It’s time for another Viral Round Up—our weekly look at the latest viral success stories as we attempt to reverse engineer them to see what made them work.

Since I missed last week’s Round Up, we’ll actually look at more videos than normal this week.  Call it my tangible apology, like the flowers I sometimes buy my wife.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

1. The Bird

Tennessee Titans owner, Bud Adams—who is 86 years old—was captured on film by a fan in the stands after the Titans beat the Bills in Nashville last Sunday.  Don’t ask me why this fan decided to turn around and film the team’s owner, but he did.  And boy, did he ever get lucky.

The footage shows Adams, excited by his teams victory over a long-time franchise rival, does a little bit of a happy jig, complete with multiple double-barreled middle finger salutes.  Yes… he flips off the opposing team… gleefully.  Check it out:

Click here to watch the video.

Less than 24 hours later he was already issuing a public apology, which did not stop the league from fining him a quarter of a million dollars.  Yikes.  That has to be the most expensive instance of bird-flippage in history.

Now… we probably don’t need to dive in too deep to examine why this video got so popular so fast (500,000 views and counting).  People love videos of prominent individuals behaving badly.  And considering how difficult it is to predict when and where such an event might take place, such videos are rare.

I happen to live in Nashville, and heard a radio interview with the fellow who took the footage.  He says he had no good reason for filming.  He just turned around and saw the owner, and instinctively whipped out his iPhone and filmed him.  That the owner ended up doing the one-finger-salute dance was pure coincidence.

Also take notice of the advertisement on the video—for iPhone4idiots.com—the guy who filmed the video just happens to run a web business helping people use their iPhones better, and he wisely incorporated some of the newer YouTube options to help promote his business with this happy accident.  Smart.

I wouldn’t recommend intentionally flipping people off for your company’s videos… but if you can somehow catch a celebrity doing it… that’s gold.

2. The Children’s Sports Accident

Last Round Up, we looked at the now-infamous women’s soccer brutality video, showcasing the ugly side of sports.  Another popular type of viral video is the “sports accident” video.  Typically these involve football players running the ball into the wrong end-zone or tackling their own teammates.  Nearly everyone who loves sports loves seeing sports bloopers.

Today I wanted to show you a slight wrinkle in the standard “sports accident” video… where the participants are so young as to simply not know any better.

Check out Youth Soccer Goalie Scores On Her Own Team:

Click here to watch the video.

See… in addition to a funny sports blooper, the age of the participants brings an element of the “cute factor” to this video—not unlike the toddler who threw her dad’s caught foul ball right back over the railing a few months ago.

If you’re able to watch that video and not smile, then I’m not sure you’re human.

Can we repeat this?  Possibly.  I have to believe this sort of thing goes on all the time across America.  It’s just not always filmed.  But I’m not sure how a 4-year-old scoring on the wrong soccer goal can help your business.

But at the same time… there’s a lesson here—that’s why we do these round ups, afterall—and that lesson is this:  even accidents can have an upside.  Don’t be afraid to let yourself be embarrassed if there is a greater benefit from the exposure that embarrassment can bring.  Think about movies where they run outtakes during the credits. Do those ever make you lose respect for the actors?  No.  They actually make the actors seem more human… more like us… which creates an attachment that is quite unique.

Don’t be afraid to put your embarrassments to work for you.

3. The Dunk

Over the weekend the Miami Heat played the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Heat guard Dwayne Wade had a dunk that sports fans are calling one of the best ever.  Take a look:

Click here to watch the video.

Even Lebron James, who plays for the other team, said it was probably a top-10 dunk of all time.  I have personally been sent this video in email no fewer than 15 times since Sunday, and I’d be willing to bet you have too.

Along with bloopers and violence and misbehaving… you have athletes just being great at what they do.  And excellence in sports performance will probably always be one of the most popular categories of viral video.

On a related note:  another version of the same video, which you can see here, also serves as a fantastic example of YouTube advertising on crack.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

4. The Dog

Nearly everyone I know has now seen the video of the dog greeting his soldier-owner upon returning from deployment overseas.  It’s heartwarming, to say the least.  If you have somehow avoided it, see it now:

Click here to watch the video.

Now, I’m not sure what’s going on with the original video, because it’s been removed for copyright claim… which doesn’t make much sense.  The one I embedded above is a re-post.  The original video has been viewed well more than the 100,000 times showing on the counter.

Anyway, you might suspect that my “takeaway” from this viral success is to put dogs in your videos.  And that would be a good idea, because people do love dogs.  But what I was actually going to point to as a great lesson is this:  dig through your archives.

You see, this video was actually filmed years ago, I believe in 2005.

Heartwarming is heartwarming, regardless of when it was filmed.  And even archival footage can go viral.  Maybe—just maybe—while you’re brainstorming video ideas and storyboarding concepts, there is an old video you’ve forgotten about, just sitting there waiting to be shared with the world.

5. The “Spontaneous” Dance

Every so often, I like to include an example of viral failure, just so we can learn from the mistakes of others.

Apparently Microsoft decided to create a video of some employees at the new Microsoft store breaking out into a “spontaneous” dance that is anything but spontaneous.  If you haven’t seen it, you can now:

Click here to watch the video.

Wow.  Pretty spontaneous, eh?

I get that Microsoft wanted to show their store and staff as friendly and hip and fun.  And there’s certainly no harm in that whatsoever.

But this doesn’t even feel hip and fun, and the video fails on a few different levels.

For starters, Microsoft apparently thinks that they can bond with today’s tech-savvy crowd by having employees do a synchronized rehash of a dance that was popular 20 years ago… the Electric Slide.  What’s next, Microsoft?  The Macarena?

But even that would still be okay if it remotely felt spontaneous.  Instead, it feels as staged as a high school play.  While a few customers join in the dance, most have bewildered looks on their faces.  They seem to be wondering why they can’t just buy a computer without being subjected to a musical number.  (Oh, and exactly how many employees does Microsoft need in order to staff that place, 100?)

Finally, it feels a bit low-rent.  No offense, but synchronized dancing and clapping is something you expect to see at a cheap steakhouse when it’s someone’s birthday, not a supposedly upscale technology store.

Microsoft has taken tons of heat for this video in the blogosphere, and rightfully so.  But was that their plan all along?  I mean, we’re not that far removed from the whole “host your own windows 7 party” video fiasco—and many at the time suggested that video was intentionally cheesy and awful.

Could it be that they’ve done it again?  The video currently has nearly 500,000 views, which is definitely a success.  And if those views were driven by bloggers who were making fun of the video, does Microsoft really care?  Could it be that their goal was simply to get more buzz out there about the Microsoft stores?

It’s an increasingly strange world, this realm of online marketing.  Even videos that are universally considered fake as well as awful can go viral.  Go figure.

That’s all the time we have for today.  Believe it or not, I had other videos I wanted to touch on as well, but we’ll have to leave that for another day.  Some of you have jobs to get back to.

In summary:

Remember, don’t be afraid to recycle old footage you have stored away—if the world hasn’t seen it, it’s still new to them.  Also, you will never go wrong capturing excellence or failure in sports and uploading that to YouTube.  Lastly, you never know when great footage will appear; one minute you’re filming an empty luxury box, and the next moment the team’s owner is being obscene—you can’t go viral with the things you don’t film.

We’ll see you here again for our next Viral Video Round Up.

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: Viral Video Round Up – Lessons From This Week’s Viral Successes

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Google today announced that they are adding automatic captioning capability to videos on YouTube.

This is a fantastic step forward for accessibility for deaf Internet users.  Says Vice President Vint Cerf, who is hearing impaired himself:

“Google believes that the world’s information should be accessible to everyone.  One of the big challenges of the video medium is whether it can be made accessible to everyone.”

Until this announcement, users have only had the ability to manually upload their own captions, something many users have indeed done.  With the new system, the captions will be automated, generated by machine, and will initially only be rolling out to a handful of partner channels’ videos.

The  Automated Speech Recognition technology being employed by Google struggles a bit with background noise, and still sometimes makes mistakes.  Engineers hope to continue improvement in the performance of the captioning machines, and the eventual goal is to have closed caption capability enabled on all videos uploaded to the site in the near future.

The system only works for the English language at present, but those English captions are easily translated into one of 51 other languages in an instant.

In addition to the automatic captions, Google has also improved the self-captioning services.  Users can now upload a script of the video, and then the system will use automated software to match the script’s text up with the actual audio sections.

There are an estimated 25 million people in the US with hearing loss, and according to the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD), there are 70 million people in the world who are deaf.  Captioning for online video is an absolute must.

Think about how many of your favorite viral videos would be dramatically altered if you were only able to hear it partially, or not at all.  Captioning is easily taken for granted by hearing individuals, but it is hugely important toward making the web a friendlier and more welcoming place for the hearing impaired.

Ill be following up with a post in the next few weeks about the power of this with regard to video search and video SEO.  I have been doing some testing which will show the incredible results that this can have in search.

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: Google Rolls Out Automated Captioning For YouTube Videos

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Market7 wants to be your online collaboration service and video project planning solution and of course make money off of you while doing it. They have free trial accounts to check it out and offer a range of product packages to help you get all your creative from talent to post-production in the same place and on the same page (or in the same frame?). It allows you to assemble teams, define projects, develop content, securely share files, and communicate clearly. The environment’s modules are organized by project stages: pre-production, production, and post-production.

Market7 is broken down into eight key areas:

1. Production Brief - a highly customizable and openly accessible question & answer forum
2. Collaborative Script - organizes script, storyboard and other key preparatory assets
3. Annotative Player – integrates video access with messaging for clear, consensus-driven direction of editing and post-production (this is pretty cool)
4. File Management
5. Team Management
6. Task Management
7. Event Management
8. Resource Management

Easily the coolest feature is the Annotative Player. Basically when you get the first footage or perhaps some primary photography in video form you can sit down and write your thoughts and notes on direction and production as annotations on the footage. But more on that later. Once you’re signed up and logged in you’re presented with the project home page where you can access all the various pieces of the project from Team straight through to post-production (the video player).

There’s also an introduction video that outlines all the buttons you’re seeing. It’s a bit much as I, who has never been involved in a major video production, certainly have no problem navigating and understanding the system. Since I really wanted to play around with the Annotative player, I got down to uploading a random video from my trip to Sarajevo this summer.

While that was uploading I took a quick tour of the other features. In the team area you can invite people to join your project. The invite box gives you a quick look at previous team members and allows you to invite people by email address. Additionally you can write a specific invite message. Everything one might expect from such a service.

Moving on to Brief gives the user a look at the basics of the project in production brief form where you need to answer specific questions to get your project organized.

• What do you want created?
• Where will it be shown?
• Who is the audience, the cast and crew?
• Why do you want it created?
• What’s the project time line?
• How to proceed?

The next area is the Script where you can collaboratively put together the direction and dialogs for your videos. I don’t particularly like how they implemented it. It feels clunky and doesn’t do things like, line wrap to fit your screen size in some instances (namely in the dialog section for who is speaking). So when you type a long line of text you have to scroll back and forth to see it all. Plus there’s no help as if we should all automatically understand the interface provided. There is an introduction video, but sometimes a good old FAQ does wonders and is sorely lacking at Market7.

File management is exactly that. Upload, download, edit, delete and comment. Organization is also key here as you can create folders and put files into them. Exactly what one would expect from a file management system.

Team management allows you to assign roles, email team members,and check on what each is doing. Pretty basic and aside from roles doesn’t look like you can create groups to put say, the cast into one group and post-production crew into another.

Moving forward brings up the Events manager which is, yes, a calendar where you can schedule particular events. You can also select events and delete or print. Again, a basic but integral piece of project planning.

Heading over to Tasks presented another similar interface where you can load up an existing template or create your own by adding multiple tasks. Each Task consists of a name, duration, scheduled time and of course team members included. It’s not extremely user-friendly nor is it clear. There are some issues with medium gray text on a darker gray background as well.

Resources allows you to track things across the whole project including estimated time, cost, qualifying members and actual time and cost. It seems basic but should help you keep an eye on the budgetary concerns and the money spent.

Finally, the annotative player. Since my video was done uploading I jumped into this with anticipation, and was let down. The annotation system isn’t all that user friendly. To schedule the times, instead of simply being able to input the times by hand you have to move the video to the specific point in time you want the annotation to take effect, click a button, then forward to where you want it to end, click a button. Now we’re told that it can be done the other way but if so, it’s not at all obvious how to do that and therefore I feel that the interface is cumbersome at times. Additionally, the annotations don’t show on the video but next to it. You are able to highlight an area of the screen or draw on it. But you can’t do both in the same annotation and so would have to overlap them to get the desired effect of two pieces of information on the actual video. Additionally, for drawing on the screen there are only two options – highlighting an area (with a box, not a circle or any other shape, just a box) or freehand. Since I’m terrible at drawing circles I had to use a box. Also you cannot highlight multiple sections of the video at once. You have to make multiple entries to do it. There’s not even a duplicate entry or a save entry option. So if you do a lot of annotating you’ll need to create your annotation every single time which could add up to a large amount of work depending on what the annotation is.

Sure the annotation system is sort of cool but it could definitely do with some extra work. In fact the more I look at it the more things I find could be done with it. The system does allow you to insert general comments without a time which could be handy for overall notes that don’t pertain to a particular time or if you wanted to just write a long list of notes. It doesn’t really seem like a feature but rather a work around as you just give the comment a time of 00:00 and no end. It will only be highlighted until the next annotation shows. You can also attach files to the annotations, but you cannot insert them into the video to demonstrate how to use them etc, I guess that’s where the freehand drawing and the highlight box come in. Finally you can close the annotation window and just watch the video. Really, it serves little purpose because, you can’t see the annotations, only the highlights on the screen. Another reason to have text show up on an overlay on the video.

Overall, I felt that Market7 had a pretty solid product on their hands. It could certainly do with some further work and more features and it seems as though they are still coding, so in some time I imagine it will be an extremely robust, full-featured online project management system. Right now it’s cool and functional just not all it could be.

The pricing of packages depends on things like how much file storage you’ll need and your position. Prices range from Free to $299.95 a month! File storage ranges from 100MB to 15GB but more can be purchased on all but the free account. Additionally all but the basic account offer unlimited projects and members and unaltered content uploads. For more information or to sign up for a free account head to http://www.market7.com/pricing/

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: Video Project Planning & Management – Market7 Overview

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Yesterday, EveryZing, a company that we have profiled in the past, has re-branded themselves as RAMP.com. They made a name for themselves by helping companies optimize their video content for search discovery through speech to text recognition technology and they are now moving beyond video optimization to focus on helping publishers ramp up monetization, discovery, and engagement through “content optimzation.”

“Over the past three years of the company’s history, we’ve continued to build our core technologies for solutions to grow audience and revenue for online audio, video, text and images for the best known brands in television, media and publishing,” said Tom Wilde, CEO of RAMP. “Given that our existing capabilities are already deployed in scale and proven in the field, RAMP is the industry’s most advanced Content Optimization platform to drive discovery, engagement and monetization universally for all types of web content.”

Ok, well to start off, lets look at the question, “What is Content Optimization.”

As defined in their new whitepaper, (available here) content optimization is…

The unleashing of monetization potential of content through optimizing the discovery and engagement of content to the dynamic requirements of online publishing and consumption with the search and browsing behavior of users.

Ramp’s new centerpiece is a highly automated system for optimizing content dubbed the RAMP platform.  It offers publishers an open, flexible and modular capability to optimize large amounts of content within dynamic publishing environments. As a result, publishers’ content becomes better positioned for discovery and targeting, leading to greater monetization and engagement.

Here is a great interview from Beet.tv where Tom Wilde talks a bit about the company’s background as well as what they are now focused on for their clients.

Click here to watch the video.

The RAMP platform is built into four modules—Workflow, Discover, Engage, and Monetize—which processes audio, textual, image, and video content with little to no human interaction.

Some capabilities of the RAMP platform include:

• Universal tagging and metadata towards extracting rich content information for content optimization
• Audio/video transcription for making rich media transparent for content optimization
• Content syndication workflow automation to optimize content for syndication
• Automated annotations to optimize content for dynamic placement
• Universal SEO – optimize content for discovery on search engines regardless of content type
• Video SEO – make video search and navigation highly transparent to web users and enable new web video experiences through optimized metadata support for video.
• Social Media Integration – Optimizing content to be social media friendly and capable.
• Site search capable – Optimizing content to allow effective website experiences with dynamic contextual content presentation and search relevant results

I had the pleasure of speaking today with Tom Wilde, CEO of Ramp, formerly EveryZing.  I asked Tom  if they have all the necessary 301-redirects in place from everyzing.com to RAMP.com and of course, he chuckled and said that they do.

Today, Tom and I will be speaking on a panel discussion titled, “Optimizing Video Search and Discoverability” together with Pete Kocks of Truveo, and Lou Schwartz of Multicast Media Technologies at the Online Video Platform Summit.  Suffice to say, Tom and his team at Ramp.com know plenty about content optimization as well as online video.

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: EveryZing Moves to RAMP Focus on Content Optimization

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Did you see the headline earlier this week that YouTube had struck a deal with Spanish Television Network, Univision?  If you’re a typical American, you might have passed right over it.  Maybe you noted it mentally, but figured it wasn’t terribly important to you since you don’t speak Spanish.

The deal actually seems pretty important to me for two big reasons:

1. For what it means for Spanish speakers

Let’s start with some basic facts about Univision that, because they aren’t NBC, you might not know.  First, they have the largest Spanish-speaking audience of any television network in the U.S.

Again, it’s easy for non-Hispanics to underestimate how sizable that market is.  Spanish is the second most-common language spoken in this county, behind only English.  The US Census Bureau says that by 2050, there will be 102.6 Million Hispanics in the United States, and that this number will make up 24% of the entire country’s population.

One in ten American residents speak Spanish as their primary language.  In fact, according to this Wikipedia article, there are more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than in Spain.

Worldwide, there are more Spanish speakers than English speakers—Spanish is the second most common language after Mandarin.

All that data points to a single conclusion:  There is a much higher audience for the Univision content than you probably thought there was.

Univision’s deal with YouTube puts full-length shows from the network in front of potential millions of new viewers as well as giving existing viewers more control over where and when they watch their favorite programs.

2. For what it means for the future of online television

Have you seen the YouTube channels for the major U.S. television networks?  They’re largely filled with clips, snippets, and really old content.  The Fox channel actually has text on there that says, “For full-length episodes visit http://Fox.com/fod”.  Everything else there appears to be a quick segment (a minute or so, often less).

The ABC channel is the same, driving visitors who are seeking full-length videos to ABC.com.  And they have some snippets of Dancing With The Stars and other shows to serve as teasers.  Ditto for the other two major networks (NBC and CBS).

Now, some of these networks have full-episodes on their own websites.  Some have them on sites like Fancast or Hulu (a couple of them are partners in ownership of Hulu).

Univision’s deal allows them to pretty much do whatever they want—it’s non-exclusive.  They could put content on Hulu.  They could put it on Fancast.  There’s nothing binding in the language of the YouTube deal preventing that.

And that’s the big shift in thinking.  The major US networks are almost falling all over themselves to control the path through which you find their video content, keeping it behind the curtain whenever possible.

There are, of course, exceptions.  For example, South Park and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia are two US shows that post every single episode online for free—the entire library.  But they’re also on cable networks.  Cable networks have shown a lot more interest in stretching the boundaries of the status quo than the major networks have.  The major networks—the big four—are still having a hard time letting go of the traditional business model and advertising revenue.

What do you think?  Any Spanish-language video marketers want to weigh in on this deal?  I’d love to have the perspective of someone who is in the target audience for this content.  Univision could prove to be a serious case study, and if successful, might serve as motivation for the major US networks to remove a couple more layers between their content and their viewers.

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: Univision/YouTube Partnership Is A Bigger Deal Than You Think

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Everyone remembers that Kaltura makes the first open source online video platform right? The Kaltura Community Edition. Well now they’re beginning to expand that with new deals, this time around it’s with LongTail video, the open source video player.

You might also remember, if you’re a loyal ReelSEO reader, that I personally had some implementation problems with the stand alone JW Player way back when, but it being integrated into a fully functional and fully open source platform should fix those types of problems for many.

“We are empowering users of JW Player with advanced video management functionalities and services at the base price that they already know and love – ZERO,” said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman and CEO. “In the past, many publishers were content with the ability to publish their videos using a free video player, but today most of them also want to manage and moderate their content, create playlists, customize their players, syndicate their clips, create and analyze usage reports, and enable their viewers to contribute and edit content.  With Kaltura’s video platform they can do all that and more.”

So now you can get a fully customizable, skinnable open source video player built right into a full open source video platform. If that’s not enough the LongTail player also brings with it their AdSolution which means you have monetization built into it as well. This is also great news if you, like me, don’t have your own content being generated for your YouTube channel [GamersDailyNews] which means you can’t join to be a partner and can’t show ads and earn revenue. Now you can take it all in-house and start showing ads and creating a new revenue stream.

This is also great for those of you who might be paying for a monthly service that is giving you everything that you can now get for free from Kaltura/LongTail.  LongTail Video is offering free sign-up to the Kaltura video platform to users that download the JW Player at www.longtailvideo.com.

Kaltura’s platform has been integrated by more than 38,000 publishers to date, with hundreds joining every week. JW Player is used by over one million sites and streams billions of videos every month.

This is an interesting announcement and is going to require me to go download, install and monkey about with the platform so that I can fully report back to you. Honestly, it looks like a great deal and I truly think it could be worth the time to get it up and running for many of us. With it being open source that means it’s low cost and there’s an avid development community building around it. Sometimes it means more work to get it running and stay running right, but in the long run wouldn’t you rather be relying on yourself than on someone else? I will try to get this setup over the weekend and throw together a demo for you next week. If anyone is already using the free Kaltura platform feel free to drop a link in comments so that others can check it out as well.

That’s a wrap.

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: Kaltura Grows a Longtail

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Is anyone still wondering if search is important for video?  In November of last year, YouTube surpassed Yahoo for the first time in total U.S. search queries, making it the 2nd largest search engine in the U.S. next to only its owner, Google.  Ever since then, YouTube has continued to dominate the search space when you look at the total number of search queries.

Now, when you think about the fact that all of the searches on Youtube are users looking for video content in particular, there is no doubt that YouTube is THE largest video search/discovery destination.

This past month, October, 2009, there were a total of more than 3.7 Billion search queries on YouTube as measured by comScore.  This represents and increase of more than 31 percent year over year (vs 2,580,000.000 queries in Oct. 2008) and an increase of 7% over just last month.  Yahoo, although still the 3rd largest search engine, has now fallen more than 1 billion queries/mo behind YouTube.

Now for those of you that are interested in search beyond just video, Microsoft’s Bing product experienced the largest percentage growth of the top ten expanded search properties, experiencing an 8% increase in query volume (although this is a larger increase in terms of percentage, it still dwarfs YouTube when you consider query volume).  On a related note, last week on Wed., Microsoft unveiled a new Bing Video, a re-launch of MSN Video which pulls content from sites like YouTube, MSN, and Hulu.

Congrats Google, YouTube, and Bing…

Here is the data from ComScore’s October 2009 US Search Rankings:

comScore Expanded Search Query Report October 2009 vs. September 2009 Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore qSearch ------------------------ Search Queries (MM) ------------------ Percent Change Oct-09 vs. Expanded Search Entity Sep-09 Oct-09 Sep-09 ---------------------- ------ ------ ---------- Total Internet 21,334 22,032 3% -------------- ------ ------ --- Google Sites 12,839 13,505 5% ------------ ------ ------ --- Google 9,373 9,788 4% ------ ----- ----- --- YouTube/All Other 3,466 3,717 7% ----------------- ----- ----- --- Yahoo! Sites 2,692 2,663 -1% ------------ ----- ----- --- Yahoo! 2,668 2,639 -1% ------ ----- ----- --- All Other 24 24 0% --------- --- --- --- Microsoft Sites 1,352 1,457 8% --------------- ----- ----- --- Bing 1,156 1,245 8% ---- ----- ----- --- Microsoft/All Other 196 212 8% ------------------- --- --- --- Ask Network 718 730 2% ----------- --- --- --- ASK.COM 339 348 3% ------- --- --- --- MyWebSearch.com/ All Other 379 382 1% -------------------------- --- --- --- AOL LLC 625 628 0% ------- --- --- --- AOL Search Network 366 359 -2% ------------------ --- --- --- MapQuest/All Other 259 269 4% -------------------------- --- --- --- eBay 621 617 -1% ---- --- --- --- craigslist, inc. 624 594 -5% ---------------- --- --- --- Fox Interactive Media 500 478 -4% --------------------- --- --- --- MySpace Sites 494 472 -4% ------------- --- --- --- All Other 6 6 0% --------- --- --- --- Facebook.com 384 331 -14% ------------ --- --- --- Amazon Sites 216 212 -2%

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: YouTube Continues Search Engine Domination – up 31% YOY

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Viral video is dead. Long live low production values. The cheaper the better. Don’t cuddle it to death, let go of your brand persona.  Those are the sage words of Kevin Nalty, who is an online video strategist, a career marketer, and a YouTube star with more than 100 million views of his videos. In this episode of the New Media Minute, shot on location at the recent iMedia Summit in Las Vegas, he shared his tips for brands that want to play in the YouTube sandbox with New Media Minute host Daisy Whitney.

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: Nalts’ Cuddly Tips & Strategies for YouTube Video Success

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I’m at the Streaming Media West conference today in San Jose, CA and thought I would attempt some live blogging from this morning’s session titled, “Successful Content Syndication and Aggregation Strategies.” The description for this session is:

“… new ways content owners and site developers are aggregating content and distributing it on the web. See examples of ways to develop niche vertical sites without significantly expanding staffing, and discuss how to reach audiences on social networking sites like Facebook. Learn about some of the new emerging platforms for niche video distribution and best practices for increasing your chances of making money with your content.”

The moderator is Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 and the following are presenters:

• Brett Wilson, Co-Founder, CEO, TubeMogul
• Vanessa Pappas, Director, Audience and Strategic Partnerships, Next New Networks
• Tom Gorke, VP, Digital Distribution, MTV Networks
• Brandon White, Interactive Manager, FUNimation Entertainment

Alright, so here we go… Jim starts out by asking Brett Wilson -

Why syndicate at all?

Brett tells us that although syndication has become more difficult as of late due to more and more content being created, but main reason for syndication is that “There are places online where people watch content, they cant always go to you, and you want to be where they are.”

The other panelists also confirm this as a primary reason for syndication along with monetization strategies.

What about paid vs. free distribution?

Brett says that for the best campaigns, companies are doing both.  He highlights a recent marketing campaign for Microsoft Windows 7 where he talks about them getting 5.5 million views for their launch party videos.  “They went both the paid route and the free/organic route.”

For Next New Networks, Vanessa says that most of their content is free distribution, but with advertisers that want to extend reach, they sometimes do incorporate paid distribution via Google.  For the most part however, they do not charge for distribution of their content.

For MTV networks, Tom says that for the most part, content syndication is via content partnerships which encompasses both paid and free models.

“It comes down to different use-cases.  People do want different stuff, on different screens.  The biggest driver behind the paid stuff is portability (i.e. mobile/itunes/etc…)”

And on to YouTube…  Why would anyone want to syndicate beyond YouTube?

Vanessa says – “If you are not on YouTube, I think that you need to re-think your strategy.”

Brett Wilson talks about a study where they measured video views distributed to YouTube only vs. YouTube + other networks.  According to Brett, there was a 100% increase when videos were distributed beyond just YouTube.

What is the next best place to syndication content?

Brandon = Hulu…  He says, “ask your audience.”

Tom = Hulu, Fancast – sites that are more television focused…

“There is no one answer…  Depends on the type of content and the demographic for that content.”

Vanessa – “I reiterate everything Tom said.”

What are the best sources for automating syndication?

Brandon, who is a TubeMogul customer, mentions that there is not a great way to get around the fact that each site has different formats, different meta data, etc…

Jim Louderback mentions that in addition to using TubeMogul for automated uploads, they often go directly into sites like YouTube to enhance metadata as there are limitations with automated syndication.

Tom talks about the fact that their team syndicates to hundreds of websites via internal processes.  They have the resources to manage distribution automatically and they are happy to have control of distribution in-house.  Apparently, even with this internal process, they do not create multiple types of XML feeds.  They try to keep things fairly standardized and before they enter content distribution partnerships, they work with their partners to be able to accept their XML feeds.

Brett says that in the future, TubeMogul is going to try to power syndication beyond the typical high-value video sharing and social media websites.  They are going to power syndication feeds for “hyper-syndication.”  That will be interesting to see if you ask me.

And, of course – its almost the end, and my internet connection is going going….  Hope there were a few good tidbits for you all… gone.

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: Succesful Content Syndication and Aggregation Strategies

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We all have video cameras or video-capable mobile phones and that means new ways to see what’s happening in the world. Not only for you but for others as well. We get a eyewitness views of the events as they unfold and now, we can do it through YouTube.
Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience.

Enter YouTube Direct where media organizations and the average YouTube user can connect. The organizations can request coverage, check out clips uploaded and then rebroadcast that footage. Sounds cool hey? A great way to utilize that ‘right place, right time’ situation.

The Direct system was built on YouTube APIs and allows organizations to embed the application right into their sites. In addition to being rebroadcast or used on the media sites, the videos will also be available on YouTube itself for the regular audience and users. So that means monetization on multiple levels is possible along with a claim to fame.

The application is designed to meet any organization’s goal of leveraging video content submitted by the community. Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the application to call-out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media spectrum itself.

YouTube reports that ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston are using YouTube Direct.

It’s never been easier to leverage user-generated video content for your site or get your own video out to multiple news and media outlets. In fact, I might even think about incorporating this into Gamers Daily News for user-generated video content in regards to video games.

Click here to watch the video.

We all have video cameras or video-capable mobile phones and that means new ways to see what’s happening

in the world. Not only for you but for others as well. We get a eyewitness views of the events as they

unfold and now, we can do it through YouTube.

Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera. As YouTube has become a

global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect

directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger

audience.

Enter YouTube Direct where media organizations and
the average YouTube user can connect. The organizations
can request coverage, check out clips uploaded and then rebroadcast that footage. Sounds cool hey? A great

way to utilize that ‘right place, right time’ situation.

The Direct system was built on YouTube APIs and allows organizations to embed the application right into

their sites. In addition to being rebroadcast or used on the media sites, the videos will also be

available on YouTube itself for the regular audience and users. So that means monetization on multiple

levels is possible along with a claim to fame.

The application is designed to meet any organization’s goal of leveraging video content submitted by the

community. Businesses can use YouTube Direct to solicit promotional videos, nonprofits can use the

application to call-out for support videos around social campaigns and politicians can use the platform to

ask for user-generated political commercials. The opportunities to use the tool are as broad as the media

spectrum itself.

YouTube reports that ABC News, the Huffington Post, NPR, Politico, the San Francisco Chronicle, the

Washington Post, and WHDH-TV/WLVI-TV in Boston are using YouTube Direct.

To get started, head over to youtube.com/direct. It’s never been easier to leverage user-generated video

content for your site or get your own video out to multiple news and media outlets. In fact, I might even

think about incorporating this into Gamers Daily News for user-generated video content in regards to video

games.

This is a post from ReelSEO Online Video News
Permalink: YouTube Direct Connects Users and Media Organizations

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