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Mediasmith Anvil |
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Volume 8, Issue
2
June 2, 2009 |
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Video search 101: Marketing and
optimization |
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By Abraham
Snyder and David L. Smith Editor’s Note: This
article first appeared in iMediaConnection’s
Video Marketing Channel. To view the original article go to www.imediaconnection.com As the online video audience continues to grow,
it's essential to get the most from your videos. Mediasmith shows you how. Article highlights: ·
Every marketer should optimize video assets, which ensures content can
be found and watched
·
Decide what you want out of your video to
help focus your VSEO efforts ·
Investing in Video Search Engine
technology can give your videos new life In November '08 alone, more than 12.5 billion
videos were viewed, up from 11.4
billion in July '08. In November, 146
million people accounted for these views, up from 142.5
million in July '08. At these rates, 50 percent of the So how can marketers reach this growing audience
with relevancy and appropriate messages? First of all, it's important to understand that
this is a new marketplace that needs new technologies. The legacy search
technologies are based on text and HTML, and cannot readily discern what is
in a video. Two video practices that can
be used to facilitate this targeting are:
Video search engine
optimization (VSEO): The optimization of any video asset to lift organic
search listing results in order to increase views and create a "forced virality" of your content.
Video search engine marketing
(VSEM): Targeting video content, on any site with indexed video, by the
selection of paid keywords pertaining to what you are marketing, with video ads
and/or accompanying banners.
How does VSEO work, and why
is it important?
Every marketer should use VSEO
to ensure content can be found and watched.
VSEO is directly comparable to
standard site SEO. Both are done to improve the probability, page share, and
relevancy of your content. Page share is often overlooked with standard
search, but video search should be a major part of any VSEO effort. Video can
live on multiple indexed pages, where each one can appear as separate result,
increasing your results page share.
How does one practice VSEO? It’s a good
question, and once again can be compared to standard SEO, with a few major
differences. Here are the key elements VSEO, which should be
practiced with any and all videos you distribute on the web to gain
visibility and relevancy: ·
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Context: The
contents of any page surrounding a video will be indexed to help find
relevancy to some broader keywords. ·
Unique
URL: Every video should have its own URL to ensure all contextual and
metadata indexing is as relevant as possible. ·
Format:
Knowing your content and potential viewers can determine the most appropriate
format. For some viewers, HD is very important. For others, fast downloads is
the priority. ·
Seeding: The
more places a video is available for viewing, the higher your page share with
any video search engine results can be. Deciding what you want out of
your video will help focus your VSEO efforts appropriately. The two options
are promotional video, where the video is the message and is geared toward
distribution and seeding efforts, and stationary video, where the video is
used to draw traffic to a specific site, creating inventory that can be
monetized.
·
Promotional: ·
Stationary: Format, context and unique
pages are all important, as these will allow publishers to most effectively
monetize content for VSEM purposes |
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Mediasmith Morsel Please join us in celebrating
the launch of our newly re-designed website The
times they are a changin’ and we are right
there with ‘em. Please
join us in our excitement and visit our newly redesigned website www.mediasmith.com. New
features include:
We had
a lot of fun building the site and wanted to make it as user friendly and
useful as possible. Feel free to take a look around and if you would like to comment,
please send us your thoughts. We developed this site using Squarespace, an online publishing and hosting platform. We are big fans! |
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What opportunities do VSEO
efforts create? The monetization opportunities
for VSEO lie with both advertisers and publishers. For advertisers, it's the
promotional videos. For publishers, it's mostly with the stationary videos,
though the distribution of content can be monetized for publishers as well.
Advertiser monetization of VSEO practices falls
into a totally new category. Though it could rely on some paid media to help
seed and push the content, the core of this is video distribution. Systems to monetize VSEO are based on
number of videos distributed, number of sites distributed to, and how deep
each individual video should be tracked. The overall effort still starts with
VSEO because once a video is distributed, it won't be picked up without giving
it the best chance through VSEO. Publisher monetization, around stationary content
video, is best thought of as creating relevant, targeted video inventory. The
targeted inventory could then be sold in the form of pre-, mid-, post- roll
or through the banners accompanying a video. The value of this inventory is
increased when it can be targeted by keyword rather than by channel or
bucket. Publishers can take steps to either make the video sharable, and
potentially further increase value to advertisers if a pre-roll, or other
unit, is embedded with a video, or to prevent the video from being shared in
order to retain the ad inventory for your content on your page. Video distribution through companies like TubeMogul
have made the process of uploading to multiple video share/hosting sites a
one step process, after the initial accounts on each site are set up. They
also feature large amounts of tracking options that will let you follow your
videos wherever they end up. How can advertisers best use the indexed videos for
marketing campaigns?
The answer? Video search engine
marketing.
How does VSEM work?
Targeting pre-qualified users through keywords is the
basis for all search marketing. This has been accomplished through various
techniques, mainly algorithms designed to rank the relevancy and quality of
content, though other techniques do exist. The techniques for searching video
content have developed out of the traditional search models, followed some other
trends in search, and are now evolving with the development of new search
technologies.
The
first generation of video search engines (universal search) relied on the
text content surrounding videos and other traditional search techniques, like
scanning metadata. Though this method can still be found in some engines, it
is no longer in use with the major video search providers. Search engines
started to move away from this method because of the inherent risks of
relying on metadata provided by the video's publisher, a lack of relevant
contextual surroundings, and a lack in precision. At this point, all search
engines—video and standard—realize that the best results come
from the most accurate results, so how can they get better video search results? Enter
human-powered video search, another technique directly bowered from
traditional search methods. In this system, videos are watched and indexed by
a staff of people. The indexing is based on the actual content of the video
(human image recognition), and then transferred to metadata. From there it
operates like traditional search methods. This technique is still one of the
most accurate but has a limit of scale compared to some of the automated
engines. So how can we have the accuracy of human-powered search with the
scale of automated indexing? Video search engines like Blinkx, Google Video, CastTV, and VideoSurf are now all using methods that take the scalability of automated search and blend them with the accuracy of human-powered search. The models used by current providers are all very similar, with slight variations in the process. The development of tools to crawl page content, the video (automated image recognition) and/or audio has been the first step to take VSEM to a critical mass. As these systems develop and we see the accuracy continue to increase, we will see the demand for VSEM capabilities increase—not only with the video search engines but all sites, from sharing/hosting sites to news sites through white label video search providers like Pixsy. The
technologies supporting VSEM are evolving slowly, and we're sure to see
applicable developments in the near future with a reliable AI system still a
bit farther down the road. For example, current audio technology can convert
voice to captions which can be indexed, yet anyone who has used one of the
many voicemail-to-text offerings can attest to some of the interesting
interpretations these provide. On the video side, there is little clarity
other than that current AI can identify if there is a lot of moving flesh
color, which is best used for trying to avoid inappropriate content not
contextually identifying videos. These current technologies rely on the
original algorithms that came from SEO and SEM to find relevant metadata and
page content. |
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Mediasmith Morsel Growth of Online TV Viewing According
to Nielsen Online VideoCensus,
online video site Hulu.com recently surpassed Yahoo and MySpace
in number of video views, seeing a large spike in traffic after airing a Super
bowl ad. Although YouTube still dwarfs Hulu in traffic, Hulu’s
long-form, professionally produced content signals a
change in viewer’s habits as consumers become more comfortable watching
popular TV shows and even movies online. Early
adopters have been pushing for IPTV for some time. While those in media have
monitored the slow adoption of the set-top box and ho-hum response to Apple
TV, a few trends indicate the pace could be picking up:
For
consumers, this means more and more options. For content producers and
distributors, this will continue to present a challenge for tracking
viewership and audience numbers in an increasingly fragmented market. Source: Ad Age, “Hulu Now No. 2 Online-Video Site, Behind YouTube,”
3/12/09 |
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Is there any VSEM inventory to buy? How and what
exactly do we buy?
Currently, the VSEM market is
in its infancy with most vendors and publishers still getting their general video
serving systems updated to handle the growing demand. Video search engines
and some video sharing/hosting sites are currently the major sources to find
VSEM inventory. Outside of YouTube,
there are few sites, even among the sharing/hosting sites currently offering
true VSEM to its advertisers. The two means of purchasing VSEM on video sites
are through targeted keywords and vertical keyword buckets. The main
difference is that the vertical keyword buckets are usually predetermined and
are more of a best-fit model, where targeted keywords are a specific list
created by the advertiser.
In both current VSEM models, there are challenges
one faces when putting together a campaign. These include a lack of readily
available inventory (depending on your product and keywords), large minimum
buys where inventory is available and a lack of understanding from the media
community. The lack of inventory tends to affect the B2B
audience far more than consumer, because of the type of content desired to be
associated with. Some of the major business publishers like Forbes and Fortune
are taking large steps to create video libraries around a wide variety of
topics. Along with smaller business publishers, such as Small Business TV, an online library of
useful business information on every topic a business owner or decision maker
may need is being created. It is these efforts, along with the eventual white
labeling of video search platforms for destination and news sites that will
help open up VSEM to every marketing segment. When faced with new media most advertisers will
test before investing. The minimum buys seen with some VSEM offerings make
this difficult. Without proving the effectiveness, it is hard for most
advertisers to spend so freely, especially considering the current economic
turn. Finally, the media planners of the world are
still learning what this all means and how it would fit into their media mix.
As case studies develop and the use of VSEM as a practice develops, this will
become less of a barrier. Now,
quickly, if you're a vendor or publisher, you may ask, "Why should we
invest in VSEO/VSEM?"
The
answer is simple.
Sites
sell remnant inventory through video ad networks at greatly discounted rates.
Investing in Video Search Engine technology can give your videos new life.
For instance, a tech advertiser may have a product that answers a specific
concern in the business space. If they are able to target all the video
content specifically covering the issue—no matter what channel of a
site it originally lived in—it becomes valuable to that advertiser.
This will likely necessitate innovative pricing structures, like CPC for
accompanying banners because the inventory will literally be created.
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Mediasmith Morsel Content Sharing and the Rise of the Social Space Although
Forrester Research found
through a recent study that 75% of marketers have budgeted less than $100,000
for social media efforts over the next year, 53% of those marketers plan to
increase spending on social media.
For most marketers, this space is relatively new, but Forrester analyst
Jeremiah Owyang says, “Marketers are trying
to pull budgets out of other areas.” Nielsen Online,
found that member communities have increased their effective reach by 5.4%,
being the clear growth winner in the digital advertising space in terms of
reach.
Nielsen
Online also shows that a majority of this growth is coming from the 18-34 and
35-49 age demographics. If the
average month-over-month audience changes over the last six
months continues, by mid-June 2009 there would be as many 35-49 year
olds on Facebook
as 18-34 year olds. The
growth coming from the social space is impacting traditional trends that
media professionals have been tracking for some time. Although advertisers
spend billions in search marketing to drive traffic to certain sites, a
recent article from Ad Age states that Facebook is
sending more traffic to certain sites than Google. This article reports that Facebook is affective in driving users to content rich
sites like Twitter, for example. These
current statistics are pointing to the growing power of content sharing.
Ultimately, advertisers will push budget to where the “eyeballs”
are going, but all will stay tuned to see social media and universal search
battle it out in the content sharing space. Source: Ad Age,
“Facebook Sending More Traffic Than Google to
Some Sites,” 3/9/09 |
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What will we learn from using
these practices?
VSEO and VSEM will both
provide a vast amount of information to optimize and learn from. The media
purchased through VSEM offers traditional types of metrics like clicks,
click-through rate, cost-per-click, and any post-click tracking desired. VSEO
enables us to see many new and interesting data points. The two main areas
where statistics will come from are through distribution of the video(s) and
the actual viewing of the videos.
Videos that have proper
tagging and are distributed through servers designed for videos will allow
full tracking of all videos. These numbers include number of views and
completion rates (25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent...) and how many times
the video was shared and to where (e.g., Facebook,
through e-mail). This data will show the path of the video as it distributes
across the web, and how the viewing varies between points. Does the sharing
end at one site, but have the most completed views there? Or vice versa? What
does this say about the content in the video, how does it change your
approach to future videos?
What's next? There are continual developments in the video
space. What the next iteration of Video Search engines or the next VSEO
technique will bring about has no where to go but up. The technologies are
still in their infancy. White-labeled audio recognition technology and
questionable video recognition mean that companies are still heavily relying
on meta data and page context for keyword targeting. Will this be perfected
in the next year? Unlikely, but as techniques develop, the marketplace will
be there growing with it. As the online space continues to develop and
connections become faster and faster, content will continue to shift into
video, creating an expansive and ever growing platform to be a part of. As
publishers and marketers grow, these vast libraries of video content and the
content spreads to more locations. VSEO and VSEM practices will monetize this
medium as much, if not more, than traditional search. A version of this article originally appeared in iMediaconnection. |
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