Tag Archives: Youtube

President Obama on Youtube answering questions

Posted on by
Reply

The US Presidential elections are much more about marketing more governance, and it’s been interesting as an internet marketeer to watch the brilliancy of the Obama campaign with respect to online media and especially social media.

For example, right about NOW he’s on YouTube answering questions from voters: http://www.youtube.com/whitehouse?feature=inp-gh-SOU

Republican Mitt Romney’s pathetic twitter following is probably an indication of who will win in the coming online media battle for the White House.   Clue – it’s not Mitt Romney.

YouTube + You = cash? Not much!

Posted on by
1

YouTube’s starting to experiment with revenue sharing for video producers, though it is not clear yet how the details of the program will shake out.   Marshall at ReadWriteWeb   suggests this action might “put to rest” the notion that YouTube cannot monetize content, but I think it will actually show how difficult it is to monetize even popular content.     Unlike targeted pay per click advertising it’s hard to “hit” a customer with a relevant ad when they are simply surfing aimlessly for clips or watching a funny clip.    True, you get some vague targeting information such as a possible few interest areas, but this is nothing like running a per click ad during a search for “Buy a sony digital camera”.   The latter is a golden opportunity to strike at the point of purchasing decision, and it’s why PPC, especially at the brilliantly matched Google PPC adwords environment, works so very well.

About a month back, when YouTube started allowing you to embed videos in a web page and use adsense to monetize them I tried a small experiment setting up a new website called “Funniest Online Videos“, fovideos.com.     There are adsense ads embedded around the funny clips that Google pulls from their YouTube comedy section.    

After sending a few thousand people to the site using some untargeted advertising I think I made something like 35 cents from a handful of clicks.     Sure, I could work hard and target better and get some organic (free) traffic to that site, but as they are starting to find in many other venues video clip advertising does not pay well at all.    I’m very skeptical of this model for ads, and given the deluge of clips I think advertisers will soon see this type of advertising as a waste of money, even at the low end of the scale.

Brightcove darkens. More companies to follow.

Posted on by
Reply

Update:   Here’s the word from Brightcove 

Brightcove, a formerly “promising” video distribution startup has given up it’s lackluster battle to compete with YouTube in consumer video, though *it will remain open as a distribution point for high quality video.    (High quality video?  Isn’t that an oxymoron in modern media parlance?).

ReadWriteWeb has an unsatisfactory summary of this event, failing to note that the key challenge for anything related to online video is this:   Video-related advertising doesn’t work.    More importantly it’s not clear it will *ever* work.   I’ve always been skeptical of how video would monetize, and still think YouTube may never justify it’s capitalization except as one more brick in Google’s massive wall of online dominance.

In fact it’s time to consider this interesting possibility – pay per click advertising may be a “one hit wonder”.     I’m not prepared to make this case yet but it’s not really clear that online advertising techniques outside of PPC are working well for advertisers, and even PPC is showing signs of reaching some cost limits in term of advertiser ROI.     Success for advertising agencies (Google is number one, with half the online ad take)  should not be confused with success of the advertising itself.    Clearly PPC is working for many, but part of what is happening is that offline advertising is finally recognized for what it is, which is an “emperor without any clothes”.      I’d argue that as a general rule (ie more than 50% of the time) offline advertising campaigns have negative ROI.    Watching in the Travel industry how negative ROI is spun by ad salesfolks as positive ROI and how failure is analyzed as “success” has been a real eye opener, and I think these mathematical misperceptions are pervasive in the industry. 

Another powerful force is the impact of “free” social network marketing.  Word of mouth has always trumped paid advertising, and social networking is ushering in a new era where consumers not only control what they buy, they are working to control the ads they are exposed to and are talking a lot about products independently and without advertising intervention.    Facebook’s recent “beacon” fiasco tried to spin this backwards and has had very questionable results.

Pay per click has brought much better ROI measurement to mom and pops as well as large companies whose agencies are having increasing difficulty spinning failed “branding” campaigns as a big success.  

Brightcove is not an exception: look for more failures in the video space and elsewhere as the 2.0 bubble slowly deflates into a balance with rational business practices.

User content myth?

Posted on by
3

Chuqui 3.0 has a nice piece challenging the hype over “user generated content”.   He suggests that it’s inappropriate to call simple profile pages at Facebook or Myspace “user content”, and that only about 1% of users are generating most of the content in social network sites.    

I’m torn between wanting to agree that things are overblown about this and my basic assumption – social content of both high quality (serious bloggers) and low quality (myspace TV show notes from a 12 year old)  is driving the new web and will continue to do so for some time.     Tons of content is pouring in and even by a high measure of “quality” people already have more than they could read in a lifetime.    It’s hard to make a case that the popular YouTube videos are quality, yet they are generally viewed far more than most quality web pages talking about relevant news or science or yada yada.

So, is the importance of user content of mythological proportions?  

No, but thanks for a thoughful post Chuqui!  

Microsoft loves Facebook

Posted on by
5

Microsoft bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook today for $240,000,000.   Reported at NYT here.  This give a market value to Facebook of right about 15,000,000,000.   

WoW

I do think Microsoft is smart (and Facebook stupid) to make the cash outlay much smaller than most had thought, giving them an alliance and a powerful foothold without spending the “billions” that apparently would have been required to buy a big stake in the internet’s latest wonder site.

With *revenues* of about 150 million Facebook is now valued at …. wait for this ….. one hundred times revenues.    This is simply a spectacular and speculative valuation, even by internet standards where  even a Google is only valued at about fifty times earnings.   Note that if Google was valued at 100x their expected revenues over the next year their capitalization would be something in the neighborhood of 1.5 trillion dollars.    

Many will suggest that the value in keeping Facebook away from Google was so great that MS has won big, but I’d predict not much will come of this alliance.     Like many online regulars I’m already tiring of Facebook and looking for a completely open, portable social application.   To justify today’s value Facebook will need to grow pretty much like nobody’s ever grown before.    Sure, it’s possible, but I think this will go down with Google’s YouTube aquisition as good money after bad, because monetizing Facebook traffic will be far more problematic than Microsoft seems to think.

All that said, congratulations to the Facebook team who must be popping a few corks about now…. no champagne is good enough for this news.

Social media frenzy may kill high quality content. Somebody fix this!

Posted on by
8

The news last month that Microsoft may wind up offering Facebook $500,000,000 for a 5% stake is great news … for the tiny number of Facebook insiders who stand to gain from this move which would effectively value the social media giant at about $10,000,000,000.    For the millions of Facebook folks like me who provide the content and faces that drive Facebook it means … um … more advertising.   

Gee, thanks Facebook.   

When people wake up they may start to realize that we’ve got a potential crisis as small numbers of “info intermediators” like Google and Facebook scoop up the lion’s share of the online ocean of cash while the “info creators” are distinctly second class citizens in the big show.   Small time web publishers and mom and pops are in this group.  So are major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post and most other print outlets who tend to make relatively little online despite offering much of the web’s best content to date, especially now that the foolish paywalls of some newspaper outlets like NYT are coming down.   Having no paywall will allow them to make more, but it’s not clear to me they’ll make enough to keep all that high quality content coming.  

Print and newspapers are  hurting and that is going to continue.   That’s OK as long as websites and blogs continue to provide great insight and breaking news, but it’s about time the big players in the online world start working *a lot harder* to feed the hands that are feeding them.  It’s about time they realize that the best web ecosystem encourages high quality content and not just socializing for the sake of hanging online with friends.

Yes, it is true that revenue sharing programs like Google adsense give publishers a nice share of revenues that come directly from activity at their websites.  However lost in this debate is the fact that *most* of Google’s money  (and virtually all of Myspaces), goes into the pocket of Google and Fox (owners of Myspace).   This is because most of the cash comes from searches done at Google.com rather than publishing affiliate sites, and Google keeps all that despite the fact it’s generated *indirectly* from the ocean of content Google has categorized.  Sure Google should make *a lot* from categorizing *your content* so effectively, but should they make 100%?   You can argue this arrangement is fine if the big players turn around and do things with that money that make the internet ecosystem thrive and grow in ways it could not without their involvement.  I think that argument was far more valid a few years ago than it is now.  Literally thousands of  startups are dying off as the Youtubes and Facebooks – built squarely on the shoulders of other people’s content  – scoop up the super gigantic big money.    It is not a problem that startups die – in fact it’s a good part of the ruthless evolution of things – but it’s problematic when the lion’s share of online resources from the work of so many are redistributed to so few.    Not because this is “unfair”,  but because this type of  inequity does not lead to optimal system efficiency and growth.

Social media in all its various and sundry forms is a wonderful development.  Finally we see clearly that people, not computers, will be at the heart of future online developments – probably for some time into the future.    Facebook users are now leading the innovation in this area, though Alice at NYT thinks this could lead to unintended consequences.

To protect this new socially charged online environment from the ravages of our silly, stupid and prurient human interests we’ll need better incentives than the big players currently offer to quality content producers.   Those incentives will ultimately shape the quality of online content for years to come.