Clickz broke a great story about changes to youtube. Basically, youtube seems to be throwing in the towel on monetizing their brand of UGC. They’re creating a tabbed ‘ghetto’ for not only amateur videos like “Charlie Bit My Finger“, but also for semi-pro content as well (sorry semi-pro, you’re more semi than pro).
Between closing down the Google Adsense/Youtube units and now creating a monetizable player specifically for professional content, I think Youtube is taking a business plan stand. Their UGC, with billions of eyeballs, is pretty much unmonetizable. UGC (and copywrite infringements…and porn…), with its $470 million of loss for hosting and serving, may be the french fries that bring the search audience to youtube. But it’s the professional content where youtube is now betting to make its money.
Some changes I would expect? Search results will begin to favor professional content in the results. UGC, which is next to impossible to search productively anyway, will become subordinated to the professional results. If you search for “how to bake a cake” chances are you wouldn’t mind finding a Food TV segment, or Martha Stewart or anyone you know. Of course, you actually get “lfritz73″. And as charming as she is, I have no idea if she makes a good cake. Segregating the two will allow you to find all the copywrited clips you want…all legally if Youtube can get their syndication deals done with the majors.
Copywrite infringing materials will get taken down faster, or through a better process. With revenue at stake now, both youtube and copywrite holders (NBC, ESPN) will want to have their results found on the monetizable, “good” player, not the UGC ghetto tab. Previously, there was no economic incentive to takedown infringing content (and actually incentive to leave it up for the audience those clips attracted). Which leads to….
Professional publishers will be more liberal with what they put up online. If youtube is monetizing the content, and they are counting the eyeballs, and there’s a pretty player….well, voila, that’s kind of TV.
More and more eyeballs to broadband…less and less to the TV box. Watch out Comcast. The repeats and archives are now moving online. You know what’s next.
Most of you won’t be affected by this, since it seems very few people were using it. Google Adsense discontinued offering Youtube Video Units as part of their never-ending-search for youtube’s revenue model. As part of the program, Adsense users were able to find a youtube video, attach it to their Google Adsense account, and embed the ad-enabled video into their site. Then, they could sit back and let the Adsense for Video overlay money roll in while they slept. From an email they sent to Adsense account holders last week:
“After reviewing our AdSense video units feature, which allows you to show YouTube content and ads on your pages, we’ve found that it hasn’t had the impact we had hoped for. As a result, we’ve decided to retire this feature at the end of April so we can focus our resources on other opportunities to help publishers earn from their sites. “
What were the problems? We don’t really know, but let’s assume that Adsense publishers really did embed adsense-enabled youtube videos into their destinations. Here are some guesses as to why Youtube still might not have found success:
1) The ads were unable to correctly discern the context of the video in order to match relevant advertisers. Adsense works because of its unparalleled ability to contextually match an advertiser to related text content. Adsense for Video, however, is dependent on Google’s ability to read the tags and metadata attached to the video. The metadata for Youtube videos are created by the uploaders, which include things like “27309 1/9“. In that specific case, the video has no other metadata other than being in the “People and Blogs” category. Hard to create advertising relevancy with that level of information — even for Google. Therefore, not only could the viewer be negatively affected by irrelevant ads, but that leads to poor performance for the ad units.
2) The videos that people wanted to post don’t lend themselves to advertising. Many viral videos, as we know, are extreme, funny, or extremely funny. Most don’t lead the viewer to think, “Hmm…I would like to know more about a cheap plane ticket to Florida right now.” Even if Google was able to discern the context of the video through proper user-selected titling, tags and metadata, finding a relevant ad on the skateboarding cat is hard to do.
3) The age old problem: Branded advertisers want to know where their ad is showing up — not just on which embedded video, but on which embedding site. Advertisers on youtube video overlays often turn a blind eye to whether the video itself is appropriate content for their brand. If you pay by the click, sometimes you just care about the people who clicked, not the people who didn’t. However, in this program, the advertiser must also extend their ‘blind eye’ to include whether the embedding site is appropriate. If Youtube tries to sell CPM video deals with branded advertisers as opposed to applying only CPC affiliates, then the importance of knowing where the video is being played rises. Branded sponsors have too much at risk to tie themselves to unknown destinations, once they get over being tied to unknown video content.
We like the Google Adsense for Video service that places relevant Adsense overlays on video. For informational video content attached to rich metadata, there is no reason that GAFV shouldn’t be as successful for Google Adsense in generating revenue for video publishers. At Expo, we experience very rich RPM from GAFV and high CTR due to the relevance of the ads to our video content. A Krups coffeemaker video review will display a “Krups at Macys” overlay every time. We wouldn’t be able to do that without Google Adsense, but the bar for user gen video is as high as any other content to properly leverage Adsense’s strengths…metadata, quality and relevance of the content still matter.
UPDATE: If you’re confused about all these monetization attempts on the part of Youtube, here is a clarifying page Adsense put up to help discern them all
If you upload a video on amazon, there’s an insteresting app that will let you make referral money off it. Gets into a murky area if the video you’re uploading is a product review or claims to be unbiased, but it’s a cool tool regardless.
A friend of mine uploaded a product review to Amazon under my associates account, and I added a bunch of products to it. Some were irrelevant, but fun to add. Very simple. I like it. Lots of possibilities if Amazon can hone in on what video they’re looking for people to upload, and what behavior they want to reward.
Julie Ruvolo, who pops up everywhere on the digital scene all at the same time, has joined a startup that went alpha this month. www.solvate.com
The concept revolves around creating an uber-database covering answers to common customer service issues that people individually need to solve hundreds of times each day. Solvate allows frustrated customers to not have to re-invent the wheel each time one of us has a problem someone else had before. For example, something like “How can I return my cable box back to Time Warner so I can cancel my cable subscription” probably takes us 45 minutes working through TWC’s byzantine call centers before we find out our options. And even then, we probably only find the option that one customer service rep knows, which I bet would be a different option if we were connected to another rep on another day. Meanwhile, I know hundreds of other people had to have gone through this…why don’t I know what they know?
Solvate plans to standardize the ‘answers’ to these questions, so that Solvate agents (and I assume the online public) can provide fast solutions to the second client who asks the same question.
Solvate charges by the man-hour to find the solution, and is currently offering your first hour of agent time for free. So, I tried it out by asking about the best online site to find a deal for a Disney Cruise. I know that Disney itself doesn’t offer many deals directly to cruisers, but they do offer them to agents (who then can pass on the deals to cruisers). Solvate did work, I did get a list of places from “Ryan C”, my Solvate agent, that offered consistent specials and weren’t shaky fly-by-night travel sites. I’m not sure if it saved me time, since it was just an online search. But, I would guess that if my problem involved customer service reps, and phone calls, and escalations, and specific departments, Solvate would save me time and aggravation. And if I was the lucky second person that asked a question, I am sure that the pain of the first person would benefit me. I think the trick for Solvate is to hone in on the problems people would be willing to pay Solvate to solve. ate.
Good luck, Julie and Solvate. I’ll call you back when I need to cancel my cable subscription so I can get FiOS.
Noticed in facebook, lots of people have ‘registered’ themselves on wefollow. they’re trying to start a tag-based directory.
My tweets, trying to stay industry or expo-relevant are tagged under #consumer #socialmedia #video: http://twitter.com/daphnekwon
Also, to cut the clutter of ridiculous spam Tweets, here is ExecTweets, created by Federated Media, powered by Microsoft http://www.exectweets.com/about/
Note, I’m not followed by exectweets, so you know it must be good.
iMedia’s Sean Egen followed up on a WSJ story about the New Info Shopper. I thought I’d follow up his question: “You might be a New Info Shopper if….”
…you wished the display computers at the Best Buy store were connected so you could surf the web before you bought
…you look at a magazine ad and wish you could click on the URL at the bottom
…you actually thought the Facebook Beacon about what your friends bought was interesting, not the ultimate symbol of privacy being invaded
…you’d buy your second choice item on Amazon because it had customer reviews, rather than your first choice that no one reviewed
There are probably many tools out there, but if @mattcutts is using bit.ly, then it’s probably on the better side. When you’re signed in, you get your shortened url (e.g., http://bit.ly/10UdcG). I can now track when someone clicks on that short URL. I can see weird stuff like from what country, but I can also see useful stats like what site you clicked from (twitter, blogger, facebook). I can also see if someone else copied the URL into their own Tweet as well. Movie trailers seem to get picked up pretty well by others!
if you see a lot of crazy unrelated things and ads on my site, i’m testing pluck on demand. more later.
Update: So far the note to myself is that I think Pluck thinks i’m an ultra-conservative right-winger because I wrote about Sarah Palin months ago. Doesn’t seem to be able to discern the substance of my post. I’m sure this post today is also going to contribute to Pluck’s perception of me! I have to stop saying Sarah Palin. Whoops.
Update: Pluck is getting better because my posts are more directed. I like the articles it is surfacing, even clicked on one.
I recently spent time with 8 women who were old enough to remember Nadia Comaneci’s perfect 10. All were professionals, from Google to Goldman Sachs. Amazingly, only one woman other than myself was on Facebook. No surprise, she was also the CEO of an internet company.
Some were on Linkedin, but seemed to dismiss it as a job tool, not a social network. Regarding FB, privacy seemed to be the loudest concern. “But can’t everyone see it?” was the main objection. The next objection was “Who would want to see it?”. They derided needing to know if their co-worker was now a fan of Michael Phelps, or poking their old college boyfriend.
My description of “completely remapping the social neural network in my brain” didn’t seem to move them much. Transforming my social connections into a movement that I can observe instead of single points that I have to directly contact didn’t resonate. Weakening the isolation that accompanies privacy in favor of participating in a self-selected, partially unintentional social dialogue was baffling.
That said, my group is a strong, fearless bunch of girls, always up for new things (as long as someone else is doing it, too). I’ve set up a ‘secret’ and more public group for them to join, and am sitting back as a few are entering. I’ve been peppering them with advice, which I thought I would list here for those of you who need some courage.
Rules for being 40 on Facebook. 1) Get a picture up. Immediately. Pictures are part of the way the web is becoming personal, less anonymous. Having one up shows that you’re willing to show the person behind the action.
2) Don’t stress over your profile. Profiles are boring and people only look at it once, anyway. Put a few fun things so you don’t seem uptight, but don’t go crazy filling everything out. If you’re over 30, take off your birthyear.
3) Join your school and work networks. Joining networks helps people find you to friend you. The location network you joined when you signed up is lame…it basically lets FB geotarget ads to you, but is too large to be of any use. Go to “settings” in the upper right corner > account settings> networks. Search for your undergrad/grad schools, and the company you work for.
4) Become a fan. Type in a person, politician, cause, even a product or restaurant name in the search box, and then select “Pages” in the tabs. This gives you the ‘official’ brand pages of which you can “Become a Fan”. These show up on your profile. Check out the page first, make sure it seems legit. Michael Phelps has 995,000 fans, and In-n-Out burger has 28,000.
5) Join some groups. Anyone on FB can start a group. I started a group for people who used to work at Oxygen Media back in the day (pre-NBC). To find a group to join, type an interest into the search box, then select “groups” in the tabs. Joining a group shows up on your profile, and is a way to make a statement, without really making a statement. Two that I want to join but don’t have the guts are: “I went to public school….bitch!” and “Zero Population Growth”.
6) Friend Farm. Look at me, I’ve coined a phrase. Everytime you make a friend, go to their friend list and see if there’s anyone you want to friend off it. No one will know you found them by poaching off your friends’ list.
7) Lastly, after you’ve done everything, go prune your personal newsfeed. Almost everything you do in FB is broadcast in your newsfeed, which will show up on all your friends’ newsfeeds. Because FB is a robot, it often sounds like English is its second language, and something like “Daphne Kwon is no longer single” is just embarrassing. Hit your name in the top menu bar. Mouse over any news item you don’t want broadcast, and you’ll see a little “edit” button on the right pop up. Click it and select “delete”.
After a while, when you have time, check out all the fine-tuning under “Settings” in the upper right under account settings and privacy settings. Don’t over do it on the restrictions…. You didn’t go join FB to be private! Take a little risk for a while, let yourself ‘out there’ and see what happens. Who knows. Maybe some day you’ll ask me about Twitter.
We partnered with shop.org in helping consumers tell the real story about how the economy is affecting them. These were all shot by our community themselves, in their homes and in their words, and sent to us after we posted the question.
Beware you might find this depressing…our editors asked next time if we can ask a more cheery question like “How did it feel when you found out the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real?” But look closely and you can also spot the resilient, optimistic nature of the American consumer. We’ll be back.
Co-founder and CEO of Expo, video commerce solution based in New York City. Former CFO of Oxygen Media and member of founding team. Entrepreneur, wife, mom.
Most of you won’t be affected by this, since it seems very few people were using it. Google Adsense discontinued offering Youtube Video Units as part of their never-ending-search for youtube’s revenue model. As part of the program, Adsense users were able to find a youtube video, attach it to their Google Adsense account, and embed the ad-enabled video into their site. Then, they could sit back and let the Adsense for Video overlay money roll in while they slept. From an email they sent to Adsense account holders last week:
