Forget YouTube, Ellen DeGeneres now has Her own digital video network, ellentube

This interview with me was originally published by Adam Flomenbaum in Lost Remote.

ellentube-og-1200x630Ellen DeGeneres on her show last week announced the launch of ellentube, her new digital video network (and app) that will host videos that are “fun” and not “mean spirited.” The site will allow users to send videos directly to Ellen – which will be reviewed by Ellen’s team – and ellentube will also host favorite videos, show clips, and exclusive content produced by the woman behind the selfie seen ‘round the world.

ellentube is powered by Kaltura’s open source online video platform, Kaltura, a New-York based company founded in 2006, has secured $100 million in financing and currently has over 300,000 publishers using its platform. ellentube is based on Kaltura’s MediaSpace social video portal, which can be deployed as an out-of-the-box application, with the ability for full customization and branding.

Ellen is no Oprah, but her following is sizeable, and more, she has proven to be more attuned to the digital generation. ellentube is not democratic – her team will carefully curate videos that are all-around positive and are thus good for Ellen’s brand. Using digital platforms for brand building is something that celebrities have already experimented with and will continue to do so. For more on ellentube, how it complements Ellen’s other digital undertakings, and whether this is something we will see more celebrities doing, we spoke with Kaltura product manager Iddo Shai:

Lost Remote: How is this a better experience for fans than YouTube?

Iddo Shai: The site perfectly mirrors the Ellen Show experience, which is always fun, open and positive. Unlike YouTube, ellentube is curated. YouTube has some great content, but it also has some not-so-great content. On ellentube the videos are always great, because there is an editorial team behind the scenes, making sure that only videos that meet the site’s standards are published. This means that fans can spend literally hours watching really fun content.

Curation helps making sure the content is good, and it also helps with content being appropriate for all age groups. This is not the case with YouTube. Let me quote Ellen when launching the site on the show “if you accidentally type in a word wrong, you are not going to stumble upon something that’s… bad or mean or… you know how that can happen. Everything on the site is fun, nothing is mean spirited.’

And finally there’s the interactive aspect. The show didn’t only build a site but also a native app that makes it extremely easy for users to upload their videos. Kaltura also helped make the reviewing process quick and easy. Doing that via the YouTube app would have been challenging and almost impossible”.

LR: How does this complement Ellen’s other digital undertakings. 

Shai: Ellen is really a pioneer when it comes to digital and social media. She holds the world record of the most retweeted picture, and she was also one of the first to interview the Twitter sensation #AlexFromTarget.

So it’s no accident that she is also one of the first celebrities to build their own video centric site, connecting directly with fans, asking them to register to the site and featuring their videos on her show. A few years ago, TV talent didn’t understand why the second screen was important, we heard TV producers worried about building a web entity thinking it would hurt their ratings. The opposite is actually happening. With these videos going viral, Ellen’s ratings will go up. And when people want to watch more content, they will got to ellentube, where the experience is all about ellen and she is not just another contributor in an ocean of videos. From there, the sky is the limit: exclusive content, selling merchandise and more – I am curious myself to see what’s next.

LR: Will this be something we see more celebrities doing to engage fans?

Shai: I believe so. And I believe ellentube will show many of them the way. I think this will make a lot of sense for celebrities that are highly engaged with video content. And now it is easier than ever with tools like our MediaSpace product – an out-of-the-box social video portal, which ellentube is based on. Kaltura MediaSpace can be launched as is very quickly, or further customized to the customer’s liking.

They can create video communities, where users come to watch but also participate. We at Kaltura have seen bands doing live streaming for fans while being on the road, for example. Some of this stuff you can do on free platforms, but not everything. And especially for celebrities that can get a massive audience, splitting the revenue with Google makes very little sense. If you are giving it for free, you can at least ask for your fans’ email address. You can’t do that on YouTube.

LR: Anything else?

Shai: We are seeing a strong trend with user generated content. Remember, this is the selfie generation and there’s huge potential in creating TV shows and also marketing campaigns that ask people to submit their own content. With smartphones and apps it’s easier than ever and it creates an infinite feedback loop. This is what social TV is all about and this is what good marketing campaigns are all about.

We have seen one good examples of that when one of our customers called Visalus did a weight loss challenge and had people document themselves every step of the way and then others voted for them to win a nice prize. Creating truly unique interactive video experiences for communities with common interests is difficult to do well on a mega-site like YouTube, where one size fits all.

Why is YouTube brand Maker Studios worth more than Marvel to Disney?

This article was originally published via The Guardian Media Network.

maker-studios-logo-lWe are all used to seeing movie and TV stars being promoted in the subway. Well, YouTube now feels that if you have at least 1.4 million registered fans – you are worthy of an ad campaign as well.

Hollywood is clearly taking note of the potential of YouTube talent. About a month ago, in one of its biggest deals in recent years, Disney bought Maker Studios for roughly $1bn – or about £600m (half of it in cash and the rest in Disney stock). Maker Studios represents many popular YouTube talents and help them to produce and monetise their content.

This deal reminded me of the deal in 2009 in which Disney acquired Marvel. When comparing the valuation of Marvel and Maker at the moment of purchase, the difference is staggering. In 2009, the year it was acquired, Marvel did about $670m in sales. Disney paid $4.94bn for Marvel, which gave it a valuation multiple of about seven.

In the case of Maker Studios, the revenue numbers were not public knowledge. But we do know that Maker was evaluated at $300m about six months ago, when it went through another round of funding. Even if we assume that Maker got a very generous valuation back then (say 10x), its revenue couldn’t have been more than $30m. Given that Disney bought it for $500m (with up to $450m in performance-based earn-out), Maker basically received an evaluation of between 16x and 31x. What makes Maker Studios worth at least 220% – and possibly as much as 440% – more than the people who brought us Spiderman?

Much of it is about the number of YouTube subscribers. Maker’s revenue may be small but its reach is massive. It claims to have 5.5bn monthly views and 380 million subscribers. In that sense, Maker’s acquisition is more similar to Facebook buying WhatsApp for $19bn. WhatsApp had 450 million users at the time, which means that Facebook paid about $42 per user, while Disney paid about $2.60 per user. So maybe Maker’s price tag makes sense after all.

“Eyeballs valuation” is another sign of technology and entertainment convergence, where every content property can be easily measured. But what happens now? How can the Maker acquisition drive much higher revenues for Disney’s stockholders?

Maker will start by fostering and monetising its biggest asset: the direct relationship with subscribers. The first stage will be to cut out the middleman – YouTube. Maker recently launched its video site, called Maker.TV (powered by the Blip player that Maker bought last year). While the YouTube channels will still be operated, I assume much of Maker’s energy will now be directed towards moving its fans to Maker.TV. This is strategic for Maker for several reasons:

Ad revenue – YouTube takes about 30%-45% of any ad revenue. In addition, Maker has to work with YouTube on selling its ads and it has much less flexibility with advertisers.

Sponsorships – Maker needs to be able to create more branding and sponsorship opportunities around its original content. This is extremely hard to do within YouTube’s unified design.

User targeting – Maker needs to know everything about its users: their email addresses, viewing history and engagement levels. It also needs to be able to track viewing trends. This data is worth money. If Maker can offer more targeted ads, it can receive higher CPMs from advertisers and deliver them better click-through rates. In addition, data is key to offering appealing content recommendations. On YouTube, Maker has little control over the suggested content. On its own site, it can push its original content and record – and subsequently act on – the data on what’s working and what’s not.

Now that online video distribution and social media marketing make content more accessible than ever before, we are likely to see more content makers following Sesame Street’s lead and creating their own holistic website experience, in addition to their YouTube channel. This is vital to creating a direct relationship with viewers, which is what is driving today’s eye-watering acquisitions in technology and entertainment.

New Technology Promises to Unify a Fragmented Video Ad Market

This article was originally published via The Guardian Media Network.

onlinr video adsA few weeks ago I stumbled upon an article titled Why the Pipes Are Broken in Mobile Advertising. If you are an advertiser or a publisher dealing with online video, the challenges the article mentions would sound all too familiar: fragmentation of mobile devices, a dearth of good analytics, a lack of ad format standards and too many isolated solutions that only work for specific devices or streaming method. But guess what? That article was actually written in 2011 – before all the great devices such as connected TVs, tablets and Chromecast had caught on.

Is it really possible that no advancements have been made in almost three years? In reality, much has changed.

Specifications such as VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) and VPAID (Video Player-Ad API definition) have set the standard for online video ad types as pre-rolls, video pods and overlays. As a result, it’s much easier to integrate with multiple ad networks and maximise one’s ad inventory. Cost per thousand page impressions (CPMs) and real-time targeting are also far better than they used to be, thanks to improved cookies and real-time bidding.

All of these factors have made online video advertising smarter. Online video ads are far more effective than banners because user engagement can be tracked, allowing advertisers to know if the skip button was clicked or if the ads were muted by the viewer. In many ways, online video ad tools are much smarter than those used to track viewing of traditional TV commercials.

And while online video advertising is clearly a great way to monetise content online, we are not out of the woods yet. In some ways, the landscape is more challenging than it was back in 2011 – mainly due to increasing device fragmentation.

While online viewing is booming, an increasing number of viewers are using “closed” devices such as connected TVs and games consoles that are notoriously hard for publishers and advertisers to target. For example, on some of these devices, a pre-roll can be run pretty easily, but a mid-roll (i.e. a video ad that runs in the middle of the video) throws up challenges. As a result, the classic TV ad experience (2-3 ad breaks per programme) can’t be offered by online content providers.

Fortunately, a combination of two ad serving technologies that reduce the challenges posed by device fragmentation are starting to make an impact: native player ad delivery and server-side ad stitching.

Native player ad delivery (or “smart ads”)

These are used today on desktops, browsers on Apple devices, and native applications on iOS and new versions of Android. With this technology, once the user clicks the “Play” button, the player calls for an ad.

By using the native player, the ad is much “smarter” and advertisers have more options: the ad can be configured to be skippable or non-skippable and can include a strong call to action and an option to click on it. This approach also allows improved targeting based on the age, geo-location and the context of the ad environment (eg website, article) and improved analytics.

Server side ad stitching (or “dumb ads”)

These let publishers reach pretty much any device that can be used to stream video – almost all Android browsers, connected TVs, Xbox, video aggregation mobile apps and Chromecast. It even helps with some ad blockers. This approach “stitches” the ad to the video file, removing much of the work that would otherwise need to be done to specifically integrate with a device’s native player. If the device can play the video, it can play the ad. Ad stitching is consequently a good option for campaigns focused on reaching a broad audience and can help to significantly drive fill rate.

That said, it does have a few limitations. Stitched ads don’t have easy-to-set-up skip buttons. Some stitched ads are very easy to skip, by simply skipping forward using the scrubber but in most cases the advertisers will not even know the ad was skipped. In addition, user targeting is limited and publishers have much less intelligence about how the ads perform.

Online video monetisation – whether via smart/dumb ads or via other payment models – is a hot topic this year. And while we have yet to solve some of the critical online advertising pain points that were present back in 2011, significant progress is being made. Dumb ads are a good tool – albeit perhaps a temporary one. The future will probably see more smart ads coming to the fore, regardless of how they are delivered to the device.

As we move into a more personalised web, the ability to get maximum insight into end users’ viewing habits and interests is key. It’s essential to keep that top of mind when approaching today’s monetisation challenges.

New Mixtape: My 2013

My 2013 by Iddopop on Mixcloud

my 2013This year I bought my first turntable in years, so every few weeks I was able to have the record store experience: walking in, taking off my earplugs, examining all the vinyls I wished I had, examining some records I have never heard of and finally finding one I must own.

I am a bit late to the vinyl nostalgia club, but 2013 was a great year to join. So many albums that came out this year didn’t have one distinctive hit. I found myself often going back to the same Spottily playlists, listing to the same albums from beginning to end and learning to appreciate them more with each listen. Even my mixtapes this year, often featured the same artists/albums. It was a good year for music.

On a personal level, it’s been a really great year. “Solid” is probably the best word to describe it. 2013 didn’t have the crazy turns of past years, but it did include professional growth, new experiences, old friends, fun shows and awesome cocktails. Solid.

So here it is – My 2013: https://iddopop.com/mixtapes/My2013/

Have a great 2014!

Love,

Iddo

New Mixtape: Fugitives

Fugitives by Iddopop on Mixcloud

FugitivesIt’s been an emotional week. I finally watched Miley’s new video. It had a major impact, which was amplified by the expressive director’s cut. Then Glee said goodbye to Cory in a dark episode that left me speechless (all I could do was retweet Molly Butterfield:  “If your watching glee right now and not crying.. Your heartless and I hate you”).

Listening to Fugitives now, I can see how all these raw emotions found their way to this new mixtape. What was supposed to be a lighthearted piece of pop morphed into a chunk of emo.

Or maybe it’s just a reflektor?

Stream: https://iddopop.com/mixtapes/Fugitives/

 

New Mixtape: Greenwich Time

Greenwich Time by Iddopop on Mixcloud

Greenwich TimeIt’s been a great summer. Other than one week, Manhattan was never too hot or too humid. Most days were just perfect and the city felt luscious and youthful. Luckily, I was able to take it all in every day when I walked to the office from my East Village sublet. The urban jungle composed of the homeless, tourists, students, party people, Jivamukti yogis and Middle Eastern refugees gave this mixtape its aroma. Some romantic comedies that I’ve enjoyed lately (Drinking Buddies!) helped with the final touches. Enjoy!

Stream: https://www.iddopop.com/mixtapes/GreenwichTime/