jun 18
I just received IPG’s emerging media lab’s newest newsletter - here are some of the articles I found interesting:
Choose your own ad:
Joining Hulu and other content providers who have decided to let users choose their own ads, YouTube has begun a small ad test. Users will now be offered a choice between watching a “promoted video” before watching the video they want to see or watching “a few” (up to four) in-stream ads placed in commercial breaks throughout that video. This not only gives users a say in the ad process, but the behavioral data alone will lead to more accurate targeting efforts when it comes to serving up the right content to the right user profile…a semantic Web approach to advertising. Smart!.
Online video streaming on game consoles:
Video game consoles are increasingly being used to stream online video. According to a recent In-Stat survey, 29 percent of console owners 25 to 34 years old stream Internet video to their consoles. As a general behavior, 40 percent of young adult US households streamed Internet content to their TVs once a month. Considering the recent announcements at E3 by Microsoft, this number may grow at an even quicker rate than expected.
Facebook name:
Did you get your Facebook name? For the few who may have missed the Facebook username rush, usernames are an attempt to make Facebook profiles and pages easily shareable. Facebook custom URLs are certain to rank high in the search engines, so individuals and brands should claim their username NOW. Only brands with 1,000 fans can claim a URL, forcing companies to market their pages to reach that number. Brands can prevent their trademarks from being registered as usernames, by using this form.
Source: www.ipglab.com
maj 15
Cool stuff, similar to the Nintendo Wii execution done in YouTube a while back, this one is from China Mobile: http://minisite.youku.com/chinamobileg3/
apr 20
Found these 2 articles about a new ad-funded video service on YouTube and a Partnership between Myspace and Visible Measures:
The joint venture made by YouTube and Universal will be called Vevo, and hopes to mirror rival Hulu.com’s success in bringing in ad revenue from streaming videos and television content, with music. It will be a “premium online music video hub” with the hope that it will appeal to younger audiences, which will attract advertisers to use the portal to target them. Vevo will undoubtedly become essential for advertisers to reach this particular demographic, which are currently difficult to reach. Read the whole article at Brandrepublic
Myspace has signed up to Visible Measures so that their videos and user interaction with the videos can be tracked. Following suite with other video sites, MySpace is now increasing the amount of professionally-produced premium videos as they are more attractive to advertisers, and UGC videos are more for the users themselves. Visible Measures will allow Myspace to track user engagement with their videos, and give video partners a dashboard so that they can track their own videos. The kind of data they will get will be how much of a video someone watched, how many times a video was viewed, etc. The average viewing time across MySpace so far is 10 minutes, twice that of other video sites. Video is becoming a much more popular form of advertising, and to be able to find out exactly how media is being consumed and what is working with their video content will be invaluable for advertisers. Read more
here…
feb 24
While it hasn’t been officially announced, YouTube is rumored to start offering full length feature films at the beginning of 2009. Parent company Google has allegedly struck a deal with at least one major movie studio for ad-supported movies to run on the video site. The films are unlikely to be premium studio offerings, but if this happens, it could be a successful means of monetization for YouTube, as the user-generated content that dominates the site has proven difficult to sell ads against.
Something that YouTube already have created is its first branded live event – YouTube Live. This past November they held a two-hour concert featuring performers who “got their start” on YouTube, as well as artists whose careers were boosted by the video site. The concert, which included Katy Perry, Soulja Boy, A kon, and will.i.am, took place at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco and was streamed live on the video site. A second concert also took place in Tokyo, featuring artists popular in the Japanese market, and was streamed through the YouTube Live Tokyo site. Tickets to both shows sold out. (http://www.youtube.com/user/Live)
While YouTube is certainly popular among web visitors, it has had some difficulty finding a profitable business model. Ultimately, branded events such as this could bring some much needed revenue to the company.
