Social Media And The Celebrity Factor

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This article was originally published in TechCrunch.

Kim-Kardashian-InstagramThe re/code mobile conference took place a couple of weeks ago, and among the speakers discussing the trends in tech were YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki, Instagram’s Kevin Systorm, Kim Kardashian West and… “Wait, what? Kim Kardashian is a tech expert now? Seriously???”

Many on Twitter were not convinced, and even Kara Swisher had to kickoff the interviewsomewhat apologetic going over Kardashian West’s impressive social footprint: 21 million Instagram followers; 25.2 million Twitter followers; and her iPhone game made her millions in the last year (and she does it all via a BlackBerry). If that’s not a savvy mobile tech powerhouse then what is?

Kardashian West is much more than a reality-show star at this point but in a way the reason she is a pioneer in using social media and developing her media brand, stems from the fact that she first got famous on reality TV.

Reality stars are good examples of artists that have massive appeal, great brand recognition and (for some) the talent to have successful careers after the show ends. However, when they are reality stars, they have no leverage over the show producers. If their show gets dropped, if their persona gets twisted in the editing room, their career could end before it even really started.

That is why social media outlets are key for these artists; they allow them to connect directly to their audiences. If E! drops Keeping Up with the Kardashians tomorrow, Kim will still be famous, because every time she’s online, she can connect with an audience more than twice the size of the average viewership of an episode of The Voice on NBC. Having this direct channel to her fans, she can now easily branch out to other ventures, like her mobile app.

Another social media powerhouse is Ellen DeGeneres. Ellen has about 33 million Twitter followers and about 100 million YouTube views per month. As a TV star, having her own video space seems vital. She recently launched ellentube, a website with an accompanying slick mobile app that allows fans to view her show’s highlights, additional clips and even upload their own cute home videos.

So what are the main reasons to build such a unique brand experience and go, in Ellen’s case, beyond YouTube?

It’s about building a community; videos uploaded to ellentube are moderated, which is not a simple feat. It surely requires quite an operation in the backend. However, creating a safe environment is key for Ellen’s brand. If she is going to throw all her weight behind this, she must make sure her fans feel completely at home there. This feeling is going to encourage them to come back and participate. This environment, which marketers usually refer to as “brand safety,” is key to attracting large sponsors that usually worry about having their pre-roll ads before a cute kitten video. So if Ellen can make both her audience and her advertisers comfortable, this site has enormous potential.

It’s about owning the data. In her re/code interview, Kardashian West called her Twitter followers “an amazing focus group.” The ability to get direct, unfiltered responses from fans is priceless. Kardashian West often uses it to consult with her fans about which restaurant to go to, but she can also use that as a focus group when making business decisions. Netflix is using its fan base for that and HBO is looking to do the same.

In Ellen’s case, her producers can now make a calculated decision to air a user-generated video from the site, based on how many people liked it on ellentube.

These examples boil down to being able to call your own shots. Creating your own video site or gaming app isn’t easy; it takes investment, time and expertise. However, if you team up with the right people, the potential upside is enormous. It’s all about maintaining creative control.

These celebrities know their audiences better than any video or gaming expert out there. So if they are independent and can create their own experiences — as well as have a direct channel to their fans — their possibilities in the digital space are endless.

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

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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?

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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

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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.

Increase Video Views and Conversion With A/B Testing

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shutterstock_110350520 [Converted]Zappos.com is famous for many reasons. The #1 reason may be the fact that it was one of the first online stores to offer free returns, making it easy for customers to overcome the limitation of not holding the product in their hands before committing to pay for it. The #2 reason for Zappos’ fame is its use of product videos that are focused on solving the exact same problem as the free returns – helping customers shift away from the brick-and-mortar store mentality.

The results were astonishing: an increase of 6%-30% in conversion. That is significant for a company that exceeds a billion dollars in annual sales. Thus far, Zappos has produced over 200,000 product videos and is well on its way to reaching the 250,000 videos goal.

Zappos considers video to be a vital part of its marketing efforts for two reasons. “Although we have seen an increase in conversion, what’s more important is the decrease in returns we’ve noticed. Regardless of conversion and free returns, if a customer receives a product they are unhappy with – they can become disenchanted,” said Laurie Williams, Senior Manager of Photo & Video for Zappos.

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But the decision to produce videos is only one step in an organisation’s video strategy. No doubt it’s an important one, but, the way they are used to drive traffic, how they are presented on the page and the player’s performance could have a huge impact on video consumption on your website.

One of the best ways to make these decisions is by performing A/B testing: the same method that has become instrumental for UI designers and marketers in organisations such as Netflix, Google and Amazon to examine how design impacts  user behaviour  could also work well when examining the ROI for your video investment.

Surprisingly, when it comes to video usage, A/B testing is not as common as you might think. However, there are some good examples of tests that could help you understand what factors impact video consumption and engagement.

 

1. Promise Videos

Video is a great way to get the customer to stay on your site longer and ultimately drive conversion. A good way to do that is by clearly communicating to the user that there are video previews available. Sometimes another word or video icon can make a big difference. For example, the site SixPackAbsExercises.com did a split testing on a sales page. As part of the test, the site tested two different versions of the same button:

1. The control was: “Next Page Read Sample of Book”;

2. Variation 1 was: “Watch Video Preview”;

3. Variation 2 was: “Watch my #1 Abs Exercise On Video”.

Variation 1:

variation 1

The best-performing variation (variation 1, see above) increased conversion by 14.18%, which clearly shows how “watching a video” is so much more attractive than reading a “sample of book”.

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What to Produce First – Viral Videos or Product Videos? Best Practices For Your Online Video Marketing Strategy (Video)

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sxsw-kaltura-logo-2013_Many companies wish that their videos would go viral. There’s no doubt that you know you’ve created the ultimate marketing campaign, when your viewers do much of the distribution for you. However, most companies have a limited video production budget. So what is more important and how should they prioritize their video production queue?

Usually there are 3 options for videos:

  1. Funny, viral videos that increase brand recognition and make your company look cool and exciting.
  2. Slick product videos that help in sales pitches.
  3. Engaging tutorials to support your current customer base and demo specific features for prospects.

But it doesn’t end there. Let’s say my company chose to produce a great viral video –

  1. How do we market it?
  2. Which metadata should we use?
  3. Should we buy ads on YouTube or should we find other ways to increase views?

We asked Bettina Hein, Founder and CEO of Pixability, for her advice. Hein and her company have much experience in getting maximum views on YouTube by analyzing video analytics and other data.

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For more information take a look at this presentation that the Pixability team used for their SXSW session: