Marketing Quiz which is a fun interactive game that tests your knowledge of video as an effective marketing tool.

We were overwhelmed with the results. As soon as Chris tweeted about the giveaway, everything went nuts with thousands of people taking the quiz and tweeting about it afterwards. It was such a simple idea, yet it worked so well for us and we were tremendously grateful to Chris for his support and proud to be part of the launch for Trust Agents.

We knew it was a successful idea when Chris ran with it and instigated the exact same promotion with his pals at LinkedIn less than a month later. I’m sure it’s not the last time we will see Twitter used in this way.

This week our Video Marketing Quiz saw another form of imitation as Omniture, the web analytics company that was recently bought by Adobe, released an interactive game that tests your knowledge of banner ads as an effective marketing tool. If you disregard the background, the awkward fonts and the clumsy interface that never quite clicks on what you want to click, it’s eerily similar to our own Video Marketing Quiz. All of which goes to prove a few things:

• If something works for someone else, you might be able to make it work for you
• If you want to know who’s listening, check who’s copying
• Great ideas belong to the world (but it’s always nice to know you had them first!)

            

          EyeView's Video Marketing Quiz                                        Omniture's Pick The Winner Quiz

Long-form or Short-form Video? Hulu on the Rise

It may be the start of the new year but we’re still calculating the gains online video made last year. comScore has just released the online video viewing figures for November 2009 and they tell another story of records being broken at the end of a breakthrough year for online video.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the latest report.

YouTube remains the most important delivery mechanism in online video streaming over 12 billion videos in the month and helping Google to a 39.4% share of all online video watching for the month.

Far behind YouTube, but ahead of everyone else is Hulu. With a 3% share of all videos watched during the month Hulu has exceeded all industry expectation and defied the perception that online video is a short form medium.

In fact the market share percentage of almost every video property, including YouTube, has dropped since comScore’s figures of last July with the exception of Hulu.

With the average Hulu viewer watching over 2.1 hours of video in the month the average length of each online video viewed has risen to exactly 4 minutes. There are no figures about the average duration of video watched at YouTube, but this blogger believes it’s considerably less.

It may be time to start considering long form and short form video as two different verticals online as one grows and the other recedes in importance and viability for advertisers.

From the advertisers’ perspective, Tremor Media remained on top with the widest potential reach of all ad networks at just under 50% penetration, up from 42% in August. The rest of the top 10 also experience a nice bump in penetration apart from ScanScout Network who have seen their penetration drop from 50.6% last July to under 20% in November according to comScore figures. This dip follows a round of funding for ScanScout reported at $8.5 million.

6 Predictions For Online Video For 2010

The end of the year is always a time for reflection. This year I left behind my life with a major online video sharing site and started working for a company that is just as enamored with online video but approaches the medium with higher expectations. If video sharing sites represent the youthful excesses in the life of online video, then the next iteration is all about online video growing up, taking responsibility and earning its way.

Here are my predictions for the coming year in Online Video. I hope you enjoy my perspective.

1. Video Sharing sites will continue to grow in size but diminish in importance. In other words YouTube will be huger than ever but the story will be even more fragmented than it was this year. Apart from unpredictable viral hits like Susan Boyle, no YouTuber will ever again achieve the prominence that subscription grinders like Fred, Hot For Words and Michael Buckley have. YouTube has taken over from MTV as the number one place to watch music videos. YouTube is already more relevant as a search engine than as an entertainment destination site. It’s almost like Google could see into the future when they bought it.
2. Some small and medium businesses (SMBs) will embrace video more than ever before. The cost of entry for online video has been so reduced that every commercial site will experiment with the medium. Most will do so with no way of measuring whether the experiment was successful.
3. Some large businesses will continue to invest large sums in telling their stories with video. They will continue to be happy to do so despite not knowing how effective these videos are because however large the budget they are still cheaper than creating and buying airtime for TV ads.
4. Some SMBs and some large businesses will demand that their investment in online video brings a measurable return. They will operate under the assumption that marketing spend needs to be justified and they will seek out video solutions that combine analytics with video creation and implementation. They will find such solutions and they will be very happy.
5. Video will become a more important weapon in the affiliate marketer’s arsenal. As affiliates acknowledge the persuasive power of video over less dynamic media, they will push advertisers towards supplying video versions of banners and other collateral. Affiliates will be a major force driving video to becoming more accountable in the sales funnel.
6. Everyone reading this blog will appear in at least one video posted on the internet between now and this time next year. Happy New Year.

A/B Testing Done Write

I’m really excited about the test we are currently running for our friends at Ginger Software. Ginger Software is a spelling and grammar checker which uses the context of the entire sentence “to facilitate error-free writing”.

It’s a great product that might have been aimed at people for whom English is a second language, but that is also tremendously useful for those of us who remain a little unsure about ‘principal’ and ‘principle’ or ‘affect’ and ‘effect’.

The A/B test running right now on Ginger’s homepage divides incoming traffic into two groups and offers each half one of two situations. Half the visitors will find a video player embedded in the page that autoplays the first time they arrive there. We know video is a persuasive medium for increasing conversion, and we also know that forcing people to watch by using autoplay can sometimes be controversial, so it will be interesting to compare the conversion rates for this half of the visitors with the figures previously achieved by the homepage.

The second group of visitors will be presented with the same homepage, but in place of the embedded video there will be a video initiation trigger. The trigger changes as you roll over it and if you click it the video opens in a lightbox player.

You do not have the Flash Player installed.
Click Here to install it.

Another key difference with this player is that throughout the running time of the video there is a clear call-to-action button that sits on the player and directly reflects the call-to-action button on the site.

So, while the video is the same in each case, the method of delivery is very different. We will be closely tracking the conversion rates for each version and reporting our findings in this forum in the near future.

In the meantime, enjoy the video.

Online Video Still On The Rise

It’s that time of the month again. The comScore Video Metrix service has released the data for online video for August 2009. For yet another month all records have been broken as US Internet users continue to tune in and watch video online.

The breakdown goes like this: In the US alone in the month of August people watched over 25 billion videos online. Of this number around 40 percent were watched on Google sites. That percentage represents around 10 billion videos of which 99 percent were viewed on YouTube. You can expect a big announcement soon when YouTube alone accounts for over 10 billion videos in a calendar month.

Coming a long way behind that lion’s share of the market was Microsoft, Viacom and Hulu, each with around 2 percent of all videos consumed.

The highlights of comScores report show that over 80 percent of US internet users watched online video in August, with the average online video viewer consuming 9.7 hours of video over the month. Compared to TV consumption, these numbers are still modest, but I still wonder how long they can continue to rise.

As far as ad serving goes to the 161 million unique video viewers in the US, the largest network, Tremor Media, only reaches 40 percent of the potential audience. So even if the penetration of online video levels out in the coming months, the potential for ad revenue still has quite a way to catch up.

Adobe and Omniture – Visions of the Future?

Today, I'm delighted to host a guest post by the CEO of EyeView, Oren Harnevo. Don't be shy about letting him know what you think. You can also follow him on Twitter @ohnevo. Take it away, Oren:

Last week Adobe declared that it will acquire Omniture for $1.8 billion. While some might not understand this bold move by Adobe, for me it makes a lot of sense. Adobe is entering the online market and is starting to use its elbows against companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. I think the future for OmnAdobe or AdobNiture is bright and here’s why.

It might not be what Adobe wants from Omniture but this is my vision of the future of OmnAdobe!

I see a future in which advertisers turn to agencies no longer for content, but for effective content. What do I mean by “effective content”? Content whose impact can be assessed, measured, optimized and which can deliver ROI. Advertisers want to pay for results, not for mere content, and that is exactly what a company with a range of content-creation products wants with an analytics company – content with results.

Today, the creation of online content is all about experience and aesthetic. The flash application developer and creative designer believe they know what to create and do the best they can. But what if we had a way, to measure how good their work really is? What if we could put a price tag on one designer’s work against another’s? What if we could show that one flash application averages 40 seconds of use and another application maintains its hold on users for more than a minute? We could actually measure which designer was more successful.

This is not so much a vision of the future as a reflection of our normal working day at EyeView - effective content, constantly measured and optimized to provide real ROI.

Imagine this (names are strictly fictitious):

1. Niky, a fictitious online retailer of socks, wants a new flash application that allows its users to see and play with different sock options before purchase. They believe it will boost sales.
2. Niky finds Ogilby, an online, performance-based content creator which does more than just creating content - Ogilby also promises effective content and ties payment to success.
3. Niky loves the Ogilby pitch and decides to sign. Why pay for regular content when someone is offering measurable content?
4. The design team at Ogilby open their Adobe applications, create some killer content and click the “Insert Analytics” button in the toolbar.
5. Niky now log into their OmnAdobe (or AdobNiture) analytics platform and watch how the content performs, how it impacts their traffic, their sales and their users.
6. It turns out that Ogilby improved engagement with the website by 30%. Ogilby earns a bonus for their work.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? It may still take a while for Adobe and Omniture to reach such lofty heights. These companies are different on so many levels that it would another five posts to describe. Adobe is a Software as a Product (SaaP) company while Omniture is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company with subscription-guaranteed revenue. Omniture usually sells to the very high end of the market while Adobe sells to all segments. Omniture is mostly US while Adobe is worldwide. There will be many challenges for them to face together before they provide the end-to-end solution that bundles content and analytics into the perfect package.

When content is measurable and advertisers demand this accountability from their agencies, Adobe may be the only provider in the market to meet that demand. When that happens, people may take another look at this acquisition and reconsider its value.

New Online Video Provider Comparison Site

I was excited to be contacted this week by Kris Drey. During daylight, Kris is VP of Product Marketing over at Fliqz, a video hosting service. But late at night, when the moon is full, Kris is launching a new site called VidCompare.com. According to the homepage VidCompare is “a free comparison service for business decision makers looking for an Online Video Platform Provider”.

Although the site is still officially in Beta, Kris and his partner, Alex Polonsky have done a great job reaching out to different sites and creating a directory of companies working with online video at varying levels. Each entry gives a brief outline of the site’s offering and a breakdown of the different services. You can see information about the company’s target market and pricing models as well as a sample video to give you a taste of their player. It’s easy to filter your search and distinguish between white-label players and full-service production houses.

Satisfied users can come back to the site and add a review of the companies they’ve worked with. It’s not a new model, but it’s already proven its effectiveness in other markets.

Whether you’re in marketing for a huge multi-national or a one-person start-up looking to include some video on your new site, VidCompare takes the headache out of researching a bunch of companies to find the best fit.

From my perspective as a vendor, the arrival of VidCompare is a validation of the online video market as a healthily competitive place. We know more and more business are looking to incorporate online video on their sites and presenting the range of possibilities in an accessible way increases visibility and adds transparency to this search.

It’s too early to know how much value the site can provide to vendors in terms of leads, but I’m sure customers will welcome the chance to compare their options and that will ultimately provide benefit to everyone.

So far, it looks great and I will update as the site grows.

Video Marketing Quiz 2009

One of the benefits of working for a company that is committed to testing is that we never have to fall back on guesswork. When EyeView releases data about the impact video has on conversion, you can be sure that the data comes from real sites using real traffic. We don’t deal with suppositions, simulations or uncertainties. Instead, EyeView has a scientific approach to conversion optimization where every element is tested to prove its worth and every assumption examined to establish its authenticity.

The Video Marketing Quiz (VMQ), which you can find here, is the culmination of several weeks’ work to find an engaging way to present some of the data we have collected to the community of marketers. The quiz will test your instincts and help you understand effective use of video for businesses.

How do we distribute content in 2009?

Once we were sure the quiz could provide value, we looked for the medium that was best placed for sharing that value with the marketing community. Much has been written over the past few months about Twitter and its value for businesses. For the most part that value has been ascribed to consumer-facing (B2C) businesses like Zappos.com or Comcast who are leveraging Twitter to maintain relationships with their customers and establish their reputations as companies that care. On the surface our company is a classic business-facing (B2B) business, but we are discovering that the old B2B models aren’t as relevant anymore. B2B relationships aren’t about businesses communicating with other businesses, they are about individuals within a business talking with individuals working somewhere else. Twitter is the perfect tool for humanizing relationships, not just with consumers but with business partners, colleagues and peers.

We are launching this year’s VMQ using Twitter as our main communications medium backed up by Facebook and LinkedIn. We believe that a friend spreading the word to other friends is the most effective way to reach a broad group of people. As more people take the quiz and share the experience with their trusted network, we hope reach a wider audience and share our experience and add value to the community that provides value to us very day.

So, enjoy the quiz, share the quiz and thank you for everything that you share with us.

You can find us on Twitter here.