VideoVoo: Online Video Marketing

Search marketing seems to be recession-proof, according to Hal Varian, former Berkeley economist, now Chief Economist at Google, as it caters for price sensitive searchers who know that they can get what they want cheaper online - obviously, search helps to compare various promising deals and discounts.

Hal Varian: It’s very apparent brand advertising tends to be pro-cyclical. When the economy goes up, it goes up. When the economy goes down, it goes down. On the other hand, direct marketing is definitely not procyclical. … And we feel that Google is more like direct marketing than brand advertising. … when you look at a recession in aggregate, it’s basically a 2% or 3% reduction in GDP — instead of growing at 3%, you grow at zero. So it’s a relatively small amount. … This is like the Wal-Mart effect. Wal-Mart’s sales go up during a recession.

In the context of this AdAge interview pitching Google as recession proof rather than keyword targeting as such, search marketing is still primarily viewed as direct marketing, despite (e.g. Marketing Sherpa) studies on how top results for core keywords are seen as top brands, in spite of another AdAge article in the same issue hinting at this opportunity, and despite the fact that Google has moved a long way away from exclusively paid search sponsored links. In addition, Google AdWords was highlighted as an optimal recession marketing tool, competitors were not even mentioned (AdWords still not copied by either Microsoft AdCenter or Yahoo Search marketing, although it could hugely increase advertising on Yahoo and Live search platforms too).

Hal Varian also points out that search marketing for real estate is less shaken by recent market changes (highlights by me).

It’s true that overall real-estate queries have gone down as a fraction of total queries. But there are interesting anomalies. Type in “California foreclosures” or “Arizona foreclosures” or “Florida foreclosures,” and you’ll see 11 ads for companies that are providing lists of foreclosures, advice for bidding on housing auctions or getting a great deal in the housing market. Remember, every time a house is sold, another is bought. You’ve got to advertise to make that happen, and the internet’s the place to go for a deal on Hawaii or a house.

It seems that other forms of keyword-based advertising, e.g. keyword based content network advertising is still neglected and somehow wrapped into the term ’search marketing’, although it’s not clearly search and it’s not clearly brand. As is many other ad tools offered by Google. I feel Google is somehow crammed into a narrow pigeon hole of ’search’, even in an infomercial article in a professional magazine like AdAge. Is the brand vs. direct marketing a valid dichotomy or a simplified outdated terminology that old time marketers are sticking to? How will they categorize ads in the future that are keyword targeted based on speech to text TV and video ads? Will it be seen as recession-proof?

source: AdAge

While most of the traffic to various online videos came via social networking sites in 2007 April, one year later, we see that search engines (and video search engines) came a long distance and scored a draw, according to the data presented by Hitwise, and I am positive that search will increase further.

Heather Dougherty writes

search engines and social networks are now accounting for an equal share of referred traffic. Last week (ending April 12, 2008) the share of upstream traffic from search increased 35% over the same week the previous year, while the referred traffic from social networks declined 20%.

Heather suggests that this gradual process of equalization comes from the following trends:

1. Universal and blended search, which mixes text snippets from website headline or description meta tags or other texts extracted from the given website and videos, maps, images, news results, etc. These mixed search results show videos more prominently than ever before, so it boosts the growth in search-referred traffic: Google (up 44%) and Yahoo! (up 13%)
2. On the contrary, social networking site MySpace, which caters for most of the video referrals with 22.54% compared to Google 19.04% and Yahoo approx. 13%, showed a 25% decline from 2007 to 2008.
3. Shifting demographics: “video websites attract a more mainstream audience,” writes Heather Dougherty from Hitwise. YouTube for one thing is visited by a wider range of generations - more evenly represented across all age groups. In contrast, in social networking “the majority of the audience (47%) is under the age of 35″ So basically, I guess, what Heather is suggesting is that younger users may reach videos (still) more via social networking sites but as older users get the taste for online videos and use general search rather than social media, referrals are more from search than social sites.

Now, I am a bit puzzled and I wonder how the data was aggregated. While Google Video is definitely a video search engine also hosting its own videos, YouTube is a vid social networking platform hosting videos plus related conversations, and making them searchable - presumably using Google internal video search engine. However, I think when it comes to searching videos, YouTube is also thought of as a vertical video search engine. So it seems a blurry area to phrase things clearly for search vs. social networking and video search vs. video social networking. For the French, Daily Motion is The Video site, especially for French video uploads, and it’s a social networking site at the same time. MySpace is hosting its own MySpace videos on vids.myspace.com, and its internal video search is run by Google.

So what was the baseline for measuring video sites and the traffic sent to them via various referrals?

Anyway, let’s suppose it was a clear-cut question and I am only confused because I have the time to be confused (aka hairsplitting). Let’s see how we can find videos online at all. Some of the major ones:

• videos found via search (blended search, excluding internal site search on any social networking site, even if the sole aim of the visit to the ’social networking site’ hosting zillions of videos to qualify the ’social networking site’ as a ‘video search engine’, was nothing else but searching for a video)
• videos via emails (closer to social media than search, so Yahoo Mail with its about 4% is minus from Yahoo’s 13%)
• videos on user profiles: e.g. MySpace profiles, but there are profiles on video social networking sites too serving as internal references…
• videos on news websites, blogposts, vlogs, twits, articles, company websites, forums etc. - anything that is not search neither social networking sites (for me wordpress or blogger is not a social networking site referral)

How do you group video referrals? Let’s take an example:

My Space referring to a MySpace vid, My Space referring to a YouTube vid, MySpace referring to a Google video, YouTube referring to a YouTube vid, Google Video referring to a YouTube vid, Google Video search referring to a Google vid, Google Search (not video search, ‘normal’ blended search) referring to a Google vid, Google Video Search referring to an AOL featured video, etc. etc.

My instinct, or rather self-observation tells me, although how major a factor it is among users I don’t know, that users tend to re-visit certain videos, which are a lot easier to find via a good video search engine than trying to search the email or the profile of that person. To boot, clickable interactive hypervideos are going to make criss cross linking and referral typology even more challenging in a couple of years.

Also, the intention could be a better basis of comparison than the type of site, but obviously it’s way too difficult to measure video consumption intentions.

photo from Hitwise

Video market is quickly developing and Google’s conference call snippets confirm the video buzz we can see around us. But even better, they have data results to share with us. So here are the video advertising related quotes from Google’s management.

1, Sergey Brin: “Mobile search traffic growing rapidly.” Mobile users now get entire library of YouTube videos. (Eric Schonfeld was live blogging the conference call on TechCrunch.)

Paul Kedrosky’s comment: Great, glad to hear that. I was so worried. Youtube? “Mobile video traffic growing rapidly” too. Another load off my mind. Not.

2, Sergey Brin: Ten hours of new video going up onto YouTube every minute.

Paul Kedrosky’s comment: No idea what that actually means in monetization, but it’s a great stat for future presentation porn. Whoa, and Dunkin’ Donuts uses YouTube.

3, Larry Page: On YouTube, AdSense for video and in-video ads, seeing much better clickthroughs than banner ads.

Finally, Google co-founder stated “We were able to make a very large improvement in what we consider the hardest 20 percent of our queries“? Unfortunately, nobody asked back what that challenging 20% includes. My guess is he may have been referring to that 20% of portion of all search queries that Google has not seen and processed before and appear as totally new search queries. (see the interview with Udi Manber). It just reminds me that I still don’t understand why Google search results don’t feature videos on the search results pages when there is a search query containing the word ‘video’ - and that’s the same with maps, e.g. I search for “new orleans restaurant” and get a map on top, but if I search for “new orleans restaurant map” I get only text results. It boggles my mind.
By the way: Do you know how many employees Google currently have? (by 2008 Apr 1):

19,156 employees at the end of the quarter, including DoubleClick… That’s a lot of new people, a lot of new people to train and retain…

Finally, Eric Schmidt thinks Google grew into an international company this quarter:

Eric: This is the Q our international sales are 51 percent, I don’t think that number is going to go down. this is the quarter the sales team made Google a truly international company.

(TechCrunch)

Currently what you can do is that you embed youtube, daily motion, revver, metacafe, etc. videos, but if you want to see the votes, views, and direct vid comments, you need to go to the original video social networking, or search or whatever vid aggregator site.

Could it be a killer app to enhance video embedding and provide HTML codes that give a peak into what’s going on around the video, what’s more, you can vote or comment on the embedded version and do so without clicking through?

From a video contest point of view it would be awesome. Admittedly, I don’t know if it is possible to realize such an extended version of embedding  programming-wise or not, so wash my head if the idea is much too crazy or unfeasible. Even if it is, I guess you get the gist of the idea for a potential market opportunity.

But watching excitedly the ever growing number of online video contests, and seeing that there is a limited number of service providers who build their apps on the fact that you cannot make a video contest branded on your site without help (like memelabs or votigo), it seems to be a viable option to let for/non-profit businesses organize their video contests on their own sites (including cheat-proof votes, comments), while hosting vids, comments in fact on video social networking sites. The screens make the video service provider co-branded anyway, videos can already be embedded, so why not go further?

OK, maybe this ‘embedded video contest’ option would not be free but would come at a lot more moderate price, let’s say about the tenth of other co-branded video contest prices, approx. $3000 for a 3 month video contest?  Developing a highly affordable video contest platform could mean a huge market advantage for struggling video sites competing against the youtube monogamy.

But would co-branding be enough for the video hosting sites? How would they monetize their own sites then? Some of the options are:

• moderate revenue from video contest hosting
• ads running on user generated video contest entries (non-competitive text links, overlays, post-rolls, etc. E.g. if it’s a TicTac video contest, ads for ‘food’ would be automatically excluded, or Ferrero/Tic Tac could say that they opt in for sports, wellness ads. Likewise, a Best Western Video Contest could exclude all travel ads, or even better include water cooler, water management, water-water ads, as their present contest theme is water coolers)
• running related videos outside the video contest in question (it’s not so great for contest organizers)

Another potential cheap option for a video contest may be on startyourtube, where anyone can set up a personalized, branded youtube-like channel for free (showing their own domain address!), and keep 60% of the advertising revenue! If Start Your Tube is really like youtube, it should have a cheat-free voting system too. And what more do you need than a branded efficient video uploading and sharing site with views, votes, comments featuring your domain? If contestants need to upload their videos on a self or cobranded video site, independent from youtube if you wish to be, then why pay thousands of dollars when you can have the same effect practically for free (OK, sharing ad revenue with Start Your Tube). Can you?

Don’t keep back your feed-back, I really wonder if this is a good or bad, a timely or futuristic, a gray or green idea.