Category: #TheYouTubeAd That Goes Straight To The Heart Winner: Budweiser | Chicago Cubs 2016 World Series Champions | Harry Caray’s Last Call | Fly The W (VaynerMedia, MediaCom)
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Category: #TheYouTubeAd That’s Your Guilty Pleasure Winner: Dear Kitten: Beginnings // Presented by Buzzfeed & Friskies (Buzzfeed)
Category: #TheYouTubeAd That Puts Stars In Your Eyes Winner: Best Fiends – WARNING: Don’t Download Best Fiends (Best Fiends In House)
Category: #TheYouTubeAd That Knows No Limits Winner: #Pokemon20: Pokémon Super Bowl Commercial (Omelet, MediaCom)
Category: #TheYouTubeAd That Takes A Stand Winner: The Unseen | It Can Wait | AT&T (BBDO, Hearts & Science)
Category: #TheYouTubeAd That Says It In Six Winner: Old Spice | Sweat | #smellegendary (Wieden+Kennedy)
Google’s Transparency Report shows that Google was asked to remove over a billion links over the past 12 months and has complied with copyright holder requests 90% of the time. TorrentFreak crunched the numbers and found that Google was asked to remove 1,007,741,143 total links from 945,000 different domains. TorrentFreak says that a total of 908,237,861 links were deleted.
The music industry dominated the take down requests, with over a quarter billion over the last 2 years by BPI, which represents the UK’s recorded music industry. Nearly 98% of url’s reported by this organization were removed.
The contention is that music “doesn’t just happen,” it’s an investment. A recent report by IFPI, Investing In Music, details the significant investment of the music industry (particularly record labels) make in creating hit songs and popular artists. The report says that music companies invest US$4.5 billion annually in discovering, nurturing and promoting artists. It’s no wonder they are actively fighting illegal sharing of their product.
File sharing sites were the biggest targets of the removal requests:
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.”
YouTube has launched End Screens for videos, allowing creators to add a clickable promotional page at the end of videos that works on both mobile devices and desktop computers. Previously, video makers would have to upload a promo page and it would only work on the desktop.
Point viewers to other videos, playlists, or channels on YouTube
Call for subscriptions to your channel
Promote your website, merchandise, and crowdfunding campaigns
End Screens are embedded within the video and appear during the last 5-20 seconds. They can include up to 4 elements to promote your content, channel and websites, which on the desktop offers more information on hover or on a mobile device on tap. YouTube notes that other interactive elements, like card teasers, featured content, and branding watermarks, are suppressed during the End Screen.
According to YouTube, elements can feature the following types of content:
Video or playlist: You can select to always feature your most recently uploaded video; allow YouTube to select a video from your channel to best suit the viewer; or pick any video or playlist from your channel, public, or unlisted content.
Subscribe: Encourage subscriptions to your channel.
Channel: Promote another channel and provide a custom message.
This feature is planned to get more robust over time as YouTube receives feedback and data on performance, viewer behavior, device and context. They say that the End Screen will not be played when a video is viewed in background mode and for this reason YouTube recommends not pointing to elements or adding crucial content to the end screen part of the video.
Encourage viewers to click using calls to action for different end screen elements.
Make sure you leave enough space and time at the end of the video for an end screen. Make sure you consider the video’s last 20 seconds when editing it.
Consider timing different end screen elements to appear at different times.
“After testing End Screens with a number of creators, we’ve incorporated feedback to make the tool work even better,” said Muli Salem, Product Manager at Google. “We couldn’t be happier to make it available to every creator on YouTube. So how will you use End Screens? We can’t wait to see the ideas you come up with.”
Google has made it easy to watch the final presidential debate right on YouTube. “Over the past three debates you’ve come to YouTube to follow live coverage from more news organizations than ever before,” says Brandon Feldman, who is YouTube’s head of news partnerships. “And Wednesday’s third and final debate will be no exception.”
YouTube will be hosting a number of news channels airing the debate starting at 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday, October 19:
The debate will be moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News and is expected to be very entertaining considering the Wikileaks releases that showed an extreme Clinton coziness with the media when she was running against Bernie Sanders. Expect Trump to tout that the election is being rigged, with evidence this time from Wikileaks, while Clinton continues to push Trump as aggressive with woman based on newly released allegations of alleged behavior a decade ago. It will be fun to watch!
Google has purchased FameBit, a technology and marketing platform that helps brands link up with social media stars on YouTube and Twitter. This is part of a growing trend where Google and others realize that preroll video ads are not the future and that marketing integration into content is the smart way to reach millennial’s and even younger audiences.
Ironically, that’s how television started in the 1950’s, where every show was brought to you by a product and often that product was integrated into the content.
“We believe that Google’s relationship with brands and YouTube’s partnerships with creators, combined with FameBit’s technology and expertise, will help increase the number of branded content opportunities available, bringing even more revenue into the online video community,” noted Ariel Bardin, Vice President, Product Management at Google.
FameBit provides a modern version of this, telling marketers that it will grow your customer base via tutorials, comedic skits, mentions, routines, DIY videos, game plays, lookbooks, vlogs and hauls. What this means is that FameBit, and now YouTube, will connect your brand with YouTube stars and help popular YouTuber’s make additional revenue in the process.
“Every year, more and more brands are making YouTube essential to their marketing strategy,” said Bardin. “In fact, in the last year alone, the top 100 advertisers have increased their spend on YouTube video ads by 50 percent.”
Google knows that even though brands have increased their marketing on YouTube, what they really want are deeper connections with YouTube stars and through extension their fans.
“As brands continue to embrace the value of YouTube, they’re also taking their investments one step further, partnering with creators on branded content opportunities such as product placements, promotions and sponsorships,” he said. “As we look to the future, we want even more creators and brands to come together and realize the benefits of these creative collaborations.”
Unlike Google search, YouTube video is not inherently a lead generation opportunity, but rather is more like TV, promoting brand recognition and brand favorability. Fortunately for Google, that’s what Madison Avenue sells and Google wants to tap into more of their dollars.
According to eMarketer TV ad spending will be $72.01 billion in 2016 with digital ad spending just slightly under that. But with advertising in video formats from YouTube, Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, etc…, digital ad spend will increase as a percentage. By 2020, it’s predicted that digital ad revenue will be 37% higher than TV.
Of course, digital delivery of TV is also on the rise, replacing the cable middlemen and ultimately making digital the primary way to consume video content.
“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.
“360 is a video format that unlike traditional video, is capturing in full 360, so full spherical,” commented Kurt Wilms, Senior Product Manager at YouTube. “When we talk about 360 at YouTube, we’re talking about filming content and viewing content in this new video format.”
“VR at YouTube is all about how viewers are experiencing this,” Wilms said. “VR means you’re watching the content in a specialized headset that allows for really immersive viewing and really transports you in a way that isn’t possible if you’re watching on your phone or on your desktop computer.”
YouTube has developed a special camera to create 360-degree videos:
“360 video as a format has been out for a while but up until recently, people haven’t had a great way to consume in a way that was immersive,” noted Bryce Reid, a User Experience Designer for YouTube. “What I’m really excited about is now that we have all these new technologies for viewing the content, it can really transport people. So I don’t think of it as using a camera to create a scene, I think of it as like a personal teleporter where you can send people to a new place. And that’s really exciting.”
“Telling traditional stories but putting a new spin on them with 360 is something that all creators should be thinking about across all content verticals,” says Wilms.
“When I’m filming in 360, I try to place myself inside that camera,” says Reid. “I want to make sure that the scene that I’m telling captures their attention and focuses them in the direction that I want them to be looking, rather than aiming. So if you really want someone to look that way, do something over there and then that will gather some people’s attention.”
“Whether it’s up down, left or right and really the viewers feeling like they’re present there, they’re actually in the film maker’s shoes.” says Wilms.
“There aren’t do’s or don’ts yet and I think that we’re looking for creators to define that,” said Reid. “We know that there’s some basic rules about comfort, like you know, don’t spin people around and make them sick but other than that, it’s really wide open.”
“Getting started with 360 is actually really easy,” Wilms said. “You can go out and buy a camera, consumer grade cameras that aren’t very expensive. They integrate with YouTube. You can start filming immediately and upload your content directly to YouTube and start exploring and filming and seeing what works and what doesn’t for your content. Viewers with a mobile phone, with a desktop computer, with a smart TV will be able to watch your content without any special hardware and really allow viewers to experience things like they’ve never experienced before.”
“360 is best when you want someone to be really close to something and to feel like they were there,” commented Reid. “To form a memory of it. It’s not really like a thing that I watched, it’s a place I was at.”
“One of recent examples is creators are starting to use 360 to live stream,” says Wilms. “Doing things like putting a 360 camera on a red carpet at an award show to give viewers a whole new perspective and watch things live like they never could before.”
“I’m really excited to see all of the traditional things applied to VR and applied to spherical video and see what sticks,” said Reid. “We really don’t know the answer yet. There’s going to be whole new genre’s that we don’t even know about that are going to emerge from this and it’s really exciting about what that’s going to be.”
Google is gearing up to be the go-to place for Rio Olympic Games information. “Next week, the 2016 cauldron will be lit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where thousands of athletes will come together to represent the strength and pride of their home countries with the world as their audience,” says Google Product Manager Jonathan Livni, in a post on the Google Search blog. “In celebration of the next chapter in Olympics history, we’re bringing the best our products have to offer to help people around the world stay up-to-date with the Olympic Games Rio 2016.
Livni lists these products that will help you keep up with the Rio Games:
Discover the event schedule, medal counts, and athlete information in Search
Get results and view TV schedules in 30+ countries
Watch official broadcasters’ event highlights on YouTube in 60+ countries
Explore Rio and venues in Google Maps
Keep up to date with the latest search Trends from around the world
“If you search on the Google app on Android and iOS, you’ll also see an option to get automatic updates on top event and medal wins, so you’ll never miss a beat,” says Livni.
YouTube & The Rio Olympics
“In the last 12 months, over 23,000 years of content have been watched on YouTube for the four most popular Olympic Games’ sports alone – athletics, gymnastics, diving and swimming, and volleyball,” commented Google’s Christoph Heimes, Head of News and Sports Partnerships, EMEA at YouTube. “To put this in perspective, that’s the equivalent of watching all 17 days of the Olympic Games, 24 hours a day, not once, but over half a million times. Nearly two thirds of that viewership has happened on mobile devices — and even more in countries like the U.S., U.K. and Japan.”
YouTube is sending 15 of their top creators to Rio to live stream everything except the games themselves, because NBC will be broadcasting these considering they paid $1.226 billion for the rights! You can also watch NBC and other official broadcasters’ video highlights on YouTube in more than 60 countries around the world, including the BBC (U.K.), America Movil (Latin America excluding Brazil), NHK (Japan) and many others.
Google will link all of these official broadcasters’ highlights directly into Google Search and YouTube Watch Cards for the Rio Games.
According to the YouTube Summer Games Report by the Google Trends team, the majority of time spent watching sports content happens on mobile. In the past 12 months, mobile devices accounted for 65% of Olympic sports videos global watch time.
Sports related content drives fans not just to YouTube, but to search as well. The Games are motivating more searches globally than the last World Cup and past two UEFA European Championships.
Brands on YouTube Tying into Rio Olympic Games
Brands are also heavily committed to the Rio Games, uploading ads celebrating the athletes, culture, and passion around the Olympic Games, and they are being watched in big numbers.
“From April 2016 through June 2016, ads from Worldwide and National Olympic Partners have already received the equivalent of over 400 years worth of watch time,” stated Heimes. “From epic wins to all-star performances, YouTube will bring you the best from Rio, before, during and after the Games through official broadcaster channels and celebration via content creators.”
“Even if you’re a world away, preview the places where the world’s most talented athletes will make history and explore the breathtaking beauty of Brazil,” said Livni. “We hope you’ll let Google be your guide.”
Pokemon Go, launched July 6, 2016, is arguably the fastest growing game ever. In that spirit YouTube Trends wondered just how big is it? “We asked the YouTube data, and can confirm that “Pokemon Go” is a unique video game phenomenon like no other,” commented YouTube Lead Gaming Curator Jeff Rubin in a blog post for Yahoo Trends. “After just a few weeks, it’s clear “Pokemon Go” is big.”
That’s Jeff Rubin in the lead pic above.
Overall Pokemon Go Stats
Craig Smith over at DMR scoured the web for Pokemon Go stats seen in his blog post. Here are a few of the most illustrative stats on the popularity of Pokemon Go:
From a peak of over 25 million US active users, there are now just over 20 million.
Users are spending 43 minutes a day playing, more than any other social app.
YouTube Pokemon Go Stats
“We compared the launch week of Pokemon Go’s with the launch week of other blockbusters from 2016,” he said. “We found that the launch of “Pokemon Go” received twice as much watchtime as “Overwatch,” and three times as much as “Tom Clancy’s The Division.” Overall, since launch, “Pokemon Go” has racked up millions of hours of watchtime and consistently been one of the top 3 games on YouTube (trailing only “Minecraft” and “Grand Theft Auto V”).”
Rubin noted that one video related to Pokemon Go on YouTube is the “2014 Google Maps April Fools’ Day prank”, which has seen its views and watchtime pop up since the game was launched.
All Pokemon Go players must swear allegiance to one of three teams – Team Mystic, Team Valor, or Team Instinct. Using YouTube search and watch data they were able to determine which team is the most popular. “We found that, in terms of search queries, Valor jumped out to an early lead but was soon overtaken by Mystic,” Rubin said. “They’re currently running neck-and-neck, both ahead of Team Instinct.”
He says the best part of Pokemon Go’s popularity is that the Pokemon theme song is back! “And that’s the way we like it,” Rubin says!
Googles Paul Muret, VP, Display, video & Analytics at Google, says that Google’s research shows that the average mobile site takes 19 seconds to load. If however, through optimization you can get your site to load within 5 seconds or less, Google estimates that you can earn twice as much revenue than those at the 19 second average.
“Think about that for a minute,” said Muret in a post on the DoubleClick Publisher Blog this week. “That’s a long time! Not only is this frustrating for users but it’s also a huge missed opportunity for publishers.”
A web surfers sensitivity to website speed have gone up significantly in the last few years. In a recent study of google.com search, the Google team found that every four hundred millisecond delay in delivering search results resulted in a half point drop in overall search volume. “It’s about the time it takes to blink and on mobile the situation is even more important,” commented Muret in a talk at the DoubleClick Leadership Summit earlier this week. “Creating a great user experience necessarily means making it super fast, but an alarming 77% percent of publishers today, their web pages take more than 10 seconds to load, and the average is actually 19 seconds.”
AMP for Ads
Google’s main initiative to make the mobile web faster is a the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP), launched last Fall, which is an open sourced global community of publishers and other tech companies. Google’s analysis shows that mobile web pages that use AMP HTML load four times faster and use 10 times less data on average than non-AMP mobile web pages. Over 145 million AMP pages have been created so far from 640,000 demands. Google sees AMP as a first step because it only covers publisher content, but not the ads, which means opening a web page still involves “much slower loading javascript bundles.”
At the DoubleClick conference Muret announced AMP for Ads, a new initiative to incorporate AMP technology into the ads themselves in order to make the entire mobile experience faster. In an example that Paul Muret gave the Washington Post, which is an early adopter of AMP and AMP for Ads, instead of the ad taking 4 seconds longer to load than the publishers content, with AMP for Ads it loads seamlessly at the same time as the mobile page content.
AMP for Landing Pages
Google announced “AMP for Landing Pages” to make the click-through fast as well. This much speedier experience is likely to significantly increase conversions for mobile marketers.
“Making experiences fast is the first step, but they also need to be really well integrated into their environments into the context that they sit in,” said Muret. “If ads are not integrated well it can lead to ad blindness, or worse, annoyance and ad blocking. As an industry we need to come together and think about creating better ads for all of our users.”
Muret believes that good integration starts with native advertising. He said that we need the ads to really fit into the context of experience.
DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM)
If you are a DoubleClick user this will be of interest to you, Muret announced programmatic native in DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) which “brings the power of native to all advertisers to be able to run programmatically at scale across all their campaigns instead of delivering arbitrary of rectangles of content all over the place.” He said that advertiser’s can create asset bundles that can include headlines, images, and colors that are “dynamically fit to the form and function of the page it’s on.” This should make for a much more integrated experience which Google hopes will result in less ad blindness, less blocking and more clicks!
Google’s DoubleClick also wants to make sure that there is enough inventory for these dynamic programmatic ads. That’s why Muret also announced that DoubleClick was expanding their support for native and Double-Click for Publishers to include ALL app and web content and ALL deal types, programmatic and reservations. What this means for DoubleClick is that they now offer full coverage of the massive shift to native advertising.
Muret noted that DoubleClick’s new technology, in a test with eBay, caused a 3 times increase in user engagement compare to eBay’s normal non-native ads.
Programmatic Video
Video is the future of internet advertising without a doubt, and of course DoubleClick and Google are on top of this trend. Muret said that an amazing 85% of “Ad Age Top 100 Advertisers” have already bought programmatic video ads on DoubleClick Bid Manager. More importantly, they are seeing a 550% increase in programmatic video revenue from TV & media companies year over year.
Google, like many other tech media companies, is at the forefront of the video advertising revolution that has been long predicted, but is now finally happening. One of the key trends is multi-device viewing which Google sees as an opportunity to deliver video ads in even more places while users seamlessly move back and forth between different content formats.
“Over 90% of people use multiple devices sequentially to accomplish a task,”said Meghan Lee, Agency Development Manager for Google AdWords. “Adwords advertisers are used to a very simple and clear way of measurement and they have that same expectation on mobile.”
Outstream Video
Muret also announced a new product from DoubleClick, Outstream Video, which is for non-video content. “For advertisers this means getting additional reach with the power of sight, sound and motion,” Muret told the conference audience. “For publishers this means tapping into TV budgets and driving yield even when the the content is more traditional.”
Outstream Video ads are served outside of a video player, often between paragraphs of text, typically without sound. According to Google, interstitials, native, and in-feed are types of outstream video. An example of outstream video ads is the autoplay silent video on Facebook, for instance.
VR & AR Ads
Google is also very aware of another massive disruption and opportunity in digital advertising, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Research by Digi-Capital predicts that VR and AR will be a $150 billion industry by 2020. The study forecasts that AR (augmented reality), a less intense experience, will take the lion’s share around $120 billion and VR $30 billion.
Virtual Reality is a technology that can be very disruptive in that it has the potential to impact how we live and what we do and from a marketers perspective it opens up a whole new world.
“Obviously virtual reality and augmented reality are coming are are here and are being incorporated,” said Muret. “Rest assured we are going to be your partner in delivering those experiences as we get those built into our advertising system.”
“The promise of VR is what the industry calls “presence”—the feeling that you’re really somewhere else,” commmented Aaron Luber, who is in charge of Google and YouTube partnerships.
TrueView Discovery Ads
A prelude to true VR and AR is already here, 360-degree TrueView ads, which Muret announced they are now making them available to all advertisers. YouTube is king of 360-degree videos, of which uploads of 360-degree videos are growing and have doubled over the past three months, according to Luber.
Google announced, just yesterday, that they were changing the name of “TrueView in-display ads” to “TrueView Discovery Ads.” They didn’t stop with just the name change though, they also made significant enhancements to the product, TrueView Discovery Ads will now appear on mobile search results.
They’ve also made TrueView Discovery Ads more relevant on search results pages and are being used across the full inventory of YouTube videos, which Google says has increased ad click-through by 11%.
With TrueView Discovery Ads, your videos can be discovered across YouTube, YouTube search results, video watch pages and on the YouTube homepage, no matter what device you’re on,” commented Josh Rubel, Head of Brand Product Strategy at YouTube, in a promo video for TrueView. “Users initiate the ad by simply clicking your video, which takes them right to your videos watch page. By bringing the user to your channel environment, the level of engagement and activity… subscribes, shares, and additional views is impressive.”
“Are you ready for the new mobile gold rush? Of course you’re not,” said Jim O’Leary, Sr. Manager Mobile Solutions Marketing at Cisco. “Though truth be told, the pending growth in mobile video may be more like a video tornado and only a handful of mobile operators are prepared.”
What Jim O’Leary is talking about is the rapidly changing landscape of content viewing. Multi-device viewing is now the norm and the dumping of the old cable content bundle is well under way. Over-The-Top content (OTT), where content is consumed without going through the traditional gatekeepers such as the cable or satellite provider, is bringing complete and utter disruption to the cable and broadcast companies.
Video now accounts for the majority of global mobile data traffic and is forecast to be the key driver of data traffic growth globally. To date, mobile video (and the ability to monetize the content) has been dominated by Internet players, such as YouTube, Netflix, with the operator role simply one of connectivity provider.
However, a number of operators are developing their own content delivery platforms. Singtel, Verizon and PCCW are three prominent examples of this trend, with their HOOQ, Go90 and Viu video platforms respectively. While HooQ and Viu are variants of the subscription-based model, Go90 more closely resembles the Internet business model, with a reliance on advertising for revenues and a focus on millennials. – Jim O’Leary, Cisco
“Mobile operators across the world face the same twin challenges of slowing growth and ongoing disruption of core services by new Internet & OTT players, even as the broader mobile ecosystem continues to see significant revenue growth,” O’Leary posted. “So if you are tired of being just an operator that carries mobile video and prefer to be able to monetize it, read on.”
Mobile Video Watching is Booming!
O’Leary sees a significant monetization opportunity for mobile operators with video for a very good reason, the exploding growth in using mobile devices to watch videos. An On Device Research study commissioned by the IAB in 2015 (Download PDF) confirmed the changing landscape for mobile globally, with 35% watching more video on their smartphone versus last year.
In February 2016 Cisco released a study predicting that by 2020 there will be 5.5 billion global mobile users which is up from the 4.8 billion currently, and those millions of new mobile users will be watching video too!
More astonishing, the study says that by 2020 there will be 11.6 mobile-connected devices! This is indicative of another emerging trend, connecting ALL devices to the internet via mobile operators where internet content and data can be consumed and sometimes produced on and by these devices.
Gartner estimates that the Internet of Things (IoT) is currently connected to 6.4 billion devices and will connect to 20.8 billion “things” by 2020. Some of these “things” will be video enabled devices as well. For instance, watching a video of how to make vegan scrambled eggs on your refrigerator door!
Mobile Operators Can Play “Central Role” in Content
So mobile operators have massive connectivity with virtually everyone 12 years old and up having a smart phone and if they can play a central role in providing content they can benefit from the “emerging online video value chain.” It’s about using great content to boost usage of their mobile broadband service. O’Leary believes that Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and others should take advantage of this “content opportunity” in order to cash in and drive business growth.
The biggest impediment for mobile phone companies entering the video content space is their tendency to charge high rates for large bandwidth consumption. Mobile broadband carriers should eventually come to the realization that their businesses are tied to consumers needing them and it is in their interest to provide inexpensive ways to consume high bandwidth mobile content or they will by bypassed by new mobile broadband competitors that get it.
Mobile is the New Video Distribution Platform
O’Leary predicts that OTT, where the internet is used to bypass traditional content middlemen like cable, is the driving motivation that should entice broadband providers to enter the content space more aggressively over the next few years. He advocates mobile operators creating a “cloud based platform” and then partnering with content producers in order to “scale their video infrastructure efforts and deliver high-quality, live video and on-demand content to consumers on any device — be it their smartphone, tablet or connected television.”
Content producers will likely consist of a wide variety of players from traditional sources like ESPN and Disney to well funded content upstarts such as such as Amazon, Apple, YouTube and Netflix. Content alliances between mobile operators may also include more direct deals with talent such as successful independent internet based content stars on YouTube, Vine and even Snapchat. Mobile is already the primary platform used to consume video content so the next step is to cut out the middleman and partner directly with popular content providers.
“In growing numbers, consumers are replacing their traditional cable and satellite TV packages with smaller, more customized, and often less expensive mixes of programming, cobbled together from an array of online and on-demand services,” said O’Leary. “As more consumers replace their big-bundle TV packages with à la carte online offerings, an opportunity is emerging for mobile operators and other service providers to combine mobile broadband (MBB) packages with compelling “over the top” content.”
Mobile operators should realize that they are the distribution platform for millennials, they are the network and they are the new cable and satellite companies. With that in mind, they don’t need the networks or cable to drive viewership and usage of their platform, they simply need great content however they can get it, even if it means becoming content creators themselves.
YouTube was founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were among the first employees of PayPal. According to Wikipedia “Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco.” By July 2006 “the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.” YouTube was sold to Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, a deal by today’s standards.
On April 23, 2005, at 8:27 p.m., according to CompsMag, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded the very 1st YouTube video titled “Me at the zoo.” The video was shot by Yakov Lapitsky, Karim’s high school buddy.
That was Then and This is Now
According to Alexa data, YouTube is now the 2nd most visited website in the world and the 3rd most visited in the US.
According to internal YouTube stats, they now have over a billion users, which is almost one-third of all people on the Internet and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views daily. The last specific number of video views released by YouTube was 2012 where they said they had 4 billion views per day. YouTube video views are likely much higher at this point where video is now mainstream and YouTube videos are routinely found in online news articles, Facebook, Twitter and other social media and are intensely consumed on mobile devices.
There are 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, which is 432,000 hours a day or “approximately 50 years worth of videos.”
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.
Content producers are also making more money, with partner revenue up 50% year over year for 3 straight years and the number of channels earning $100,000 or more per year also up 50%.
Copyright holders are also earning more YouTube payouts, having paid out $1 billion to rightholders as of 2014 (last data available). YouTube’s in-house content team, YouTube spaces, which is “focused on helping creators make great content through strategic programs and workshops largely administered at the YouTube Space production facilities in Los Angeles, New York, London, Tokyo, Sao Paulo and Berlin” is also going well. “As of March 2015, creators filming in YouTube Spaces have produced over 10,000 videos which have generated over 1 billion views and 70+ million hours of watchtime,” according to a YouTube posting.
“To date, the most watched YouTube video has approximately 2.2 billion views,” Kyle Brigham who is SEM Director at Chicago based Marcel Digital wrote in a 2015 blog post. It is that of Psy’s “Gangnam Style”, the popular hit from 2012. At a distant second is Justin Bieber’s “Baby” at 1.2 billion.”
As of this writing “Gangnam Style” now has over 2,606,130,861 views!
Have you ever thought of being a YouTube star or perhaps really using YouTube and your personality to promote your business? You can do it just as literally thousands of YouTube entrepreneurs have done including one YouTuber Eric Bandholz.
Bandholz is the Creative Directory and co-founder of Beardbrand, an Austin, Texas grooming company for men with beards, marketing beard care products. The company started in 2012 with a blog, a YouTube channel and a Tumblr account. They say that their “mission has been to foster style for the urban beardsman and provide tools that help men become better.” Eric Bandholz started the company with co-founders Lindsey Reinders and Jeremy McGee.
The Beardbrand company was started with a unique personality and passion. “Rather than wait for someone else to build the community, we (my co-founders and I) stepped up to the plate,” says Bandholz. “We wanted to be more than a company that sells products, and instead we want to guide men to become the individuals they want to be (beard or beardless). For many of our customers, that means giving them the tools they need to grow their beards out. I’m talking about guidance on how to handle the growth of beards physically and psychologically.”
We’ve grown tremendously over the years and are really lucky to be leading a new movement for men. Traditionally beardsmen were thought of as bikers, hippies, vagabonds, and outdoorsmen. We wanted to show the world that there were ordinary guys out there who rocked beards and they don’t fit the traditional stereotype.
On this channel we talk about beard, hair and body grooming. We also have another channel called Urban Beardsman where we talk about the lifestyle of the urban beardsman. Those topics include style, travel, lifestyle, and self improvement. Thank you so much for your support and beard on!
Eric Bandholz was recently interviewed by John McCallen of YouTube in a YouTube Creators Spotlight video. Banholz offered three tips for entrepreneurs thinking about creating their first YouTube videos and launching their own YouTube channel to promote their business.
“One… Just do it,” says Bandholz. “Get off your butt, start creating, no excuses. When I started creating content regularly, like once a week, is really when we started to see the growth in our channel. In the first year we uploaded five or six videos and we had 300 subscribers. And then I really decided to get it into gear, in 2013 when we launched our business, and uploaded probably 20 videos that second year. And then we really got consistent and started uploading every single week. That’s when we jumped up to something like 70,000.”
“Two, take advantage of the resources on YouTube, they’re everywhere, like YouTube’s Creator Academy, other YouTubers and other channels, and listen to your community as well”, added Bandholz. “The challenge is when someone is like ‘I love this music!’ And the next post is: ‘I hate that music!’ So you really just have to do what feels natural and comfortable to you and is something that you feel proud to share.”
The third key ingredient to successfully becoming a YouTube entrepreneural marketer is to “be passionate about what you’re doing” says Bandholz. “Because that’s what’s going to keep you going through the long haul. If you don’t have that passion it’s going to be a total, total drag. So I always recommend: do the thing that makes you happy.”
“Beardbrand has grown to a seven-figure business,” according to the Beard Man Eric Bandholz. “We’re up to 12 employees, hiring more every day. It was a really exciting day for me to see us pass 100,000 subscribers. We e-mailed all our customers and let them know.”
“When we started Beardbrand nobody had known or heard about beard care,” Bandholz said. “It would be scoffed at. Without YouTube, without explaining why we’re doing the thing we’re doing, without being able to engage with the community, we would not be here. With literally a zero-dollar investment and a passion for beards I’ve been able to build the life that I want to live and I’ve been able to surround myself with the people I want to surround myself and interact with the community of people that I love interacting with.”
The company has been unsuccessfully featured on SharkTank, exposed to the world by a New York Times article and now has become a YouTube phenomena and they say, you can do it too. As Eric Bandholz says, “Just do it!”
YouTube today introduced a suite of tools for business of all sizes to make video ads. At launch, YouTube Director includes three main tools that let’s businesses, especially small businesses, make video ads with a professional look and feel.
The first tool allows you to create a YouTube video ad right from your phone. To try it out simply download the free YouTube Director for Business app which is available on the iPhone in the U.S. and Canada with an Android version coming soon. The app is designed for the non-techie… so go for it! Another perk for small businesses is that they can use the app to create a video without any obligation to run paid ads on YouTube. Just make the video, upload it and promote it on your small business website, on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
To prove that anyone can make a professional looking video ad YouTube provided the example of Woody Lovell Jr., owner of The Barbershop Club in Los Angeles. Woody created his own video ad in less than 20 minutes and ran a campaign on YouTube promoting his business. Woody said that the campaign is already seeing positive results.
Youtube invited The Barbershop Club and four other businesses to take part in the YouTube Director Video Challenge. They asked each owner to make a video about their business, film it, edit it and put it on YouTube in 20 minutes or less!
First, they were asked to create a video ad without this new tool. They did it but it wasn’t easy. Using YouTube Director Video they were all able to create great videos in under 20 minutes using YouTube Director and couldn’t praise it enough.
“It’s perfect, a lot easier and so easy,” commented the business owners. “It’s like a big budget. It’s so much better and it walked you through it giving you tips. One, two, three, four… it was as easy as ABC! It was designed well. An instant commercial. The app worked as the director. It cost nothing and it’s so easy and you can just publish it.
Here’s the video made by the Pink Family of the world famous Pink’s Hot Dogs in Hollywood, California. I’ve been to this place and it’s great and you can get a vegan dog too. Keep your eyes open because this is a popular celebrity hangout!
Woody did a great job making The Barbershop Club video. It really has a professional feel. The Barbershop Club is based in Los Angeles at the Original Farmers Market at 3rd and Fairfax, which opened in July 1934. As Woody says about his shop, “It is where young men come learn the ways of manhood, men come to talk with ease and both are made to look like true gentleman when they leave.” Couldn’t have said it better!
Chef Roberto Martin of eLOVate Kitchen produced the video below. eLOVate is a vegan restaurant in Santa Monica, California, one of my favorite cities, and as a vegan I’ll be trying this place out! I guarantee you, non-vegans will like it too.
Here’s the video ad made by Sarah Wolfgang of The Dog Cafe. Sarah started an interesting new concept of dog adoption making The Dog Cafe a gathering spot for dog lovers to meet and mingle with each other over a latte and with rescue dogs looking for loving homes. Way to go Sarah!
Nadia Geller of Nadia Geller Market created a nice video ad in just 20 minutes! Nadia Geller Market is located in the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles that carries home products with a tongue in cheek vibe. It’s part of a larger business Nadia owns called Nadia Geller Designs which is an upscale interior design firm. Nadia is somewhat more sophisticated in marketing than the other businesses YouTube chose to highlight in this product launch.
YouTube also announced a service called YouTube Director Onsite, where YouTube actually will send a professional videographer to shoot and edit a video ad for any business that spends a minimum of $150 advertising. That is an incredible deal and a great way for small businesses to get started with video advertising. YouTube Director Onsite is launching in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C.—and coming to more cities soon.
For businesses that are integrated in mobile apps, YouTube also announced YouTube Director Automated Video where YouTube will create a video ad from existing creative found in your business app such as logos and app screenshots already uploaded to the app store. This is available worldwide. YouTube is asking that you call one of their experts (1-855-500-2756) to try out this service.
YouTube is arguably the most disruptive marketing platform of this decade. Yes, it’s been around since 2005, but only in the last few years is it starting to impact Madison Avenue marketing campaigns. Companies are using YouTube to put their brands in front of hard-to-reach niche viewers and are also finding ways to creatively make their own videos to spread their marketing message and enhance their image.
If you are the marketing director of a Fortune 2000 company or are an entrepreneur starting a small business you should dive into YouTube and video in general and learn how it can be an effective marketing tool for you or your brand.
Recently, some video gamers on the YouTube platform and part of the Youtube Creator Academy made a short video offering some advice on how to build a unique audience. This is from gamers perspective, but I think you will find the tips useful no matter what industry you are in.
“I built a community by being a really family friendly channel,” said Zach Letter of Aviator Gaming. “I do mostly story based content in Minecraft. I like to consider my channel the soap opera of the Minecraft world so that kids come to watch an in-depth story that has some drama, has some romance and has that tension they deal with everyday at school or in their real life. I think that is how I built such a tight
-nit community that loves my scripting, loves my role play but also loves me.”
Letter commented, “When I try to engage my audience I use a lot of the YouTube tools but I also use parts of my voice. I will try to engage them for likes and comments, just to see where they’re at in a certain series.” For instance Letter might ask, “What do you thinks going to happen next in the plot?” “That actually inspires me to write certain things in the script. If a lot of people want this certain thing to happen I might go back in and change the script and change up the episode. I think it’s alway smart to engage comments especially when it’s related to your content because it allows you to tailor content that your viewers actually want to see.”
“Whether it’s submissions on social media or in the comments sections they let me know that, hey, we really want to play this game, or hey, try out this game that’s coming out,” commented Garrett Sutton of JoblessGarrett. “Staying up on the trends and hype trains in regards to new releases of games really helps a child’s world as well.”
“For us it’s hard, because our main body of the episodes are very heavily scripted, but we use the intro paragraphs, we use the end cards as ways to actually communicate with the fans.” Matthew Patrick of The Game Theorists said. “People have been asking for us to cover films, TV and anime for a really long time, so Film Theory, the Channel, made a lot of sense. Hey, it would be really cool to see you play games and see what you do in real life, so the live stream happened.”
Patrick added, “First off the way they behave on camera will really dictate the way their fans behave. If you are responding to haters all the time those are going to tend to filter up in the comments, whereas if you are responding to that thoughtful comment, it shows that you as a creator is active in that community and is someone who is listening and is excited to engage.”
Buzzfeed is at it again today. First it decided to pick sides in a presidential election, and now it has noticed that other countries, often Muslim, don’t have the same sensibilities as Americans. And this is a big problem for social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos noted, “The proliferation of internet-connected mobile phones, in theory, is bringing the world together — with people continents apart talking and sharing, fueled by the sweet nectar of social apps. But in some cases, those connections turn into collisions. Within just the last three weeks, three big American social media platforms — Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter — have all butted up against the laws and cultural norms of local populations outside the United States.”
Good points, although somewhat obvious. The 3 examples she gave, Iranian women posting selfies on Instagram, Indian comedian Tanmay Bhat morphing some photos on Snapchat for humor and a bunch of Twitter accounts deactivated for making fun of Putin aren’t really the worst of it.
What’s worst is that social media companies and Google are giving into censorship demands. Just last week, Twitter, Facebook, Google and Microsoft agreed to a “Hate Speech” ban which for all intense and purposes bans normal free speech if it bashes principals of Shariah law, according to some critics. It’s well known that Saudi Prince Alwaleed, a believer in Shariah law which makes women and gay people second class citizens owns 5% of Twitter. Should we be concerned?
Of course there are cultural differences and those differences stand in direct contrast to American values of free speech, freedom to associate, equal rights and religious freedom. In Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to drive, must cover their face in public, cannot generally mix with men and can’t vote at any level. They are second class citizens. In many countries people are not allowed to criticize the government or government leaders. Should U.S. Internet companies go along with this? Are we in effect helping governments keep their populations from rising up for freedom? These are tough questions but perhaps its time that the United States enacted laws of its own requiring U.S. based companies not to compromise the principals of freedom with social media and search engines. They might ban their use in certain countries, but so what?
Conservative provocateur Breitbart London produced a video to get the word out about what it calls the EU’s “Orwellian” new online censorship deal:
Some of the comments in the Buzzfeed article seem to get that the story is not just the obvious butting heads of different cultures:
They should continue exposing the faults in society’s moral/cultural/legal systems. Censorship is a tool that is used to maintain a system that benefits a sector of society at the expense of others. The refusal to expose and discus issues allows problems in society to pile up, it creates inefficiencies and imbalances in society.
And maybe the world needs to remove the giant stick from it’s bum and get over it. As others have said, exposing faults and inequalities in a system or government is a GOOD thing and very important. That’s how change happens. Oh, and good luck censoring the internet… some regimes may be able to do this for awhile, but they won’t be able to do it forever. (P.S. – ask Beyonce how hard it is (see: impossible) to get a photo scrubbed from teh interwebz, lol.)
Kaylee Priest at least in America we’re allowed to comment on social issues that need reform. Good luck with some of those backwater misogynistic countries listed up above.
I feel so sorry for the people who live there, mainly the women and gays… at least before YouTube & social media, they weren’t really aware of how good people have it living outside of the country. How horrid & confusing it must be to see other women driving cars, with concern only for gas prices?
In a disturbing agreement from the perspective of free speech advocates Tuesday, the European Commission and U.S. based social media companies Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft agreed to a “Code of Conduct” on “hate speech”. It’s pretext is to stop terrorist related propaganda on social media, but reading the announcement from the EU it looks to also be a way to censor opposition to negative news about Muslims. The EU describes it this way:
The IT Companies support the European Commission and EU Member States in the effort to respond to the challenge of ensuring that online platforms do not offer opportunities for illegal online hate speech to spread virally. They share, together with other platforms and social media companies, a collective responsibility and pride in promoting and facilitating freedom of expression throughout the online world. However, the Commission and the IT Companies recognise that the spread of illegal hate speech online not only negatively affects the groups or individuals that it targets, it also negatively impacts those who speak out for freedom, tolerance and non-discrimination in our open societies and has a chilling effect on the democratic discourse on online platforms.
The EU further describes the purpose for the new rules as follows:
In order to prevent the spread of illegal hate speech, it is essential to ensure that relevant national laws transposing the Council Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia are fully enforced by Member States in the online as well as the in the offline environment. While the effective application of provisions criminalising hate speech is dependent on a robust system of enforcement of criminal law sanctions against the individual perpetrators of hate speech, this work must be complemented with actions geared at ensuring that illegal hate speech online is expeditiously reviewed by online intermediaries and social media platforms, upon receipt of a valid notification, in an appropriate time-frame. To be considered valid in this respect, a notification should not be insufficiently precise or inadequately substantiated.
The problem is what is hate speech? It’s well known that the EU has often twisted the idea of hate speech from a battle with Islamic extremists and terrorists to a fight to stop the speech of those opposing their extreme positions. For instance, is it hate to draw a political cartoon of Mohammed as the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo did which resulted in the murder of 12 members of its staff by radical Islamic extremists. By Western standards of free speech, obviously not. But from the EU’s point of view maybe.
Many see these new rules as Orwellian and distressing that US based social media companies would agree to censorship of views the EU doesn’t agree with. From Breitbart:
Janice Atkinson MEP told Breitbart London: “It’s Orwellian. Anyone who has read 1984 sees it’s very re-enactment live.
“The Commission has been itching to shut down free speech in the Parliament and now they’re attacking social media. We have already seen Facebook ‘policing’ so-called right-wing postings.
“If an MEP, such as the centre-right Hungarians, the Danish People’s Party, the Finns, the Swedish Democrats, the Austrian FPO, say no to migration quotas because they cannot cope with the cultural and religious requirements of Muslims across the Middle East who are seeking refugee status, is that a hate crime? And what is their punishment? It’s a frightening path to totalitarianism.”
UKIP’s Justice and Home Affairs spokeswoman Diane James MEP told Breitbart London:
“This legislation is so vague that it is the thin end of the wedge not just curb hate speech but free speech as well.
“Different people and cultures across Europe have different ways of communicating. The Liberal tradition in Britain for instance is more open and very different from that of dictatorial former Communist countries in the East.
“The EU was sold to people as a Common Market, it became a political union and now wishes to decide and compromise our civil liberties as a people. This is unacceptable to a free people who have a right to know where all this legislation is leading to.
“In my opinion, if the EU still allows to me have an opinion, I believe this matter should be decided by national parliaments rather than the unelected European Commission.“
Faced with this lamentable outcome, and with no possibility to provide meaningful input to this process, the Commission has left us with no other choice but to withdraw from the discussion,
said Estelle Massé, EU Policy Analyst at Access Now.
It is ironic that the Commission is threatening to take Member States to court for failing to implement EU law on racism and xenophobia while it is persuading companies like Google and Facebook to sweep offences under the carpet,
added Joe McNamee, Executive Director at European Digital Rights.
In a release, the EDRi explains why they have a problem with this new Code of Conduct agreement:
What is in today’s code of conduct?
– an explicit statement that companies will “take the lead” in policing controversial speech online, which means that law enforcement authorities will not be taking the lead;
– an undertaking that IT companies will ban content that should already be legally banned;
– an undertaking to review notifications against company terms of service first and then, “if necessary” to review them against the law. In practice, this means that the legal procedures for testing the legality of content against the law will never be used as the code of conduct asks for illegal content to be banned by terms of service.
In short, the “code of conduct” downgrades the law to a second-class status, behind the “leading role” of private companies that are being asked to arbitrarily implement their terms of service. This process, established outside an accountable democratic framework, exploits unclear liability rules for companies. It also creates serious risks for freedom of expression as legal but controversial content may well be deleted as a result of this voluntary and unaccountable take down mechanism.
This means that this “agreement” between only a handful of companies and the European Commission is likely in breach of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, under which restrictions on fundamental rights should be provided for by law. It will, in practical terms, overturn case law of the European Court of Human Rights on the defense of legal speech.
What is the appropriate way to compare the audiences of an online video series and a television series? This controversy can also be called… The Upfronts vs. the Newfronts!
The Upfronts is where ad agencies on behalf of advertisers buy TV ads in bulk and also get presented with pitches by the various networks. The Upfronts have been around since 1962. The Newfronts are the digital equivalent, mostly featuring premium online content such as made for YouTube professionally produced series. The Newfronts have been gaining steam over the last few years but actually began in 2008. The Newfronts and Upfronts were just held back to back in New York City.
What’s provoking jabs by TV execs such as CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, is that it’s becoming clear that the Newfronts and Upfronts are competing for the same ad dollars. The budgets from advertisers of premium online digital video is coming out of the original budgets for TV commercials. For instance, ad agency Magna Global announced at the Newfronts that they are shifting $250 million from TV to digital in 2016.
At an Upfront breakfast speech, Moonves told the audience, “When it comes to digital, “The bloom is off the rose and the lack of effect of digital advertising are “absolutely true.” According to Adweek he put it this way:
As for other networks highlighting their success in specific demographics during upfronts, Moonves noted, “different people brag about statistics that they just made up last week.”
Moonves joined the chorus of broadcasters who are swinging back this week at the debatable claims coming from digital companies. “There’s a lot of stats that aren’t true,” said Moonves. “We see [ad] money coming back to the network. The bloom is off the rose [for digital].”
The Wall Street Journal Thursday added fuel to the fire by questioning a comparison of the audience size of the TV show “Pretty Little Liars” and the YouTube show “How to Survive High School”. At the Newfronts Fullscreen said that the online show, “How to Survive High School” has amassed 36 million views since it launched last year, while in comparison “Pretty Little Liars” had 2 million viewers. This is a weak statistic, but it’s meant to illustrate the growing reach of premium online video content, not that the YouTube show is actually more popular than “Liars.” Per WSJ “Pretty Little Liars” has been averaging 2.5 million viewers an episode since January based on seven days of live and recorded viewing.
Statistically it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison because the TV show has 2.5 million viewers every week while the web video show had 36 million views over the course of its existence. But at least those numbers are indisputable, while TV viewing is still relying on Nielsen estimates that are extrapolated from diaries and homes that installed their box.
Another argument was made by a TV advertising trade group:
Via WSJ — “Sean Cunningham, chief executive of the Video Advertising Bureau, a TV-led trade group that has been making the argument that digital outlets are overstating their audiences, said that with Fullscreen’s comparison, “the basic media math falls apart here in every way.”
The VAB made the case that a better way to compare a Web video show with a TV show is to calculate the average audience at a given minute for both shows. The group found that since last August “Pretty Little Liars” averaged over 1.6 million viewers watching live at any given minute when on the air, while “How to Survive” averaged just 850 individual viewers during a given minute.”
That way of comparison is silly and starts to make the hyperbole of online video proponents look sane. Not a good idea if you really want to make the case that online video views are overstated.
By its nature TV shows are mostly viewed live or after being recorded while online video is viewed over a much longer period of time and the period of time right after they are uploaded is irrelevant. Measuring the audience of an online video at a given point in time instead of overall may apply to TV somewhat but obviously way understates the viewing audience of online video. “How to Survive High School” had 36 million views! That is in NFL playoff territory.
Are they all unique? No. But so what? TV viewership is not unique over a multi-week period of time and TV execs don’t seem to have a problem with that. They charge advertisers based on their total viewership for the episode, even if the advertiser is advertising every week where there is substantial overlap in their viewers over time.
Another aspect rarely noted is that digital ads are viewed preroll and cannot be bypassed, whereas TV ads are routinely fast-forwarded through or ignored (bathroom break!) and this is true of the younger age brackets especially. Of course with digital, unlike TV, there is usually only one ad per episode, but that’s likely to change over time.
The point is that online digital is catching and likely surpassing the viewership of traditional TV viewership and it is freaking TV execs out!
Amazon today announced the launch of Amazon Video Direct (AVD), a head-to-head competitor with Google’s YouTube platform. Amazon touts it as a service that gives video providers a self-service way to reach Amazon’s huge customer base including the coveted Prime members. Individual creators and professional video story tellers can earn royalties based on hours streamed, videos rented or purchased and subscriptions.
What’s interesting is that videos uploaded as part of AVD will be available to consumers via Amazon Video where there is also unique series content, movies, TV shows and Showtime and Starz programming. AVD is clearly a big part of Amazon’s strategy to be the epicenter of Internet TV where cable and satellite middlemen are replaced.
Video providers, both professional and amateur, can have their videos included in Prime Video at no charge to Prime members, available as an add-on subscription, offered as a one-time rental or purchase or make them available to all Amazon customers with ads. If a video producer chooses the ad-supported option Amazon will give the provider 55% of the revenue which is the same as YouTube. For purchases, rentals and subscription AVD will split revenue 50-50 and for videos provided free to Prime members Amazon will pay $.15 per streaming hour topping out at $75K per year.
“It’s an amazing time to be a content creator,” said Jim Freeman, Vice President of Amazon Video. “There are more options for distribution than ever before and with Amazon Video Direct, for the first time, there’s a self-service option for video providers to get their content into a premium streaming subscription service. We’re excited to make it even easier for content creators to find an audience, and for that audience to find great content.”
In order to attract the best talent from YouTube and other video platforms Amazon is creating a $1 million monthly fund that will be used to distribute bonuses for producing the most watched videos above what video makers will already earn on the platform. Amazon is calling it the AVD Stars Program. This is designed to steal YouTube celebrities and will lead to bidding wars for today’s video stars.
Launch partners include: Conde Nast Entertainment, HowStuffWorks, Samuel Goldwyn Films, The Guardian, Mashable, Mattel, StyleHaul, Kin Community, Jash, Business Insider, Machinima, TYT Network, Baby Einstein, CJ Entertainment America, Xive TV, Synergetic Distribution, Kino Nation, Journeyman Pictures, and Pro Guitar Lessons. Their content is now available on Amazon Video.
