Over the past few years, particularly since the COVID pandemic began in 2020, the use of live video has become something that is commonplace and integral to many facets of daily life. From business, to entertainment, to social interactions, and more, live video is no longer reserved for occasional use in lieu of physical interaction, but rather it has very much become the norm.
Live Video Has Been on the Rise
In fact, the growth of live video has become so rapid and widespread that global revenue is projected to reach beyond 180 billion dollars within the next few years. Of course, it’s easy to see how this speedy upward trajectory has evolved.
Since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, remote interactions have skyrocketed. Where we once worked mainly in offices in a particular geographical location, and we once did most of our socializing in person, and we frequented theaters for new releases, now all of these things can and do happen from the comfort of our own homes or other remote locations.
All of this new connectivity outside of larger, better equipped networks, such as those in place in a company’s headquarters, have given rise to an increase in connectivity issues and security vulnerabilities. Naturally, we’re seeing these problems with the use of live video as well.
Live video is certainly not only used for business meetings. We’re using live video for marketing, brand engagement, gaming, B2B, webinars, healthcare, real estate, entertainment, social interactions, and more. Regardless of our intent and purpose, the problems we face are common among all uses.
Live Video Issues
The most common problems have to do with a variety of aspects such as bandwidth availability, internet connection, compatibility, encoding, privacy, and user interface. Having all of these things in place for every live video interaction is crucial to maintaining a quality live video experience.
One of the main reasons why we’re experiencing the common challenges is that there are so many video platforms available, but the majority were developed prior to the pandemic, therefore their development didn’t intrinsically rise to the challenges which were relatively minimal at the time, but which have become quite pervasive three years into the sudden transition to remote.
Although we’ve returned to the “old normal” in many ways, this trend of remote connection is not going anywhere and we must embrace every available technology to diminish the difficulties.
Fortunately, there is a solution which needs to become as commonplace as live video itself. Single stream technology resolves all of the most common concerns surrounding every live video experience.
Single stream technology takes data from any source, every live video stream, along with each participant, and merges them all together into a single interface, displaying a single live video feed. It can be used on any device and requires no infrastructure for clients or live video viewers.
In Conclusion
Single stream technology answers the challenges of bandwidth availability, complies with every new privacy law, smooths out any potential problem area for lagging or connectivity interruption, and ultimately produces a high quality live video every single time.
YouTube is working to entice its top podcasters to make the jump to video, offering $50,000 to sweeten the deal.
YouTube has been building its base of content subscribers, paying out $30 billion over the last three years. The company even shut down its YouTube Originals, thanks in no small part to having more than two million creators in the YouTube Partner Program.
In its latest push, Ars Technica is reporting YouTube is offering some of its most popular podcasters $50,000 to switch to video. The money is aimed at helping these creators invest in the equipment they need to produce high-quality videos.
While the company is offering $50,000 to individuals, some podcasting networks are receiving $200,000 to $300,000.
Video is one of the best tools you can include in your marketing strategy today. A study shows that people who spend time watching videos online have increased by at least 32% per year.
On average, an individual spends at least 100 minutes watching a video in a day. That means 25 days of watching. If you are looking forward to using video for social media promotion, you should factor this when coming up with your strategy.
Notably, there are many ways videos can be used in social media marketing. All you have to do is ensure you create quality videos for your audience. You can use an online video editor to customize and create compelling videos for posting on social media platforms.
Grab Viewers’ Attention Early
When creating social media videos, you should focus more on grabbing audience attention within the first few seconds of the video. Since you have limited time on the video, you have at least 10 seconds to capture the viewers’ attention, which means you have to get right to the point.
Tell your viewers what the video is all about and offer solutions within the shortest time possible. Place hooks in the first seconds of your video, and don’t give your viewers that chance to scroll down.
Only Upload Native Video Content
Facebook is a great place where you can interact with your customers. When creating videos for marking your products, you should share them on video instead of posting them on YouTube links. Native videos have been shown to perform better on Facebook than YouTube. Therefore it is important that you post videos on Facebook instead of posting them directly on YouTube.
Facebook prioritizes native uploads over external video links from platforms like YouTube. This is because native videos on Facebook autoplay while those from YouTube play manually.
Also, native Facebook videos play inside the platforms, unlike YouTube videos that force users to leave the platform when they want to watch the video fully.
Share Short and Value-Oriented Videos
Precision and quality are a must when creating marketing videos for your social media. If you want to increase your engagement with customers on social media, you should focus more on creating short and quality videos. Videos can help you improve organic reach on search engines, attract the right attention, and increase conversions.
If you want to get the best results for social media videos, here are the time frames for different social media platforms that you should stick to:
● YouTube: 2 minutes
● Facebook: 1 minute
● Instagram: 26 seconds
● Twitter: 45 seconds
Short videos are the best for promoting your products on social media because they don’t consume much time. They deliver the message to viewers right away, and this increases conversions. When creating short videos for posting on social media platforms, you should focus more on:
● Keeping your audience on track with the latest happenings
● Entertaining your audience before they can move to the next page
● Keeping your audience informed on topics of interest
Tell Your Story in a Special Way
If you want to sell more, then first win trust from your customers. Most customers are used to the many television adverts and cold calls from brands to buy their products. You want to stand out by telling your brand’s best story to engage more with your customers. Video allows you to share stories with your target audience and convert them if possible.
When you tell a story, you should focus on creating value and sticking to the goals. To make your audience feel your video and take action, you have to produce a psychological mood that brings out their emotions. Make your viewers take action at the end of the video. Here are some of the tips you can apply:
● Create a bond with your customers by introducing a character they can easily relate with.
● Add an angle in the short video to help you connect with the viewer.
● Create a solution to the problem and help your customers relate more to the video.
Add Call to Action
The reason behind creating videos is to market your business on social networks. That said, if you want to get the most ROI from your videos, you should ensure they have clear and strong Call to Actions (CTAs) embedded in them.
There is no point in creating social media videos if you are not asking your customers to take action, like visiting your website or reviewing some of your best-selling products.
If you want to create a clear CTA, you should first recall the goals and objectives of the video. This way, it can be easy to get people to take action. For example, if your goal is to generate more leads, you should create a video that asks viewers to provide you with their contact information.
Final Thoughts
Video marketing can help if you are looking forward to increasing engagement with clients, building trust, and generating more leads and prospects for your e-commerce business.
It is important that you focus on videos for social media marketing: Post relevant, quality, short, and customer-oriented videos to win customers. You can enforce the tips shared here if you want the best result with video marketing.
IAC has announced it will spin Vimeo off as a fully independent, publicly traded company.
Vimeo is a video hosting platform that serves as a major competitor to YouTube, with some 200 million users. Like many streaming platforms, Vimeo has experienced major growth as a result of the pandemic.
IAC is now planning on capitalizing on that success, spinning off Vimeo as an independent company.
“The combination of Vimeo’s remarkable growth, solid leadership position, and enormous market opportunity have made clear its future,” said Joey Levin, CEO, IAC. “It’s time for Vimeo to spread its wings and become a great independent public company.”
“We have long believed in the power of video to advance human expression and transform businesses,” said Anjali Sud, CEO of Vimeo. “Today we have a rare opportunity to help every team and organization in the world integrate video throughout their operations, across all the ways they communicate and collaborate. Our all-in-one solution radically lowers the barriers of time, cost, and complexity that previously made professional-quality video unattainable. We’re ready for this next chapter and focused on making video far easier and more effective than ever before.”
IAC expects the spinoff to be completed in the second quarter of 2021.
“Zoom is now integrated into all aspects of our lives,” says Zoom CFO Kelly Steckelberg. “We look forward to the day that the pandemic is over and we can resume more normal activities and yet I don’t think that in itself is a threat to Zoom. People have grown accustomed to it. Working from home is not a fad. We are all really adjusting to this new way of life and are integrating Zoom into all aspects.”
We indicated coming into the quarter that we really expected strong growth in Q2. We saw that across all geographies and all industries. International grew over 600 percent year over year. We saw strong performance in industries like education and nonprofits. We also had our largest Zoom Phone deal to-date signed in Q2. There was really strong performance across all aspects of our business.
What we saw from the retention perspective is that working from home is not a fad. People are really adjusting to this new way of life. They’re integrating Zoom into all aspects. We saw strong retention not only in our enterprise but in customers with fewer than ten employees as well. As we’ve continued to focus on leveraging both the public cloud as well as our own co-located data centers that’s why we saw improvement in the gross margins. We are going to continue to optimize across all of those metrics as we focus on the rest of the year.
Hired Over 500 Employees In Q2
We have worked very tirelessly. Our entire Zoom team is doing everything we can to continue to support not only our existing customers but to ensure that every customer who has a need for Zoom has access to it. We have focused quickly on scaling up our employee base. We have hired over 500 employees in Q2. That’s the largest growth we’ve had to date. We are also working from home like many of our customers are and really supporting our employees to ensure that we can meet the needs of the customer. We are leveraging great partners like AWS and Oracle as we need to in order to ensure that we have the capacity to continue to support our customers along the way.
We continue to look for opportunities to invest to grow the top-line (while free cash flow rose by 2,000 percent year over year). We had record operating margins in the quarter at 41.7 percent. We expect those to come down for the rest of the year as we are focusing on investing in more salespeople to meet the demand and more engineers to continue to innovate and build our platform. Of course, we are always looking for opportunities with M&A, technology, or teams that can really augment our platform or our team to continue to drive that top-line growth.
Video Is The Future Of Communications
We really believe that video is the future of communications. With that, we want our Zoom customers to be able to use the Zoom platform with other best of breed products in platforms that they choose. We have integrations with many products out there and that’s great. We want our customers to be able to use the products that they know and love and have them work together seamlessly.
What we’ve heard from our customers is that while everyone is really longing for the day that we get to go back to a more normal life before COVID that in many ways they are loving the flexibility that this has brought to them. They get to wake up with their children, have a full day of work and then have dinner with their family at the end of the day.
End Of Pandemic Is Not A Threat To Zoom
I really believe that Zoom is now integrated into all aspects of our lives. We look forward to the day that the pandemic is over and we can resume more normal activities and yet I don’t think that in itself is a threat to Zoom. We have grown accustomed to it. We have seen so many additional use cases. If you think about Formula One having these great premium experiences leveraging Zoom now in bringing clients into the paddock.
There is a company in Singapore using it to do virtual tours. They did half of their new properties that came to sale in Q2 they showed them virtually and sold them this way. We are starting to see more and more ways that people are making more efficient and more effective. This way of communicating and working is here to stay.
Zoom CFO Kelly Steckelberg: End Of Pandemic Is Not A Threat To Zoom
Fraunhofer HHI has announced a new H.266 VCC codec that is designed to offer far better data compression and up to 50% greater efficiency.
According to Fraunhofer HHI, 80% of global Internet traffic is compressed video. This makes efficient codecs more important than ever. Especially as more and more users rely on mobile devices and cellular connections, efficient video compression improves performance and reduces data demands.
“After dedicating almost three years toward this standard, we are proud to have been instrumental in developing H.266/VVC,” says Benjamin Bross, head of the Video Coding Systems group at Fraunhofer HHI and editor of the +500-page standard specification of H.266/VVC. “Because of the quantum leap in coding efficiency offered by H.266/VVC, the use of video will increase further worldwide. Moreover, the increased versatility of H.266/VVC makes its use more attractive for a broader range of applications related to the transmission and storage of video.”
“If you consider that Fraunhofer HHI already played a key role in the development of the previous video coding standards H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC, then we are happy with the fact that more than 50% of the bits on the Internet are generated by a Fraunhofer HHI technology,” adds Dr. Detlev Marpe, head of the Video Coding and Analytics department at Fraunhofer HHI.
This announcement is good news for mobile users and should significantly improve the quality of streaming video, especially on mobile devices.
iOS users can finally purchase Amazon Prime Video content in-app, significantly improving the user experience.
The Verge was the first to notice the change, and confirmed the prices for content did “not appear to have been raised to account for the 30 percent fee, as some platform owners like Spotify have done in the past. It was not immediately clear whether Amazon reached a deal with Apple or whether it is indeed deciding to pay the full cut.”
In a statement to 9to5Mac, however, Apple confirmed it was an “established program for premium subscription video entertainment providers to offer a variety of customer benefits,” including “the option to buy or rent movies and TV shows using the payment method tied to their existing video subscription.”
While Apple calls it an “established program,” when it was established remains to be seen. Logic would dictate that if this program had been available all along, Amazon would have taken full advantage of it from day one. Instead, iOS users have had to purchase content via their web browser or other method, rather than in-app. As any marketer will attest, the more steps in a process, the less likely someone is to follow through with a purchase.
Whenever this “established program” went into effect, it’s good news for Amazon and similar services. It is also good for customer ease-of-use, although it’s probably safe to say there’s about to be a lot more impulse movie and TV show purchases.
“If it’s a streaming war we’d like to be an arms dealer,” says IAC CEO Joey Levin. “We want to send the product and services to people who are making video. Video is relevant not just to people building streaming services, which there are now endless amounts of that and endless amounts of capital, but also every small business and every event. Everywhere people interact they’re expecting video now. It used to be text, then it was images, and now it’s video.”
Joey Levin, CEO of IAC, discusses their position as the “arms dealer” in the streaming wars in an interview on CNBC at The Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference:
If It’s a Streaming War We’d Like To Be an Arms Dealer
If it’s a streaming war we’d like to be an arms dealer. We want to send the product and services to people who are making video. Video is relevant not just to people building streaming services, which there are now endless amounts of that and endless amounts of capital, but also every small business and every event. Everywhere people interact they’re expecting video now. It used to be text, then it was images, and now it’s video. People need the tools to make that and our goal is to provide them.
I’m thrilled (we pivoted away from being a platform for streaming) now that everyone’s jumping into that space. I think between the time we announced that we were going to get into the streaming wars and the time we backed out there was another several billion dollars within a few months that entered the category. We were not competing with weapons that size and thought we’d be better off being a service provider.
It’s Possible To Compete With Google But They Have To Play Fairly
I don’t know what the right answer is (regarding breaking up big tech companies such as Google and Facebook) but I do know that we need an answer. Regulations are very hard to get right. I think frequently regulations in areas like that end up helping the incumbents. Those companies have already built huge data stores and they know what to do with those. It’ll just make it harder for the next people that come in to gather the data they need to compete. I don’t know how the regulations would work. I’d love to see that happen. I’d love to see regulations allow for more competition and protect competition, but it’s hard to see how that’s going to work. I don’t think GDPR did that really and I don’t know what would. They may need other solutions.
I think it’s possible (to compete with Google) but they have to play fairly. They have a significant position in search and they have a significant position in other areas too and that’s where a lot of people start their behavior. If Google starts favoring its own products or continues favoring its own products that is not going to leave room for others. I think that’s not necessarily great for the country.
In Deciding To Take a Company Public We Take a Long-Term Perspective
We don’t think a lot about a particular market state when we’re taking a company publicly. We think about what’s right for the company at the time. Does the company need access to capital? Does the company need a currency? Could a company benefit in some way by being public and having a public currency? It’s kind of independent of what market we’re in at that moment (when we decide it’s the right) time to take a company public. Just because the market might be hot or valuations might be high doesn’t mean we need to hit that window because we take a much longer-term perspective.
The (recent IPOs) are all different and they all have their own story. There are fantastic companies going public. I think it’ll be good for investors and they have opportunities to invest in them. It’s better that their public in a lot of cases than being private where a limited number of people can invest in them.
We Now Match 100 Percent of Employee 401k Contributions
I think there are different answers for different businesses (regarding potential regulations that could shut down the gig economy). We have businesses that have gig economy workers, 1099 workers, and we have businesses that are very big on W2 workers. The question is are the employees or the people doing the work getting the benefits that they want and getting the benefits that they need? Many of them prefer to be independent contractors and many of them prefer some of the benefits of independent contractors. Others like BlueCrew, which is all W2 workers, want benefits and need the things that come with being a W2 worker. Each business has its own needs on that.
One of the other things that we’re doing at IAC right now that’s really important for our 8,000 employees is we just announced a big change to our 401k plan to address the income inequality gap, to get more people investing in the market, to get more people participating in the economy and in capitalism. We are now matching a hundred percent of people’s 401k contributions up to 10% of their salary which is I think relatively unheard of among our competitors and other companies. I’m hoping other people follow that.
If It’s a Streaming War We’d Like To Be an Arms Dealer, Says IAC CEO Joey Levin
LinkedIn has launched live video on their business professional platform and according to marketing experts Neil Patel and Eric Siu, it’s a great new way to get traffic from LinkedIn. “If you go live on LinkedIn they’re pushing it harder than anything else because they have to catch up,” says Patel and Siu. “When someone has to catch up, what does that mean? It means they are going to pull out all the stops to get however much engagement they can. If you want more traffic and it may sound simple, but really, just go live.”
Neil Patel & Eric Siu, discuss LinkedIn Live and how being a first mover on this new platform can drive huge traffic to your videos and related internet properties on their Marketing School podcast (listen below):
If You Want Traffic Go Live On LinkedIn
Let’s talk about a new way to get traffic from LinkedIn called LinkedIn Live. You are familiar with Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Twitter, Instagram, and all those other networks, LinkedIn now has Live. If you go live on LinkedIn they’re pushing it harder than anything else because they have to catch up. When someone has to catch up, what does that mean? It means they are going to pull out all the stops to get however much engagement they can. If you want more traffic and it may sound simple, but really, just go live.
Your LinkedIn Live can be crappy quality. It doesn’t have to be anything amazing. You will get more traffic if you just go live. LinkedIn is a little late to the game but they are blooming right now after the Microsoft acquisition. I do believe they are getting better. Now you are able to take LinkedIn data and combine it with Bing too. There is cool stuff going on there. But they need people to stay on the platform because they are an advertising-based platform. They do sell services and products as well. However, look at it this way, Instagram has Live, Twitch has Live, Twitter has Live, and Facebook has Live. They all have Live. They know numbers wise that Live is the thing that works in keeping people on the platform.
Invite Only Now, But Time to Start Preparing
It’s invite only right now, but it’s time to start preparing for it. We don’t know the way in, but you should start preparing for it, and start going live right now even on the other channels. Even if you suck it doesn’t matter. It’s going to work out for you in the long-term because it’s the first mover advantage here. Try to do anything you can to go live on LinkedIn. You will notice a leaps and bounds increase in your traffic.
There are also tools and integration platforms where you can go live all at once. (These companies include Wirecast, Switcher Studio, Wowza Media Systems, Socialive and Brandlive.) You can actually simulcast across all live platforms with these tools. If you are going to go live on LinkedIn, do it on all of the social platforms because it just gives you more traffic without any extra work on your end. So see if you can find a way to get into LinkedIn Live.
Video meetings, persistent team chat, and consistent in-person connections are all important for keeping a connected feeling with remote employees, says Lisa Walker, Vice President of Brand & Corporate Marketing at Fuze. “Remote employees will always talk about how they feel disconnected from HQ and disconnected from the company,” notes Walker. “That’s just one of the things you always hear from people who are remote.”
There is Just a More Personal Connection With Video
What’s really interesting in managing a distributed team is the importance of video meetings. We know that if a leader turns on video then the rest of the employees on the call will turn on video as well. You have to lead by example there. The nice thing about video is that you are seeing everybody. There is just a more personal connection when you are able to see everyone.
What I say to both managers and employees participating in video call is that it is all about creating the perfect frame. You don’t have to have a clean house, but you have to have a clean shot of yourself in the video. There is kind of a personal brand here. If you have a large team on a video conference from around the country or around the world, everyone has that opportunity to present a personal brand moment. You should be curating at least one good frame. There could be chaos around that frame but there is an opportunity for you to be consistent on that weekly team call.
Video Meetings Help Remote Teams Feel Connected
Every time that team call happens and that video flips on you know what you are getting from people. That’s what we are talking about in terms of work mode. You have to create environments where you can be productive. One of those important environments is video. I think it is really important as a manager to have those video meetings. In those video meetings when you get together, start with a few of those conversations that are more personal and then segway into company updates.
Remote employees will always talk about how they feel disconnected from HQ and disconnected from the company. That’s just one of the things you always hear from people who are remote. Make sure that you are getting ahead of things your team may be hearing about the company. It’s important that you give a very transparent company update when starting a video call. Then get into the team stuff. Just do those first two things off the bat to make sure the team is feeling connected.
Keep a Persistent Team Chat Going
Second, for me is chat. Some people do it over Slack. We obviously here do it over Fuze. There are lots of different tools out there. Keeping a persistent team chat going in that asynchronous communication is just a great way to have the team feel bonded. They will talk about personal and professional in that chat stream and that’s fine. For specific projects where it needs to be more formal, you can create those project chat streams that are separate.
Fuze Team Chat Platform
Bring People Together In Person
The third thing, which is the hardest, because it cost more money, is bringing people together in person as often as you can. For us, within the marketing team at Fuze, we do that twice a year at a minimum. We just did that this past week. It was wonderful. We had our sales kickoff and then we stayed together as a marketing team yesterday and had that time together. Make sure that you are finding those opportunities and making the case for budget if you need to.
The other thing that a lot of managers don’t do and is a potential missed opportunity is that when you are out in other cities meeting with customers or at a conference if you have an employee within striking distance, meet them. Even if there is no office there, take them to coffee or lunch. Take those opportunities, don’t just fly in and out. If you have employees in that region, find a way to go have a personal connection with them and meet face to face.
Fuze sees itself as part of the future of work movement. Digital technologies are generating significant opportunities for both people and companies alike. Employees are demanding consumer-like experiences to match technology in their personal lives, with greater flexibility on where and how they work. Work is personal and employees want the opportunity to choose their workstyles, schedules, and tools.
Marketing innovator Neil Patel says that video is better than most marketing channels out there for getting traffic fast. In his latest video Patel explains how anybody can drive traffic to their website, and more importantly, drive sales of products and services. Taking the video plunge should be on every entrepreneur’s priority list.
Neil Patel, explains how video may be the best marketing channel for instant results:
Tip 1 – Leverage Ubersuggest
The cool thing about video is you can see results faster than traditional SEO or most marketing channels out there. Let’s go in order on what you need to do to get more sales and traffic from videos. The first thing you need to do is leverage Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest is a free tool that’ll show you what keywords are popular. If you don’t know what keywords and topics are popular within your space you will be creating video content that no one wants to watch or hear about.
Tip 2 – Record Into Your Phone
The second thing you need to do is just bust out your phone and start recording into it. Make sure you’re looking at the video. You don’t want to just do audio. You want to break down whatever topic is popular based on what you learn from Ubersuggest. When you’re doing the video, ask questions within your video. Make sure it’s engaging, be fun, laugh, and always smile. I always forget that one but that’s very important. My cameraman always tells me that one but that’s very important.
In addition to that, at the very end, you want to have a call to action that drives people back to your website. For example, at the end of my videos, I tell people to check out my ad agency. When you do that you’ll at least start generating sales. If you don’t have that call to action that you say at the very end, I kid you not, it’s going to be very hard to get sales from that video.
Tip 3 – Go to Rev.com and Get an SRT File
Then I want you to go to Rev.com and get an SRT file. What this does is they’ll do a transcription of the video content after you recorded it and give you an SRT file that you can upload. You will then want to take the video and the SRT file and upload it to each and every single social network out there. You want to do Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, at the bare minimum.
By uploading the SRT file, what you’ll find is a lot of the social sites autoplay the videos and people often don’t have their speakers on, especially when they’re at work. Then they can read the text and follow along. It’ll help boost the engagement.
Tip 4 – Include the Right Keywords
Now that you’ve uploaded this video, at the same time before you hit the publish button, you want to include the right keywords. So you already use Ubersuggest and they gave you ideas. By integrating these keywords within the copy, description, and title, it’ll help you get more traffic.
Tip 5 – Promote the Video
Then you want to promote the video. Go take your email list and send out an email blast and push it out to your list within the first hour. This will help you videos get more traction and make them go more viral. If you have a push notification list, through tools like Subscribers, send out a push about the video and push everyone to it within the first hour. Again, this will help the videos get more views and help them go more viral.
Tip 6 – Respond to All Comments
Last but not least, respond to all comments. The biggest thing when it comes to videos and getting more engagement and getting more sales is you need to engage with the community. When someone leaves a comment, you need to respond to it. By doing that they’re going to build a better connection with you. Then when you sell them products and services they’re more likely to buy.
“I envision a future where everything will be captioned, so the more than 300 million people who are deaf or hard of hearing like me will be able to enjoy videos like everyone else,” said Liat Kaver, a YouTube Product Manager focusing on captions and accessibility. “When I was growing up in Costa Rica, there were no closed captions in my first language, and only English movies had Spanish subtitles. I felt I was missing out because I often had to guess at what was happening on the screen or make up my own version of the story in my head. That was where the dream of a system that could just automatically generate high quality captions for any video was born.”
As YouTube grew, so did the number of videos with captions which now stands at over 1 billion. Kaver says that more than 15 million videos are watched each day with captions enabled.
Caption Technology
“One of the ways that we were able to scale the availability of captions was by combining Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions for videos,” says Kaver. “There were limitations with the technology that underscored the need to improve the captions themselves. Results were sometimes less than perfect, prompting some creators to have a little fun at our expense!”
Kaver says that one of their teams major goals has been to improve automatic caption accuracy via technological improvements in speech recognition, machine learning and increases in training data. “All together, those technological efforts have resulted in a 50 percent leap in accuracy for automatic captions in English, which is getting us closer and closer to human transcription error rates,” she says. “I know from firsthand experience that if you build with accessibility as a guiding force, you make technology work for everyone.”
This is a story of inspiration for all of you wannabe YouTube creators who are afraid to follow your dreams. Alonzo Lerone was working in a bakery, posting some videos on YouTube, but not really believing that he could make a living from YouTube ad revenue. Then Alonzo was fired and his life took a turn for the better.
“Being from a small city, I didn’t think I could make a living off of YouTube,” says Alonzo. “No one heard of Goldsboro. I was working on YouTube during my stint at the bakery. I didn’t have a nine to five, I had a nine to nine job. YouTube was an outlet for me, it was to escape my problems.”
“I was getting vibes so I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know when,” commented Alonzo. “When I got fired from it, I shook their hand and said thank you for the opportunity. When one door closes, another window opens and I left it at that.”
Hard Work and Consistency
“I made an oath to myself in late 2013 where I said, when 2014 comes along I’m going to my classes and I’m going to upload at least one video a week,” said Alonzo. “When people were at the beach during the summers I was working in the books and doing YouTube. By the end of 2014 I realized, oh my gosh I’ve been doing it! If I ever win an award I would totally give my boss a shout out saying thank you for firing me, it gave me more time to do what I love to do.”
“I am able to make a living,” said Alonzo. “I bought a house, paid my car off, paid my school loans off. It’s about saving and being consistent. I don’t want to get to that moment where YouTube feels like work. I’m not uploading three videos in one week. I don’t take a six month break. I’m really consistent.
Advice for YouTube Success!
“My advice is don’t get discouraged because of low views,” says Alonzo. “Don’t delete your videos. When I first started out I was in competition. When I stopped concentrating on the numbers and started focusing on my own content that’s when the numbers came in. I just hit a million subscribers. I feel like I’m on top of the world right now with my channel!”
Facebook is finally bringing monetization to videos that are posted by its users, letting video makers include mid-roll ads, according to Recode. “Industry sources say the social network is going to start testing a new “mid-roll” ad format, which will give video publishers the chance to insert ads into their clips after people have watched them for at least 20 seconds.”
Facebook is careful to match the same ad payout to publishers (55%) as YouTube, which we suspect is to avoid an ad payment war with its video platform rival. Facebook will differentiate its videos by serving a mid-roll ad instead of the dreaded pre-roll that most videos include. However, on YouTube the pre-roll ads can be discontinued by clicking “skip ad” after 5 seconds. It will be interesting to see if Facebook offers a similar way to end the ad interruption.
Facebook has been focused on video for the last few years, and at one point a Facebook executive said that “Facebook will be all video within 5 years.”
“Over the past six months we have been particularly focused on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what’s happening in more immediate and creative ways,” Zuckerberg said earlier this year. “This quarter Candace Payne’s Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times.”
Not everybody is happy about Facebook’s video advertising plans:
Even more reason not to watch video. Advertisers won’t be happy until web video is as dire as US TV experience. https://t.co/ugtpLQp7Yy
Ugh. Mid-roll ads 20 seconds into Fb videos could turn the start of videos into annoying "here's why you should keep watching!" previews https://t.co/b1qlBDaLr6
Google’s DoubleClick announced today the ability to include video with both mobile and desktop native ads. This is important considering that more than half of all ad queries on DoubleClick’s publisher platform are on mobile.
“With the addition of video to our native ads solution, publishers can now capture premium video advertising budgets on their non-video content,” said Jonathan Bellack, DoubleClick’s Director of Product Management of Publisher Platforms.
Chris Quinn, Head of Commercial Operations at Kijiji, which is a subsidiary of eBay, commented on their tests with native ad video:
“The [DoubleClick] native video templates — content and app-install — enable Kijiji to give our advertisers an alternative to banner and static native. We were excited about the ability to run assets seamlessly without embedded video players, which will hopefully give us a jumpstart in the video space. Testing has just begun across our iOS app, and we look forward to seeing positive results and potentially incorporating into our greater offering in 2017.”
DoubleClick Extends Exchange Bidding to Mobile
DoubleClick has also expanded the beta of Exchange Bidding to include mobile apps.
“Exchange Bidding helps publishers maximize demand for every impression by letting them put multiple exchanges into competition in real time without adding any new client-side code,” said Quinn. “Since we announced it earlier this year, the number of participating publishers has grown 4x, the number of exchange partners has doubled, and we’ve moved the product from alpha into closed beta in the US.”
Christian Sieweke, Senior Product Manager at Smaato, commented on their use of Exchange Bidding:
“By integrating directly with DoubleClick for Publishers, Smaato can compete in real time for ad impressions based on price and priority, in parallel with other exchanges. We’re delighted to be an early participant in Exchange Bidding and look forward to expanding this solution to all of our partners.”
DoubleClick Extends Dynamic Ad Insertion To VOD
They also announced that they were extending Dynamic Ad Insertion to video on demand (VOD). Dynamic Ad Insertion delivers seamless, personalized ad experiences to all screens, especially TV.
“Publishers like A+E Networks are now inserting relevant, highly targeted ads into both long- and short-form VOD content across all devices, and delivering personalized ads while eliminating common pain points like buffering,” noted Bellack. “This feature will be capable of serving both direct-sold and programmatic campaigns – in both cases delivering smarter, data-driven ads that perform better.”
YouTube announced today support for High Dynamic Range (HDR), improving the brightness, image contrast and color range of videos. This is yet another step in YouTube’s goal of offering content that can play on large HDTV screens.
“HDR videos have higher contrast, revealing precise, detailed shadows and stunning highlights with more clarity than ever,” noted YouTube software engineer Steven Robertson and product manager Sanjeev Verma in their blog announcement. “Support for wide color gamut means colors are more vibrant. Simply put, HDR unlocks the most spectacular image quality we’ve ever streamed.”
They said that starting right now, you can watch HDR content on HDR TVs with Chromecast Ultra and very soon on all 2016 Samsung SUHD and UHD TVs. Chromecast Ultra enables you to stream up to 4K Ultra HD & HDR picture quality over your WiFi network by simply plugging the device into your TV’s HDMI port. They say that it is extremely fast and has minimal buffering.
If you don’t have an HDR enabled device, video will play in standard dynamic range. YouTube is currently working with partners that will bring more HDR content to the platform. In the meantime, you can check out the first HDR videos uploaded or remastered by YouTube creators that includes MysteryGuitarMan, Jacob + Katie Schwarz, and Abandon Visuals:
“Starting today, any creator can upload HDR videos to YouTube,” says Robertson and Verma. To make sure creators can tell awesome stories with even more color, we’ve been working with companies across the industry. We’ve also outfitted the YouTube Spaces in LA and NYC with all the gear needed to produce great HDR content.”
They added, “HDR adds a whole new dimension of creative freedom and visual spectacle, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what this means for storytelling. We can’t wait to see the amazing videos you’re going to make with HDR.”
Facebook has added the ability to schedule live videos, something popular broadcasters have wanted in order to gather an audience before going live. The feature is being launched this week for Verified Pages, but will go live for everybody soon after, according to Facebook.
“When you schedule a live video, an announcement post will be published to News Feed letting your fans on Facebook know that the broadcast is coming,” noted Peter Roybal, a Facebook Product Manager, and Brian Lin, a Facebook Software Engineer in a blog announcement. “People who see the post can opt in to receive a one-time reminder notification that will alert them shortly before your broadcast begins. Your fans can then join a pre-broadcast lobby directly before the live video starts, where they can connect and interact with other viewers.”
Verified Page users can login via their Publishing Tools section to schedule a live video. They will be able to schedule a live video up to a week in advance, so that viewers can wait in their lobby a few minutes prior to broadcast. Fans will even be able to communicate with other fans in the lobby.
At the conclusion of the video scheduling process, you will be able to easily share a promotional link or embed the announcement on a web page. The idea is that scheduling live videos gives you time to build excitement with your followers and gather a crowd right at the start. Facebook says that your Facebook fans can opt-in to receive a one-time reminder notification alerting them right before your live video starts.
Facebook also will be making their scheduling tools available to third party developers to integrate within their apps.
Facebook provided this How To Guide:
If you’re a Page Admin using the Facebook Live API, it takes only a few steps to schedule a Live broadcast.
1. Navigate to Publishing Tools
Once you’re in Publishing Tools, select “Video Library” and then “Live.”
2. Copy your stream credentials (e.g. steam key, Server URL)
If you need to find the credentials closer to the time you’re going live, they are also available by editing the post in Video Library.
3. Craft your announcement post
Be sure to write an engaging and informative description so your followers know what to expect from your broadcast. You will be able to update the description later if you want to.
4. Finalize your scheduled live broadcast
Put any finishing touches on your post (such as adding a custom image) before you schedule your broadcast.
For a more in-depth look at scheduling a live video—including tips on how to switch to“manual mode” and change your scheduled broadcast—check out this detailed walkthrough.
“Today, we’re introducing a beta version of a new product to help strengthen the bond between you and your viewers, called YouTube Community,” says Kiley McEvoy, YouTube Senior Product Manager, in a blog post. “The brand new Community tab on your YouTube channel gives you a new, simple way to engage with your viewers and express yourself beyond video. Now you can do things like text, live videos, images, animated GIFs and more, giving you easier, lightweight ways to engage with your fans more often in between uploads, in real time.”
“Several months ago YouTube came to us to talk about a product they were working on,” announced Hank Green of the vlogbrothers very popular YouTube Channel. They have nearly 2.9 million subscribers to their channel and have accumulated over 643 million video views. Green once noted that YouTube only charges a $2 CPM and that they (the creators) only get 55% of that, which would mean they are making a living off of their channel. “I was a little dubious, but I’m genuinely excited about this change which debuts today.”
Green gave an example of how they were thinking of doing a health comedy series but they previously would have needed to use outside social media. “We wanted to make the show with lots of infographics and pictures and recipes and live shows so it would feel deeply connected, but to do that would mean maintaining a billion new social media profiles, a thought I just could not stomach. This has been an ongoing problem because we’ve always had to build homes off YouTube for the non-video community, stuff like if you want to submit a photo or painting to the art assignment you have to do so via tumblr or Twitter or Facebook.”
“YouTube always thought of itself as being about video, but for many of us it’s mostly been about community,” Green added. “I’d argue that the best YouTube channels aren’t just shows you Leanback and watch, their communities you’re part of. For a long time that was seen as YouTube’s great weakness, like in the early days YouTube actually released a product called Leanback that allows you to watch videos without engaging with them, because advertisers especially back then thought engaged viewers were bad news. For one thing, engaged viewers are less likely to watch ads.”
Despite YouTube’s push to be more of a passive TV like platform, Green says that “in spite of it all youtube has continued to be a community platform” and with Community tab launch it shows they have finally embraced it.
It’s interesting that with the virtual demise of Google Plus, their open attempt to compete as a social platform with Facebook and others, Google all along had one of the most popular social platforms on the planet, YouTube. According to Alexa, YouTube is the second most visited site in the world.
YouTube is bigger than any cable network in the US and its growth has been accelerating “up at least 50% year over year for three straight years.” In fact, the number of people watching YouTube per day is up 40% year over year since March 2014. Over 80% of YouTube views are from outside of the US with 88 country versions covering 76 different languages, which includes almost everybody. The time people spend watching YouTube videos is also up, with mobile viewing average sessions now over 40 minutes which is up 50% year over year.
Clearly, Google is using YouTube to counter its number one online ad revenue competitor, Facebook. After all, Facebook itself has made YouTube its number one competitor by focusing its energies on video. In June, a Facebook executive openly said that Facebook would be all video in 5 years.
“It will probably be all video,” says Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, when asked where Facebook will be in 5 years. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
The Community Tab lets channels post text, images, live videos, surveys and let’s people comment and communicate just like a social media platform should. You can sign up to get notifications and many more features are said to be coming soon.
“I’m really excited about it, because one it means Hank and I can finally make our YouTube channels the community hubs we’ve always wanted them to be,” said Green. “We did work closely with YouTube on the development of the Community tab and I do think it’s awesome!”
Ryan Lung started his YouTube video channel after graduating from Cornell University in 2011 and searching out daily video updates on YouTube as entertainment because he didn’t have a TV. That experience inspired him to launch his VlogAfterCollege YouTube channel.
“When I first graduated from college, I didn’t have TV,” says Lung. “All I had was Internet, and I ended up watching a lot of YouTube videos. I became really inspired by the daily vloggers and I thought that that would be a really interesting and cool way to make a living.”
Getting His Vlog Started
So Lung went out and created his first vlog with his iPhone 4, which has a very small camera lens. “Everything that I would film would look very, very close to my face even though I would pull it super far away.” he said.
“In the first month of vlogging, I think I got around 100 subscribers,” Lung said. “I think most of them were just my friends and family members, but I got a lot of encouraging words, and I just decided to keep going.”
Lung doesn’t believe that a lot of expensive video gear is necessary to create a successful YouTube Channel. “It’s more about your technique and how you tell your story,” said Lung. “I only have my camera and a selfie stick to film the dog Corgi shots and I have a tiny little tripod that I stick on to my camera. That’s pretty much all I use.”
Time is Key to Making and Promoting Videos
He says it’s more important to spend your time making and promoting your videos. “I want to make sure that it’s seen, so I spend as much time and thought marketing my video as I do creating my video.” says Lung. “I actually spend a lot of time generating the thumbnail. I create multiple versions, and I try texting it to my friends and ask them which one makes them want to click and watch the video.”
Vlog SEO Creates Success
Lung often uses a keyword approach to picking topics for his videos. “I came up with a lot of my titles based off of typing keywords on YouTube and looking at what was suggested,” he said. “I noticed that ‘taste test’ was the trending keyword. After using that keyword, I noticed a lot of my traffic came from suggested videos that were also about taste tests.”
Seeing his video views increase due to being found in specific but popular keyword searches on YouTube, Lung was inspired to create a separate channel for his puppy. “I realised that I had a lot of different segments that could stand on their own,” said Lung. “So I decided to make a channel specifically for Great Gatsby the Corgi, where I could highlight all of the Corgi footage. Someone had suggested to me to make a compilation video. That video is called ‘Puppyhood in 365 days’. It now has over 2.6 million views. And when you search the word ‘corgi’, it’s the first video that appears.”
Making a Living Off His Vlog
“By doing that, I was able to drive people back to my vlogging channel and get subscribers for both,” he said. “Success to me is being able to create content on what you’re most passionate about and make a living off of that. And that’s the goal that I’m chasing.”
Lung’s VlogAfterCollege Channel has amassed close to 170,000 subscribers so far while his newer Great Gatsby the Corgi Channel has just over 71,000 subscribers. Between the two channels Lung has generated over 27 million video views, all preceded by an ad that generates revenue for both himself and Google.
LinkedIn has added a video option for LinkedIn Influencers in varied professions to offer advice. It appears that the video are spawned from questions created by LinkedIn, with many Influencers creating a video to a question. I imagine that the questions will eventually be opened up to others on the platform.
This is a continuation of its strategy of being the world’s business platform and professional portal. “Over the past few months, we’ve worked hard to make your feed a valuable resource for dynamic conversations, professional news and stories,” commentedJonathan (Jasper) Sherman-Presser, who’s a Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn. “Today your LinkedIn Feed will come to life in a whole new way with the introduction of 30-second videos from LinkedIn Influencers.”
LinkedIn invited 500 Influencers to start adding 30 second videos on topics that they typically write about, speak about and are leading experts on. The videos become sort of mini tutorials on business and professional strategy on hundreds of topics ranging from education, diversity, leadership, marketing, sales, personal growth and much more. It’s likely that LinkedIn will open this up to many others over time.
All of the videos from LinkedIn Influencer’s that you follow will show up in your feed. The videos are designed to spark a conversation with other Influencers weighing in with comments and allowing you to comment as well. You can also share the video with your LinkedIn network or on Facebook and Twitter. At launch, videos cannot be shared on YouTube or embedded into articles on the web. Hopefully, the embedding feature will be added soon so that sites like WebProNews can embed videos into related articles.
I envision that these videos will also be used to comment on current news related to an Influencer’s area of interest. For instance, Google launches a new feature and Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand could create a 30 second video on its impact on SEO. “We encourage you to share your thoughts by commenting on videos and inviting others to join the conversation by sharing the videos with your network.” says Sherman-Presser. “By doing so, you have the opportunity to engage more deeply with the people and topics that matter in your industry.”
New Economy Editor at LinkedIn, Caroline Fairchild, asked: What’s the #1 thing founders should avoid doing in a pitch meeting? You can view the answers to that question on LinkedIn from business guru Guy Kawasaki, Homebrew VC Partner Hunter Walk, venture investor Christopher Schroeder and many others.
Although we can’t embed the videos responses to the question. The answers were generally very good and because of the 30 second requirement they were succinct. In just a few minutes you could easily listen to all of the video responses from a particular question.
KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg and others – How should colleges be kept accountable for the success of their students?
Facebook’s goal is to connect with everyone, yes every single person in the world. Not just that, but Facebook wants to connect to everyone at all times, in every waking moment. Facebook envisions a future where you will always be engaging with some part of the Facebook ecosystem, whether it’s on its mega social platform at Facebook, using it’s search engine, messaging a business associate or communicating on video or via a virtual reality environment.
But first lets talk business.
“I often talk about how when we develop new products we think about it in three phases, said Zuckerberg. “First, building a consumer use case. Then, second, making it so that people can organically interact with businesses. And then third, on top of that, once there’s a large volume of people interacting with businesses, give businesses tools to reach more people and pay. And that’s ultimately the business opportunity.”
During the earnings call yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg opened the curtain into Facebook’s plans, strategies and dreams for the future. He first provided the latest metrics illustrating Facebook’s continued success, 1.7 billion people now use Facebook every month, and 1.1 billion people use it every day. He said that Facebook revenue grew by 59% year-over year to $6.4 billion, and advertising revenue was up 63% to $6.2 billion.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook said that Q2 ad revenue grew 63% and mobile ad revenue hit $5.2 billion, up 81% year-over-year, and was approximately 84% of total ad revenue. Facebook is now truly a mobile app rather than a desktop experience for the vast majority of its users.
Zuckerberg said that they continue to see excellent growth and over the past year Facebook has added over 200 million people using Facebook on a monthly basis. Time spent per person increased double digit percentages year-over-year across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. And that doesn’t even include WhatsApp yet.
Facebook is still growing rapidly and that’s because it has continued to evolve. It’s evolution has happened because of increased bandwidth, technological advancements, acquisitions of new platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram and most importantly continuing to be on the cutting edge of what people want in a social network. All of this while simultaneously building a successful business model that pays for this evolution.
What’s really interesting however, is how Zuckerberg sees Facebook transforming in the future. “Our results show our progress as we work to make the world more open and connected across our three-, five- and ten-year horizons,” he said. “Over the next three years we are focused on continuing to build our community and help people share more of what matters to them. The next five years are about building our newer products into full ecosystems with developers and businesses. And over the next ten years we are working to build new technologies to help everyone connect in new ways.”
Facebook is seeking to be the world’s business platform, not just the peoples. More on this below in the Search section on a Facebook future where it is competing with LinkedIn.
“We’re excited to announce that we now have 60 million monthly active business Pages on Facebook,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. “We also continue to grow the number of active advertisers on our platform. This shows that both our free and paid products are providing value to marketers of all sizes around the world. We continue to focus on our three priorities — capitalizing on the shift to mobile, growing the number of marketers using our ad products, and making our ads more relevant and effective.”
Trust me, this is just the beginning of Facebook’s morphing into both a personal and business platform in the future.
The Future of Facebook is Video
Facebook used to be mostly text and over the years they changed to be photo centric, with many people using Facebook as their family photo album. People still do that but Zuckerberg envisions a huge change coming. “We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services.”
“Over the past six months we have been particularly focused on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what’s happening in more immediate and creative ways,” Zuckerberg said. “This quarter Candace Payne’s Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times. Live is also changing the way we see politics, as news organizations and delegates go Live from the Republican and Democratic conventions. And we have seen in Minnesota and Dallas how Live can shine a light on important moments as they happen.”
At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. “It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video,” Mendelsohn said. “I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We’re seeing a massive increase as I’ve said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video.”
“When you think about what’s happening on video on our platform we’re really excited by the production and consumption of video and we’re seeing the full range from people posting the things in their personal lives; the power of what a mobile phone can produce and distribute now is pretty incredible when you compare it to just a few years ago to some of the most sophisticated content producers in the world producing for us,” added Sandberg.
Facebook Focuses on Search
Facebook is moving into the search space aggressively, definitely to help it compete with Twitter and perhaps even Google in the future. Facebook launched true keyword search in late 2014 that allows users to search not just profile names or just your friends posts, but also everyone’s public posts. And, if you didn’t know, all postings default at public, which means that anyone can search for your posts.
The first goal for Facebook with search is to become more like Twitter, where people post their thoughts, feelings and most importantly news reports, especially the on-the-scene kind. When the next plane lands in the Hudson, Facebook wants the survivor standing on the wing to use their platform to post about this breaking news, not Twitter. More precisely, Facebook wants you to use Facebook Live to stream your personalized live news coverage.
“We’re making good progress on core services within the Facebook app, like Search,” Zuckerberg stated. “A growing way people use search is to find what people are saying about a topic across the more than 2.5 trillion posts in our network. Now, people are doing more than 2 billion searches a day, between looking up people, businesses and other things that they care about. Continuous, steady improvement to services like search are an important part of helping people connect and realizing our mission.”
He also said this in minimizing their true plans, in my opinion.
So I’d say we’re around the second phase of that in search now. We have a pretty big navigational use case where people look up people and pages and groups that they want to get to and look at and search. One of the big growing use cases that we’re investing a lot in is looking up the content in the ecosystem and that is an area that we’re very excited about which helps people find more content.
But certainly there’s a reasonable amount of behavior in there which is looking for things that over time could be monetizeable or commercial intense and at some point we will probably want to work on that but we’re still in the phase of just making it easier for people to find all the content they want and connect with businesses organically.
But what’s their next goal? Facebook has certainly focused on the business use of their platform as they continue to look for monetization opportunities. My guess is that Facebook will seek to compete with LinkedIn as the business platform of record.
Over the last few years LinkedIn has certainly moved from a glorified directory of business professionals to a platform for business related news, conversation and connection. Facebook has the platform but would need to figure out how to easily separate family life from business life, which could be done rather easily. With Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Facebook will be highly motivated to compete.
Google tried to compete with Facebook with Google+ and it failed miserably, but that’s because it’s harder to get people to change their social habits than it is their search habits. You don’t need your friends to use Facebook Search in order for you to find it useful, but you definitely need your friends to move to a new social platform to make it work for you. That was Google’s dilemma, but it won’t be Facebook’s.
“Since it refocused on keywords, Facebook is now seeing 2 billion searches per day of its 2.5 trillion posts,” stated TechCrunch writer Josh Constine. “That’s compared to 1.5 billion searches per day in July 2015, and 1 billion in September 2012. That’s a 33% climb in just 9 months.”
That’s lets than half a reported 3.5 billion searches per day on Google. The difference is that Google’s searches are monitizable, while Facebook searches, not so much. However, this must scare the heck out of Google because it shows how ingrained people are to use Facebook for search. Therefore, over time I predict that Facebook will add web indexing to it’s search engine. They already have 3.5 billion searches, why not open up search to everything and in the process open up a huge monetization opportunity.
One other prediction, Facebook will disconnect its search app from just Facebook.com, just like they did Messenger. Then, voilà, Facebook is competing with Google.
Making Instagram Stronger
Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion while it was just getting off the ground. It is now center to its plans on connecting with everyone in the world on a constant always on basis. That’s why Instagram is so important to Facebook, it has a foothold with younger people and its active user base is not a clone of Facebook’s, so it expands the corporate Facebook’s universe of connectivity and engagement.
“Over the next five years we are working hard to build ecosystems around some of our newer products,” said Zuckerberg. “Instagram now has more than 500 million monthly actives, with more than 300 million daily. Now we’re working to make the experience more engaging.”
He said that when Instagram, despite user pushback, began to rank its feed in order to improve the experience, that they are already seeing a “positive impact” with people spending more time and share more content within the platform.
As always, business is important to Zuckerberg as well. “We’ve also introduced our advertising tools on Instagram and we’re seeing marketers engage with people in creative and innovative ways.”
Messaging with Messenger & WhatsApp
“In the two years since we separated Messenger from the main Facebook app — which was a controversial decision at the time — we’ve improved performance and given people new ways to express themselves,” commented Zuckerberg. “Now, for the first time, more than 1 billion people are using Messenger every month.”
Facebook sees a huge opportunity with messaging because it moves them closer to their goal of connecting everyone on a constant always on basis. That’s why they paid $22 billion for WhatsApp, which is a service that barely had a business model.
“I’m also happy with the updates we’re making to WhatsApp — which also has a community of more than 1 billion people,” said Zuckerberg. “This quarter we launched new desktop apps and end-to-end encryption, and millions of people are using WhatsApp’s voice calling features.”
Facebook has big plans for messaging because not only does it help them bring even more people into Facebook’s universe, but it moves them into the business space, where Facebook desperately wants to be, because that’s where the money is.
“The scale we’ve achieved with our messaging services makes it clear that they are more than just a way to chat with friends,” Zuckerberg noted. “That’s why we’re also making it easier for people to connect with groups and businesses as well. We are going to keep focusing on this over the next several years.”
Facebook owned messaging has now taken over standard text messaging according to Zuckerberg.
“Between Messenger and WhatsApp I think we’re around 60 billion messages a day which is something like three times more than the peak of global SMS traffic.”
It’s incredible to think that Facebook now owns the messaging space. Who would have thought that 3 years ago?
New Technologies
“I’m also excited about the early progress we’re making on our 10-year initiatives,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during their recent earnings announcement. “We are investing in new technologies to give more people a voice — including the 4 billion people around the world who aren’t yet online — and helping more people take advantage of the opportunities that come with the internet.”
Facebook is seeking to connect everyone in the world, regardless of any obstacle. It’s a long term plan, but Facebook is on it.
“One of the biggest opportunities to grow our community is in developing countries where connectivity is less advanced than what we take for granted here at home,” Zuckerberg said. “So over the past couple of years, we’ve began making steady improvements to our apps to make them work regardless of the device or connection people are using. We also built a light-weight version of our Android app, called Facebook Lite, that is tuned to work on 2G networks and is now used by more than 100 million people.”
Virtual reality is another huge area of investment for Facebook, especially with their $2 billion purchase of Oculus. They see VR as an extension of connecting and sharing. Know one really knows the future of VR, but it will be deeply engrained in advertising in the future and since all of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, they need to be in this space.
“We believe that virtual reality can help people share richer experiences and help everyone understand what’s going on around the world,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s really early for us in VR but we’re hitting some important milestones. As of the second quarter more than 1 million people a month are using Oculus on mobile phones through our Gear VR 4partnership with Samsung.”
Zuckerberg also commented on the potential revenue importance of their investment in VR:
“More than 300 apps are already available at the Oculus store for Gear VR, we’ve filled all of our pre-orders for Oculus Rift and we are seeing increasing demand from retail as stores plan for the holidays. While it’s still early for augmented reality, we’re doing AR research and are seeing lightweight versions of AR technology today in mobile apps like MSQRD.”
Facebook is Just Getting Started
“So that’s a recap of the progress we’re making in our 10 year plan,” said Zuckerberg. “We have a saying at Facebook that our journey is only 1% done — and while I’m happy with our progress, we have a lot more work to do to grow our community and connect the whole world. That means making big investments and taking risks — focusing not just on what Facebook is, but on what it can be.”
