Reel SEO Video Marketing

Evenhere Video Overlays Put the Product in Your Hand

Christophor Rick — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 02:02:44 +0000

So you’re watching some show or video and see something really cool. Your mind begins to wander and you can’t help but think ‘how and where do I get one of those?’ Well that’s exactly where Evenhere.com comes in. Their service allows you to bookmark and buy products that you see on TV, in magazines, on the web or in a video clip immediately.

Evenhere’s service is a product overlay. They don’t use a standard hotspotting over every product which could obscure the content; instead they have more of a bottom of the screen ticker that shows highlighted products. This means that it won’t distract from the original content. As you can see in the upper left image there is no interface present.

When you activate the functionality it brings up the ticker-like interface at the bottom of the screen. When you choose an item it will bring up the information in a full video display that will allow you to navigate to further information, places to buy and bookmarking options. If you’re watching via any type of digital cable or via DVR, PVR you can even pause so you won’t miss anything important and still manage to get the information or products you’re interested in. In fact, in the demo I just saw when you click on the item to get the details it automatically pauses the video for you.

Buying directly from your television is a novel concept that many people will not really be able to wrap their heads around so Evenhere has a web store feature as well. The store allows you to search by network, show, episode, date and product category. This is also how they are tying into print media, as in magazines, by allowing readers to search the site by magazine, issue and even by specific page. After looking at all this information I personally thought it was what I would term “uber-cool,” which I in fact told Brian Rogers the CEO of Evenhere. I mean how often have you seen something on TV or a magazine and later went to search for it aimlessly or even more often forgot about it totally? Well now you won’t need to ever worry about that again. With the new Evenhere service you’ll be able to buy immediately or bookmark for later to any of a number of bookmarking and social networking sites including Facebook, Reddit, Deli.cio.us and more. Mr. Rogers has stated the with the web store they are looking at users having personal account and being able to bookmark directly to that sort of like a wish list.

Why Should you Know?

Well I can see various reasons why you should be interested in this product. Firstly, if you’re a publisher it could be a way to monetize your content by affiliate programs and strategic partnerships with product manufacturers or retailers. If you’re, oh let’s say, a real estate agent or agency you could show models off and fill them with furniture. When prospective buyers watch the videos they can click through and buy the items they saw and you might make some commission based on the sales. It could definitely generate some extra income in some way.

If you’re a retailer or manufacturer the obvious benefit is that it’s an entirely new revenue channel possibility. Let’s face it, the economy, well put simply, sucks. So as a retailer or product manufacturer you need every edge you can get at present and this could definitely give you an edge over your competition if they don’t hop on board or see the value of this service.

What I Found Out

I can’t include the demo I saw during research, but I can tell you that it’s slick. There’s a simple unobtrusive shopping cart icon in the lower right corner that activates the ticker. The ticker shows whatever products are being highlighted. When you see something you want to know more about you click the small image in the ticker and the full display comes up and Evenhere pauses the video. That’s so simple that even my computer challenged mother can manage it.

Evenhere is already integrating with Brightcove (it seems like everyone is lately doesn’t it?) and they are working on their plan to “integrate with all significant online video players,” according to Brian Rogers, CEO and Founder of Evenhere. He’s also mentioned the OpenCable Application Platform and being compatible with that. ReelSEO recently reported on the Open Screen Project and Flash being extended to Intel CE chips, when asked about this project Mr. Rogers stated that they -Evenhere- are aware of the project but have not yet begun to look at compatibility.

Information is power so I asked about what kinds of metrics are being tracked. Mr. Rogers stated that they are doing basic tracking of any user click action. That means when someone clicks the shopping cart to activate the ticker, when they click on a product and it pauses the video, when they click through via the Buy Now or the bookmark links. He also said, “We can also easily interface with any affiliate marketing partner that tracks CPA and CPM.”

My thoughts

Honestly, this looks like a really great product. It adds revenue channels where none existed before and does away with the need for non-targeted ads that interrupt the video content and ’switch the viewer off.’ Everyone knows that we hate commercial interruptions being forced upon us. But we also want information when we want it. Evenhere seems to take all of that into account and provide what could be the future of online video advertising.

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Internet Video Topics: adver, BrightCove, players, ecommerce, Video Advertising

Why Newspapers Should Do More Online Video Marketing

Grant Crowell — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:30:45 +0000

The Internet has now surpassed newspapers and all other media except television as an outlet for national and international news, according to a survey by Pew Center for the People & The Press, an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes towards the press, politics, and public policy issues.

According to the survey, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the Internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in one of their surveys, more people say they rely mostly on the Internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%.

Young Viewers - Internet and television audiences are now equals

One of the survey’s trends also shows that for young viewers, the Internet now matches television as a main source of national and international news. Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cited for television. In September 2007, twice as many young people said they relied mostly on television for news than mentioned the Internet (68% vs. 34%). This shows an increase of 25% of Internet audience growth for young viewers in the last year alone, with a decrease of 9% in television from the previous year.

Limitation of study: News delivery systems, not sources

Admittedly, this is report that’s a survey on general news delivery systems, and not about original sources. The study doesn’t ask is what percentages of people are getting their news from an online newspaper versus a print newspaper, or take into account the people who might be reading news on a newspaper’s own website, or through a link.

“What we’re asking here is what kind of platform are you using to get your news?” Says Caroll Doherty, Pew’s Associate Editorial Director. “People who say ‘newspaper’ to a response like this are thinking of the print product. I think those people who go online for newspapers would fall into the Internet category.”

Limitation of study: Nothing on local news interest

Pew’s question posed to survey respondents was, “How do you get most of your news about national and international issues?” It’s surprising that Pew chose to overlook regional and local audiences, which are a big part of what most newspapers cater to. Even the New York Times, one of the most well know newspapers nationally and internationally, is still mostly about local coverage. (Exceptions are USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.) By only asking the question related to national and international news, Pew’s results miss the opportunity to capture a really broad audience, AND distinguish geographic news interests.

News video has largest Internet audience

As we’ve reported here earlier on a survey by DoubleClick Performics (Now Publicis Performics), news video is shown to have the highest engagement levels with online audiences over any other kind of online video. Other industry surveys covered in a report by the media analyst firm eMarketer show news clips to be the most frequently watched type of online video content among adults of all ages, and showing the largest overall growth rates across all demographics. eMarketer’s Senior Analyst, David Hallerman, says in his report, Online Video Content: The New TV Audience, that “news clips remain among the most popular form of video content is both a national and local phenomenon.”

Grant Crowell is the Senior Analyst for ReelSEO, and author of the upcoming report, “Video SEO: The Business Solution for the U.S. Newspaper Industry”

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Internet Video Topics: news video, newspapers, video marketing

SpotMixer Expands Distribution with Google Adwords Video Ads

Mark Robertson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:34:43 +0000

Just last week, we posted our interview with John Love, CEO of One True Media and their product SpotMixer, which is an online self-service video advertising solution targeted at small and medium sized businesses . John talked with us about the importance of distribution for online video marketing for SMBs. In May of last year, Spotmixer formed a partnership with GoogleTV to syndicate videos as television advertisements.

“We are part of Google’s ad creation marketplace.” said John “We are the only self-service creation ability in the marketplace. Usually the other ones are videographers who will come out and shoot for you..The trade-off there is that those are very expensive whereas with Spotmixer, it is less than $100 to produce a television ad. It is much lower priced and it uses the assets that are already available to the business in creating their television ad. “

John also stated that they would be announcing new partnerships for distribution and sure enough, SpotMixer has announced today that they are an official authorized reseller for the Google AdWords online video advertising program. We think this is an excellent idea as we have pointed out the various advantages in terms of response rates for online video banner ads versus traditional image banner ads. By video banner ads, I’m referring to a video that is itself an ad and is served within a web page vs. in-stream video ads.

Syndication through Google’s Adwords content network allows Spotmixer to offer SMB’s an affordable, CPM-based, targeted method for banner ad delivery across the wide reach of AdWords content network. Furthermore, SpotMixer has been able able to integrate this into their existing plaform via the AdWords API.

“As a Google AdWords Authorized Reseller, SpotMixer provides advertisers the impressive reach of Google and the Google content network to build their brand and business through video ads,” said John Love, One True Media’s co-founder and CEO. “Just as SpotMixer revolutionized video creation — making it easy and affordable — SpotMixer has simplified the process of distributing video ads, delivering a simple and cost-effective self-service option for any business.”

Here are some details regarding their new offering:

“Pay only for views or impressions of your video ads. The minimum daily budget is $10/day with no minimum term. You pay for the impressions you get and will never spend more than your daily budget. You can try this for a couple of weeks, but we recommend running an ad campaign for at least 60 days to get the optimal level of brand exposure and traffic to your website.”

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Internet Video Topics: Video Advertising, spotmixer, Local Video, SMBs

Personalized Video Discovery & Monetization - An Overview of Taboola

Christophor Rick — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:01:49 +0000

Taboola.com is one of an ever-growing list of video aggregation services. So why should you be reading about it? Well they do a little more than some of the others. Not only are they organizing the videos for the users to find more easily, they’re also working towards making things better for the publishers and the advertisers. You might think of Taboola as the point where the three pieces of online video monetization meet - producer, advertiser, consumer.

Taboola prides itself on its Personalized Video Discovery Platform which boils down to a system that gives users recommendations about other videos they might enjoy. The system can be implemented on almost any video site and comes in three pieces - viDiscovery which is the aforementioned video recommendation system, DiscoverAd which is the advertising solution and Taboola Analytics which is of course the metrics.

For advertisers, Taboola gives you are more than the standard pre, mid, post-roll options. They are standalone units and appear as videos in the recommended lists as sponsored messages. The system analyzes the user’s watching habits and interests and only shows advertisements that should appeal to that particular user. The user then chooses whether or not they wish to view the message or interact further. Their Matchrank system is said to help increase click through and relevancy. Since advertisements are only seen when the user chooses to do so, the quality of the views should increase as well. Recently Taboola partnered with Brightcove to “offer publishers a simplified video discovery experience for their viewers” which means that the ViDiscovery service can be included in the Brightcove player.

The viewers of course benefit from all of this by being able to discover more videos that they might like without having to go and manually search for them. This not only saves the viewer time and energy but could also increase their viewing time as they will have more relevant content displayed right next to the video they want to see. There’s little concern over privacy since they only collect anonymous data unless the user specifies otherwise. So while they know what you are watching and might like to see next, they don’t actually know who you are or where you are.

What’s it mean for you?

Well that of course depends on WHO you are. If you’re a video site or a publisher it could increase viewing time, revenue and overall site usage, popularity and effectiveness. If you are an advertiser it could mean more targeted viewership, better results and a nice fat bottom line. If you’re just an avid online video viewer well then it simply means that you will start seeing better recommendations, spend less time combing video sites for the videos you want and have a more enjoyable experience overall. That is of course if everything goes just how they hope it will.

From what I can tell they have a lot of money, over $4.5M was hauled in recently so they’ve got the assets to proceed. Also from what I can tell there’s only one place 5min.com that’s using the service except for Brightcove members who might be using it as well.

What I found at 5min.com was, when you click on a recommended video and you are using the ’smart player’ in full screen mode (to see the recommendations), the clicked video opens in another web page instead of in the player. Doesn’t sound very smart at all now does it? I don’t understand why the video wouldn’t simply queue up in the player instead of having to go back to the web then click smart player again to see further recommendations and full screen mode. In fact it’s far more cumbersome than a normal session at YouTube which also has a recommended video feature.

So with all innovation there comes growing pains. The recommended videos I saw at 5min.com weren’t all that different from the ones that were recommended for me at YouTube. I was looking at game videos since I’m a gamer and the video I used for testing purposes at both was Halo 3 Covenent level Thunderstorm Skull video. I am certain that other videos would give similar results. So perhaps the ViDiscovery system still needs some tweaking or for me to use it longer to it can adjust to my tastes in videos.

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Internet Video Topics: taboola, Video Advertising, contextual, video search

Usability Standards for Web Video (Where the hell are they??)

Grant Crowell — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:37:49 +0000

Most companies producing online video content aren’t giving enough consideration to the end user’s experience with the video they’re watching. Despite the huge business growth of online video, not a single major usability organization or video solutions provider has put out any publicly available ‘best practices’ information on the web video experience for the end user!

Listen to my podcast on web video usability.

PODCAST SHOW OVERVIEW

Intro - Grant’s bad user experience with a web video company

Oh, it was so traumatic! (OK, it was really one of many experiences I’ve had with video on a website not working properly on multiple levels and left me with a less-favorable impression of the site owner.)

What is ‘web video usability?’

My definition: The user’s experience with meeting their web-based objectives with video, and matching the intended goals of the video owner. In short, the quality of an online video engagement experience. We’re not just talking ‘viewing,’ which is a passive state. We’re also talking ‘engagement’ which is an active state. If you’re online watching video, you are much more likely to take some kind of action (including an immediate action) than with a television.

Why usability is important in web video

You can’t assume that your experience is everyone else’s experience. If you don’t know what’s involved with other people’s experience (What goes into that is not just hardware and software, but also human ability and subjectivity -i.e., human preference.)

If people have a bad experience, it leaves them with a bad impression, and can not only waste all your efforts up to that point, but leaves the opposite effect of what you originally intended.

Anyone who’s producing and promoting video should be thinking about how to measure the quality of an online video viewing experience. This is why we need a best practices for usability in web video. Best practices allows for us to have universal standards. When we have standards, its easier for both video owners, and video users, to follow.

The dearth of usability information for web video

Being a usability professional myself (meaning, I’ve produced usability reports and conducted user testing and focus groups for clients for many years now), I checked with a number of the most well-known usability organizations: Nielsen/Norman Group (NN/G), Human Factors International (HFI), User Interface Engineering (UIE), and even the Usability Professionals Association (UPA). I also contacted some of the panelists on the recent Search Engine Strategies Chicago conference who spoken on a usability panel.

I asked both of these groups if any of them either possessed or knew of any reports, presentations, articles, white papers, podcasts, seminars, experts, or tools on usability with web video.

My answer: ZERO. All of the companies were unable to provide me with a single resource they either had or knew of. (The UPA’s Director of Member & Vendor Relations submitted my request to their board of directors several weeks ago, and today informed me that no response has been provided by them yet.)

Pretty shocking, that neither usability firms or online marketing firms can supply any information around web video, don’t you think? There are three reasons I can think of for this: 1) Combining usability with web video is multi-faceted and can be rather intimidating, 2) It exists, but its not being shared, and 3) There’s a perception by these companies that the public really isn’t interested in hearing about it yet.

I would argue that last possibility. I do believe that web video is no different from website usability when it comes to its importance, and I do believe the business community would demand it if they were just made aware of it. So where does it start? How about with some ideas on what areas of usability really matter to web video…

Areas of web video usability

These are just a few of the areas with web video usability that should be included

Location of the video

On a website and web page.
In a stand-alone media player

Features of the video

The video player
Navigation
Accessibility
Search
Image and audio quality
Length
Content
Delivery (Including speed)
Conversions
Completion

Testing

Lab testing
User testing
Analytics

Resources which ARE available on web video usability

The Usability Kit, by the SitePoint. This is a ‘web usability toolkit’ in binder format and CD-ROM. The very last chapter of the book offers 8 page of information and tips for web video and audio content. The report is over 2 years old, and while all of the tips still apply today, much web video development has happened since. (Sitepoint says that their company has no plans to put out any new reports on web video usability.)

Eyetracking Report - Below is slide from ReelSEO Publisher’s Mark Robertson presentation given at PubCon with myself, detailing an eyetracking study that shows we naturally navigate towards where we see video and video icons on a search results page.

Shelly Palmer, MediaBytes.com. His article, “What does quality online video look like?”Offers some good suggestions for online video quality. While the suggestions are largely dedicated to broadcast-quality websites, it’s a good basis for what could be applicable to small-to-medium size businesses (SMBs) as well.

Producing Video Podcasts - A Guide for Media Professionals. This book by Focal Press, with authors Richard Harrington and Mark Weiser of RHED Pixel, is an excellent guide on video podcasting, from preproduction to delivery. However it’s not meant to serve as an analysis or testing platform for users’ experiences with video on the web. (I also encourage readers to check out their companion site, VidPodcaster.com, and their free podcast series on iTunes, Producing Video Podcasts, where some of their tips are indirectly helpful for usability.)

And lastly, my own article, ”Call for video professionals to decide online video standards.”

Calling again for web video usability standards

Right on the home page of the Usability Association Professionals’ web site is an article titled, What is the value of usability? Well, if neither usability industry themselves nor marketing professional cancome up with a body of information on usability for web video, and one that matches the explosive growth of web video, then I would argue that the value of both usability AND web video risks to be seriously diminished.

Grant Crowell is the Senior Analyst for ReelSEO.

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Internet Video Topics: usability, video marketing

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Personalized Video Discovery & Monetization - An Overview of Taboola

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Usability Standards for Web Video (Where the hell are they??)

PODCAST SHOW OVERVIEW

Intro - Grant’s bad user experience with a web video company

What is ‘web video usability?’

Why usability is important in web video

The dearth of usability information for web video

Areas of web video usability

Resources which ARE available on web video usability

Calling again for web video usability standards

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