See you there!

The new blog will circuit around the business of VideoPlaza, the startup that I’m running with Fabian Bonnier and Dante Buhay. Since the business of VideoPlaza will be local, at least during the first 18 months, I’ll continue blog in Swedish. Sorry about that if you’re not speaking Swedish (sorry Sriram).

Anyway,  I don’t want to give away all of the details right now, so stay tuned for the release soon!

Here are some examples of their excellence:

• They have video as a complement to their text articles (example)
• They link to outside sites from their articles (example)
• Their videos are NOT played inside a separate video player (see video site)
  
• Their player is social: statistics, comments, ratings.
• They tag their videos
• They allow and encourage embedding (I can’t get it to work here for some reason!)
• They have different sharing functions: Share to e-mail, to mobile (only text), to Facebook and  a permalink (my favorite)
• They present related videos
• They have a page for most viewed, best rated, most commented etc. (Don’t go there, you’ll end watching a whole lot of videos!)
• They have adapted the advertising format. A short preroll and a long postroll (it doesn’t show up too often though)

Well,  just go there and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. And for all the competitors, look and learn!

If you know any other sites from main stream media doing it this right, please leave a comment.

- Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad, Nielsen writes.

Below are some heat maps from the eye-tracking study.

Nielsen mentions that they haven’t researched these effects with embedded ads in online video and that it is possible that those ads will be looked at more often. I defenetly think that ads in online video will show much better results in a test like this. I also see this weakness of traditional banner advertising as a great opportunity for online video.

Sportal.se is the third site in Sweden to use the MMS online video measuring standards! The site came up on the list just this week but can’t show proper statistics yet. This is a big surprise to me since the incentives to follow the standard has been low, specially for smaller sites. I thought for a long time that no one would dare to go public with their numbers because of the dominance of Aftonbladet and SVT.

I don’t know how effective this move will be for the video advertising offer of Sportal, but it will defenetly work as an invitation for other smaller sites to join the standard. I’ve also heard about a bigger site that soon will join the standard. So, maybe we’ll have an equivalent list to the KIA-index, but for online video sooner than expected.

Background

In april 2007, Media Measurements in Scandinavia (MMS), Ecentric/Resoner, SVT and Aftonbladet developed a new standard for measuring online video traffic. Until now, there has only been two sites on the list, SVT and Aftonbladet. Read more here.

I found the Live Earth place and found a bunch of artists and performances that I’d like to see. Every second clip I watched, a 29 seconds long preroll advertising from Philips was displayed for me. Yes, 29 seconds and the same ad!

Now I have strong negative feelings (aka hate) about both MSN and Philips. I just hope they both supported the event with a large resources.

Ignoring the fact that the site looks and works like a web portal from ’99, I started to look around for something interesting. And there it was: Re-experience the entire Live Earth again! They have some good content at least, I thought to myself. I got into the site and started to look around. I thought I’d look at Madonna’s performance and see if she still got it.

I was so dissapointed. I came to this page and once again started to think of how Microsoft can be sooo wrong and get away with it. The page I came to said:

“In order to use this site, you need to install free software”

Then it said that I needed Internet Explorer 6 (IE), Windows Media 10 and Flash 6. It also said that the next step for me was to install IE 6 with a link to it. And the most funny part is the link saying “update this page as soon as you have installed the software [IE 6]“.

So I understood that I was using the wrong browser: FireFox (FF). How can the biggest site of Sweden ignore the second most popular browser with 10-30% of the market? And why are they trying to make my download IE 6 when I already have IE 7 installed? And if I would download and install IE 6, why should I update that page I was on in FF?

I don’t understand, I really don’t and I still don’t know if Madonna still got it or not.

(Try MSN Video and see if it works for you. Drop a comment if you feel like it.)

The ads are now presented on YouTubes 2000-3000 professional content partners 70 members of YouTubes member partner programme. That means that the large amount of user created and distributed content still will be presented without ads.

The cost of placing ads will be $20 CPM regardless of content or performance.

It seems as if the ads are only showing up in the US, because I don’t get them.

NewTeevee gives us some examples here, here, here, and here.

Read more at Lost Remote and NewTeevee.

Searching on Google Video, you can now get search results from other sites such as YouTube, MetaCafé, Veoh and Atomicfilms.com. The cool part is that even our local Swedish site Bubblare is indexed on the site and searching for “trapped in the drive-throu” will for example get you here with one clip from YouTube and one from Bubblare.

You can also search the Bubblare site by typing “site:bubblare.se” and then whatever term you like. It’s a nice way to navigate between different sites when looking for something. The search results include video length, rating, number of ratings, perma link and a thumbnail. Clicking on one video will make the hosting site load under in a frame, just as the image search does. But this time, the top frame will show related videos in a nice way.

At this point, this so called universal video search is not so universal and covers mostly YouTube and Google Video content. As an example it has only indexed 798 clips from Blip.tv and 278 from DailyMotion.

So, hit it off to Google Video and start searching. Don’t forget to search for “trapped in the drive-throu” if you like R-Kelly’s story telling technique.

1. Content where the content is the message. This is primarily marketing content and user created content.
2. Content that’s produced primarily for another platform, normally TV, recorded and uploaded by users. This content carries no specific message with it. It’s purpose on the original platform is to engage and gather viewers in order to show advertising and get paid for it.

The free video sites today are perfectly made for the first group. They can spread their message easy, fast and for free! If they can make it a bit viral, the content can even spread it self.

Professional content creators on the other hand can’t benefit this system while their main purpose is not to expose their own content but the advertisers. Therefor they have few incentives to upload and spread their content. Of course, they do attract attention to their original platform and thus get the function of marketing. But why should this great sites only be used for marketing other real platforms?

I think it’s time for professional content creators/owners to apply the same ad system that’s used on other media also on the free video sites as YouTube. While their viewers watch their content, ads should be shown to them financing the production costs. I think it’s strange that we’re not seeing anyone doing this yet on a large scale, but I’m sure we’ll do that pretty soon. The free video sites are made for marketing, not for advertising in this way, but that isn’t a problem with in-video ads (overlays, pre- and post rolls). So, don’t wait for the sites to change, sell your own ad spots. It’s possible today!

(Some vlogs and podcasts (Chris Pirillo, CalanisCast) have done this already and I really find it non-obtrusive. And of course, its all about how you present the ads, but that’s a discussion for another blog post. )