EyeView's Blog

Decline in Digital Ads Offers Opportunity for Online Video

Online newspapers, once thought to be the only viable future for news media are no longer providing the comfort they once did. As offline ad revenues decline and cover price wars continue to cause major worries for print newspapers, publishers turned to their online siblings to help pick up the slack and for a while it was working. At first, many of the advertising dollars that left offline media just migrated online. It was the same media buyers talking to the same ad-sales personnel just about a different medium. In other words there was no advertising crisis, just a movement away from a tired medium towards a fresh and exciting one.

But, like the wrapping for today’s fish and chips, that is all yesterday’s news. In the UK the continuing depression in the property market combined with ongoing uncertainties in the job market has hit ad sales right where it hurts – in the classifieds. For too long now, newspaper publishers have depended on a booming property market and a healthy turnover of staff in key areas to ensure that they meet their targets. This report shows the problems facing the UK’s largest newspaper group, Trinity Mirror.

While the forecasts for the next few quarters are no brighter, I like to think that this downturn represents an opportunity for publishers rather than their end. No can say for sure whether the property market will return to its former heights, but publishers can use this time to regroup and think about what they really have to offer online. One of their key investments should be in video. No other online medium has the same power to persuade and encourage users to act.

I believe that as online publishers emerge from the current funk they will embrace video as the best solution for their advertisers knowing that it is the medium most likely to convert and provide value to those advertisers. At the same time, advertisers are turning to video as the most effective way of delivering a branded message with a precision-targeted call to action to each and every viewer.

Online video is the right solution for advertisers and publishers alike as they try to make sense of the current turmoil. The implementation of online video ads with measurable ROI will establish new models of publisher integrity which will rebuild confidence across all advertising sectors.

When the dust settles, people will be watching video and increasing numbers of them will be clicking on the embedded link.

Another Video Conversion Success Story

Anyone with a school-aged child has wrestled with the problem of tutoring. Whether your son needs help with his trigonometry homework or your daughter needs to stop falling behind with her reading comprehension you will discover that finding a tutor can be as difficult as it is expensive. Whether you have to travel to the tutor’s residence or find a mutually agreeable time in your own home, you can expect to pay anywhere from $30-75 per hour of one-on-one tutoring.

It was only a matter of time until someone came up with a better solution. TutorVista operates out of Bangalore, India with a team of highly qualified professional tutors available round the clock to work with your children improving their academic skills. As long as you have a broadband connection, you can get unlimited tutoring for under $100 per month.

The guys at TutorVista approached us with a problem. They had a landing page that was specifically designed to funnel traffic through their sign-up process. The landing page was already reasonably successful by most standards but they wanted to try and increase conversion for that page to make sure they were getting the most out of their traffic.

A conversion solution was prepared which included a battery of tests to be performed on the landing page to measure optimization around a video which we created specifically for the page. The first test embedded the video on the page for half the visitors and tested it against the existing page and the existing conversion rate. On top of that, we made the embedded video autoplay for first-time visitors, reasoning that the information in the video was useful enough to overcome the issues that sometimes arise from autoplay.

Arun Kumar, Manager at TutorVista, continues the story: “We implemented EyeView’s solution on one of our landing pages that already had a pretty impressive conversion rate. The very first test they ran boosted conversion by over 80 percent. EyeView really works.”

We will be running more tests over the coming months, with the aim of further optimizing conversion for this page, but there is nothing sweeter than hitting the first pitch right out of the park.

Congratulations to TutorVista on having such a great product and congratulations to the EyeView team for taking a gamble and watching it pay off handsomely.

If you want to watch the video, I’m adding it here, but the real magic for TutorVista is happening right on their landing page:

Online Video - A Medium In Flux

These days the only guarantee with online video is that what was true yesterday may not be true tomorrow. We are living in a period of rapid evolution where little remains the same for long.

A couple of articles caught my eye this week, because they reported facts which seemed to run counter to everything that we thought we knew until now.

First up was Jacqui Cheng writing in ars technica on the decline in P2P filesharing as online video streaming continues to grow. It seems like only yesterday when th No. 1 topic of geek conversation was the overwhelming percentage of internet traffic that was taken up by BitTorrent. According to the 2009 Global Broadband Report published by Sandvine "real-time entertainment traffic (video and audio streaming, Flash media, peercasting, placeshifting) accounts for 26.6 per cent of total traffic in 2009, up from 12.6 per cent in 2008." In the same period filesharing has declined by 25 per cent as people move towards wanting their content "on demand".

The second article backing this trend up comes from the ever-reliable Media section of the Guardian Online with a report by Mark Sweney on the viewing habits of Virgin Media's VoD customers. The article quotes Virgin Media boss, Neil Berkett, when he says that his customers spend more time watching VoD than they do with mainstream terrestrial UK channels Channel 4 and Channel Five. Again this runs contrary to previous thinking that VoD was a niche service that would not find the support from advertisers necessary to make it stick.

Streaming video is more popular and mainstream than ever as people are more selective about what they want and when they want it. Watch this space.

The Message Or The Medium

The BBC's political panel show Question Time celebrated its 30^th anniversary in September of this year. The format has remained mostly unchanged in that time with a chairman fielding questions from a live audience before a panel of invited guests usually representing each of the three major political parties in the UK and a journalist or representative of one of the smaller political parties.

The show, and the BBC, has attracted considerable criticism for extending an invitation for tonight’s live broadcast to Nick Griffin. In July of this year, Griffin was democratically elected to the European Parliament where he represents the British National Party (BNP) a far right party whose members have at various times made remarks that were anti-Semitic, anti-Islam, homophobic, in support of Holocaust denial and against mixed-race relationships. While Griffin has tried publicly to tone down some of the less-palatable aspects of his party’s manifesto, there is no denying the party’s (and his) roots in the murky world of British fascism.

Prior to broadcast, the debate has centered on whether or not Griffin should have been invited. Some people question whether the BBC, a state-funded broadcast company, should give a platform to a man whom many consider to be an unrepentant racist. The response of the BBC, until now, has been that it is merely the medium and that it would be wrong for the corporation to control the message. I don’t want to delve further into the ethics of this situation, but I do want to think about this distinction.

We know that online video increases engagement for the visitors to your site. We know that the more video they watch, the more likely they are to continue along the conversion path you have built for them. An engaged visitor is a contented visitor and is more likely to download, register or purchase.

My question today is how important is the medium and how important is the message? Is it enough to embed today’s most popular video on YouTube within your landing page to entertain your visitors? How big should such a video be? Could you turn the entire page into a screening room for the funniest clips and hope that prolonged exposure to such fare will cause them to click the download button out of sheer gratitude? In presenting the medium, how much responsibility will you take for the message?

Coming from the other side, should you prepare a video that delivers the right message clearly and articulately, hitting each of your marketing beats and presenting an overwhelming case for people to continue towards conversion and then use an clunky generic player to host it? Do you want someone else’s ads to appear on the player during and after your precision targeted pitch?

In other words, how should you divide your attention between the information you are trying to get across and the method you employ for doing so?

In the case of tonight’s Question Time, the BBC may be able to claim that they are doing nothing wrong, merely broadcasting someone else’s opinion. On your own website, you probably need to focus on the message just as much as the medium. Either one of them can negatively impact your site’s effectiveness, while doing them both well can significantly increase your conversion rate.

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.

Video Demos Are More Than Just Videos

It was gratifying to read Jason Kincaid’s piece in TechCrunch this week that he thoughtfully titled: The Underutilized Power Of The Video Demo To Explain What The Hell You Actually Do. If we disregard the fact that it might have been easier to make a video than to type that heading, Kincaid makes some strong points about the power of video to deliver something between an elevator pitch and a run through of your key features.

It’s a topic that I touched on back here when I blogged about Your Video Elevator Pitch, and it’s one that continues to have legs. Kincaid’s article focuses more on the value of video to show a product demo. While I agree completely that video should be a big part of your customer education program, I would argue that video has a more fundamental role to play on your site.

Kincaid uses the video made for Dropbox.com as an example of effective video. I watched the video on the Dropbox homepage and it does a great job of explaining the service. I was a little surprised though, when at the end of the video I was directed to go to their homepage. There was a great call to action at the close of the video to download the software, but there was no correlation between the call to action in the video and the Download Dropbox button that sat below the player. I was even concerned that the download button sat partially below the fold on my laptop screen making conversion less likely for the people who watch.

I guess the point is that a great video demo is part of the solution, but you also need to concern yourself with placement and conversion to ensure that you’re getting the best return on your investment.

As always with TechCrunch one of the most valuable parts of the article is the comments section. From there I got this great link that Andrew Angus over at Switch Marketing put together of Producers of Explanatory Videos.

Favorite Headline Of The Week

Sometimes something just tickles you in such a way that you feel you have to share with everyone. I checked my news feeds as normal this morning and stumbled across an article heading which made me stop… look again… and… instantly want to read more.

The headline read: Rossellini Ponders How To Make Online Video Pay

Rossellini is, of course, Isabella Rossellini. Isabella Rossellini – one of the most beautiful women in the world. Isabella Rossellini who was in Blue Velvet. Isabella Rossellini, the daughter of Ingrid Bergman. Isabella Rossellini who was once married to Martin Scorsese and later engaged to David Lynch. Isabella Rossellini who played Sydney’s crazy aunt in Alias, Jack’s ex-wife on 30 Rock and just missed being on Ross’s laminated list on Friends.

That Isabella Rossellini.

Isabella Rosellini is thinking about how to make money out of online video. To give this some context, Ms. Rossellini has written, produced and directed a series of internet shorts called Green Porno all about how animals have sex. Now that she’s into to season three, she’s starting to think of ways to earn back the money she has spent.

Isabella Rossellini is wondering how to get a return on her investment in online video. For perhaps the first and only time ever, Isabella Rossellini and I are thinking about the same thing.

Now, if Isabella Rossellini is thinking about building ROI into your online video spend and I am thinking about how online video should be part of your conversion strategy in order to boost revenue, maybe you should start thinking about it too.

You Don't Need 300 Million Users To Make Money (... But It Helps!)

First of all, congratulations to young Mr. Zuckerberg and the rest of the team at Facebook. According to his blog post yesterday, the site now has over 300 million users. This is a remarkable feat by any standard and places Facebook firmly in the pantheon of internet gods. Given that the announcement about reaching 250 million users only came in July, we can see that Facebook continues to experience remarkable growth as it becomes an essential part of many people’s lives.

Perhaps even more importantly for Mr. Zuckerberg, he was able to announce that Facebook had finally become “cashflow positive”. An interesting choice of words that is open to interpretation as Alan Patrick of Broadsight amusingly points out on his blog. At least one thing is clear and that is whatever interpretation of “cashflow positive” Facebook uses for this past quarter, it is not likely to have made much of dent in the $700 million that has already been invested in the site.

So, if it takes one of the world’s most popular sites five years, 300 million users and $700 million of investment to make money, what hope is there for the rest of us? Plenty. And the reason is this. You don’t need 300 million users to make money. What you do need is a clear conversion strategy for the users or visitors you do have.

Facebook has built its user base with fantastic word of mouth and viral expansion through every demographic. The rest of us are using a combination of PPC, SEO and other SEM tactics to generate traffic to our properties. But even without a viral tsunami we can all still do more to optimize the value of the traffic we generate for our sites.

You may even find that your real online business is not an ad-supported behemoth like Facebook, but a lean and keen revenue-generating machine with a real product and an open and defined strategy for turning your visitors into purchasers or subscribers or downloaders. Facebook needed 300 million visitors in order to start making money. My bet is that you can achieve the same goal with far fewer.

Online Video Will Not Save Advertising

There is a lot of speculation as to why advertising dollars have failed to follow eyeballs into online video. Tania Yuki over at comScore offered her two cents last week on this thought-provoking conundrum.

Yuki describes online video as a party crasher knocking on the door of Big Advertising with a bunch of unruly (and unsavoury) friends expecting to be welcomed into the fold and recognized as one of the guys. As Yuki describes it -- brand advertisers responded blankly and fairly, “who are you and what are you doing here?”

Yuki goes on to talk about the disconnect between agencies and content producers contributing to the lack of enthusiasm on the agencies’ part for online video.

I would take this even further and suggest that disconnect is between old-fashioned outbound marketing and the strength and importance of inbound marketing. Agencies are still trying to use video outside of a brand’s site to drive interest and build recognition for that brand. It’s the old problem of putting ads for cat food on TV when you know that only one in three households owns a cat. Most of the time you are trying to sell something to someone who will never need it.

The new reality is that everyone currently spending money on video is already spending more money on generating traffic for their property. By using video to attract business they are competing with their existing spend and, most of the time, wasting their energy.

I believe the future for online video is worlds away from the current advertising model. Following the principles of inbound marketing, an effective online video on your landing page will complement rather than cannibalize your SEO spend and be viewed by people who have already chosen to visit your site to learn more.

In other words, rather than trying to sell cat food to dog lovers, you first go out and attract the attention of cat owners and when they find you, you can tell them why your cat food tastes best.

Online Video Up. Ad Revenue... Not So Much.

Recent figures released by comScore show that even in the traditionally slow, summer month of July, audience figures for online video are still outperforming expectations. According to the report, more than 158 million US internet users watched online video during the month. This is the largest figure recorded so it comes as no surprise that the number of videos watched, 21.4 billion, was also an all-time record.

Over 40 percent of videos are watched on what comScore euphemistically calls “Google sites”. While that figure is more than 10 times the size of its nearest competitor, it still means that 60 percent of online video is being watched in places other than YouTube.

With US video viewers watching an average of 135 videos each in the month of July, there is no further proof needed that online video watching is as mainstream for internet users as reading email or checking last night’s sports scores.

Interestingly, the most wide-reaching ad network has a potential reach of only half the online video viewing audience with no ad network actually delivering more than 20 percent of that audience. This implies that the overwhelming majority of online video viewers is watching without the interruption of ads and will probably expect this to continue.

While the world of video as entertainment, which is reliant on ad revenue, may be concerned by this slow-to-improve statistic, companies that are using video for branding, exposure, SEO and conversion have less to be worried about.