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Tag: YouTube

  • Google Brand Lift Now Looks At Consideration, Favorability, Purchase Intent

    Google Brand Lift Now Looks At Consideration, Favorability, Purchase Intent

    Google announced that it is expanding Brand Lift, which helps marketers measure the effectiveness of display and video campaigns using survey and search data collected from targeted audiences, to include some new stuff.

    Brand Lift lets marketers use insights gained from survey data to better understand how their ads are affecting people’s awareness of the brand, how well an ad is recalled, etc.

    Now, Brand Lift will include measuring lift in consideration, favorability, and purchase intent for ads. The company says its survey methodology will now quickly tell advertisers who their YouTube ads resonate at different points in the customer journey.

    According to Google, it will be able to tell if your ad broke through with consumers, if they’re more aware of your brand after seeing your ad, if their consideration of the brand is higher after the campaign, if consumers are more favorable towards the brand after seeing the ad, and if their intent to purchase from the brand has risen.

    “Today’s consumer journey has become fragmented into micro-moments that span many channels, devices and media types,” says Brand Lift product manager Samir Pradhan. “As a brand trying to reach today’s consumer, it’s more important than ever that you know which moments matter most. And, because consumers are making decisions faster than ever, you need to be able to make decisions equally as fast.”

    “The good news is that while technology makes the consumer journey more fragmented, it also makes it easier to measure brand impact,” Pradhan adds. “At Google, it’s our mission to help you measure all of the moments that matter — from first impression to final conversion.”

    Google also launched a new resource for marketers to gain more insights into these so called “micro-moments”.

    During its the first year of Brand Lift, Google has run more than 10,000 studies on YouTube campaigns.

    More on Brand Lift here.

    Image via YouTube

  • PLAs Come To YouTube With TrueView For Shopping

    PLAs Come To YouTube With TrueView For Shopping

    Google announced that it is extending its product listing ads (PLAs) to YouTube with TrueView for Shopping, its new format that lets businesses run product ads with related videos.

    It’s no wonder that Google has been encouraging marketers to create more “how to” videos. These are exactly the type of videos Google created TrueView for Shopping ads for – those that show consumers how to do something that they may need a buy a specific product in order to achieve.

    Earlier this month, Google put out a report saying that how-to searches have seen 70% growth year-over-year with over a hundred million hours of such content having already been watched in North America in 2015. People are increasingly watching these videos on mobile devices with 91% of smartphone users turning to them for ideas while completing a task.

    These searches are on the rise across all age groups, but millennials are especially likely to search YouTube for how-to videos. According to Google, 67% of them agree that they can find a YouTube video on anything they want to learn.

    The new TrueView PLAs should figure nicely into all of this.

    “Whether it’s watching a product review or learning how to bake a soufflé, we look to video in countless moments throughout to the day to help us get things done,” Google says in a blog post. “We call these micro-moments – when we reflexively turn to our devices to learn more, make a decision, or purchase a product. To connect the dots between the moment a person watches a video and the moment they decide to make a purchase, today we’re introducing a new feature called TrueView for shopping that makes it easy for viewers to get more information on your products and click to buy.”

    With these ads, businesses can showcase product details and images, and users can click and purchase from a brand or retail site from within the video ad. The option is available for TrueView in-stream video ads, and works across mobile, desktop, and tablet. 50% of views on YouTube come from mobile.

    TrueView for Shopping is built on the cards platform Google announced last month, which lets you share more info about your brand, related videos, and playlists, and lets you link to your site.

    The ads are integrated with Google Merchant Center, so you can connect campaigns with a Merchant Center feed to dynamically add products and customize ads through contextual and audience signals such as geography and demographic information.

    “Brands that have participated in our early tests of TrueView for shopping have seen strong results for driving interest and sales,” Google says. “Online home goods retailer Wayfair, for instance, saw a 3X revenue increase per impression served when compared to previous campaigns. And beauty retailer Sephora took advantage of this new ad format to drive +80% lift in consideration and +54% lift in ad recall, and an average view time of nearly two minutes.”

    The new ads will come to Google’s buying front end in the coming months, but those who wish to start using them as soon as possible can get in touch with a Google account manager to learn how to proceed.

    Images via Google

  • YouTube Live Streams Get 60fps Video, HTML5 Playback

    YouTube Live Streams Get 60fps Video, HTML5 Playback

    A couple months ago, reports emerged saying YouTube was going after Twitch, in that it wanted to make YouTube Live a premier destination for video game streaming. When asked for comment, YouTube famously sent out a GIF of a girl shrugging, as if to say who? us? I dunnooooo? Also as if to say we now respond to press inquiries with GIFs, so there’s that.

    Anyway, it looks like YouTube is making a move to court live streamers – including those with a focus on gaming.

    YouTube has announced that its live streaming platform now supports 60 FPS 1080p and 720p. YouTube first debuted the 60fps option on regular videos last October. Not only that, but it sports an HTML5 player. Twitch still uses Flash.

    That HTML5 player will let viewers “skip backward in a stream while it’s live and watch at 1.5x or 2x speed to catch back up.”

    As for lag? From Ars Technica:

    We’ve also gotten word that this change won’t affect YouTube’s streaming latency significantly, and that YouTube is “working to bring latency down and [is] making good progress.” Currently we estimate there is about 30-60 seconds of lag time on YouTube’s platform, which makes the streamer’s interactions with chat a little awkward.

    For now, the new live streaming features are only on desktop but that could change in the coming weeks.

    Amazon completed its acquisition of Twitch in September of 2014. The price of that deal was $970 million. Before that, Google was in serious talks to acquire the game streaming platform itself, reportedly preparing a $1 billion offer. Reports indicated that Google backed out due to antitrust concerns. But just because YouTube lost out on online gaming’s current most-popular streaming platform doesn’t mean it’s going to lose focus on a booming up-and-comer.

  • Google’s YouTube Kids App Isn’t That Kid-Friendly According to Consumer Groups

    Google’s YouTube Kids App Isn’t That Kid-Friendly According to Consumer Groups

    In April, a group of consumer advocate groups including The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC), American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Center for Science in the
    Public Interest, Children Now, Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Watchdog, and Public Citizen called on the Federal Trade Commission to open up an investigation against Google’s YouTube Kids app. The main point of that complaint involved the intermixing of “commercial and other content in ways that are deceptive and unfair to children and would not be permitted to be shown on broadcast or cable television.”

    Basically, these groups alleged that the YouTube Kids app was showing ads to kids.

    Now, CCFC and CDD are reporting that an additional review has surfaced even more disturbing things about the YouTube Kids app – pervasive adult content.

    According to the groups, they were able to find Explicit sexual language presented amidst cartoon animation; Videos that model unsafe behaviors such as playing with lit matches, shooting a nail gun, juggling knives, tasting battery acid, and making a noose; A profanity-laced parody of the film Casino featuring Bert and Ernie from Sesame Street; Graphic adult discussions about family violence, pornography, and child suicide; Jokes about pedophilia and drug use; and Advertising for alcohol products.

    To drive the point home, the CCFC and CDD made a video:

    Is YouTube Kids A Safe Place for Young Children to Explore? from CCFC on Vimeo.

    They’ve sent a letter to the FTC to update their complaint.

    Google claims that YouTube Kids was “built from the ground up with little ones in mind” and is “packed full of age-appropriate videos.” The app includes a search function that is voice-enabled for easy use for preschool children. Google says it uses “a mix of automated analysis, manual sampling, and input from our users to categorize and screen out videos and topics that may make parents nervous.” Google also assures parents that they “can rest a little easier knowing that videos in the YouTube Kids app are narrowed down to content appropriate for kids.”

    Google does not, in fact, “screen out the videos that make parents nervous” and its representations of YouTube Kids as a safe, child-friendly version of YouTube are deceptive. Parents who download the app are likely to expose their children to the very content they believed they would avoid by using the preschool version of YouTube. In addition to the unfair and deceptive marketing practices we identified in our initial request for an investigation, it is clear that Google is deceiving parents about the effectiveness of their screening processes and the content on YouTube Kids.

    A YouTube spokesperson has issued a statement, reiterating that parents can turn off search inside the app.

    “We work to make the videos in YouTube Kids as family-friendly as possible and take feedback very seriously. Anyone can flag a video and these videos are manually reviewed 24/7 and any videos that don’t belong in the app are removed. For parents who want a more restricted experience, we recommend that they turn off search,” says YouTube.

    While it’s true that parents can disable the app’s search function, it is enabled by default.

    And as YouTube’s statement reiterates – much of the content moderation is done by fielding manual reports, at which point Google then yanks offending videos from the app.

    From the get-go, Google admitted that some stuff could slip through the cracks.

    “When your child browses the app’s home screen, they’ll find a vast selection of kid-appropriate channels and playlists. When families search in the app, we use a mix of input from our users and automated analysis to categorize and screen out the videos that make parents nervous. And for added peace of mind, parents can quickly notify YouTube if they see anything questionable directly from the app,” said Google back in February, upon launch of the app.

    Google said this new YouTube Kids app is just a first step – the “first building block in tech for tykes.” We’ve heard for a while that Google is getting more serious about building products and services for kids. If this is the goal, content filtering is going to have to get better.

    Sure, Google presents YouTube Kids as a way for parents to feel safer about their kids watching YouTube.And it’s clear that Google has failed to prevent some adult-themed content from appearing inside the app. But parents can turn off the search function (maybe Google should have it switched off by default?) and in the end, parents should know that no content moderation system is 100% foolproof.

  • Google Says To Reach YouTube Users On How-To Searches

    Google Says To Reach YouTube Users On How-To Searches

    Google is giving marketers some best practices for capitalizing on major growth in how-to searches on YouTube. Believe it or not, these types of searches have seen 70% growth year-over-year. A whopping one hundred million hours of such content has already been watched in North America in 2015, it says.

    In other words, this is an opportunity for businesses who can provide high quality how-to content to attract some eyeballs.

    This information comes from a Think with Google article by David Mogensen, Head of B2B Product Marketing for YouTube and Google Display (via Marketing Land). According to him, people look for how-to videos increasingly on mobile with 91% of smartphone users turning to their devices for ideas while completing a task.

    These searches are on the rise across all age groups, but millennials are especially likely to search YouTube for how-to videos. According to Google, 67% of them agree that they can find a YouTube video on anything they want to learn.

    I guess that’s why Google Helpouts didn’t take off.

    “Being there in these moments may be the single most important thing a marketer can do, but many aren’t,” writes Mogensen. “Marketing is still largely planned against brand moments and milestones, and it is anchored to campaign flights and product launches—not personal moments like these. The reason for this is simple. Most marketing plans are grounded in traditional one-way media: Broadcast from brands to large audiences.” Without signals of intent, traditional media makes it impossible to know whether someone actually needs or wants your product.

    “But when people ask how to do something, that’s a need,” he continues. “That’s someone asking, ‘can you help me out?’ Digital media let brands respond to those questions and be there at the very moment someone needs them most. Brands that successfully do this can win loyalty and drive sales to boot. In fact, nearly one in three millennials say they’ve purchased a product as a result of watching a how-to video.”

    He talks about how Home Depot has a bunch of how tos for home improvement and how Valspar has content about various paint-related subjects.

    Home improvement, beauty, and cooking are among the most popular categories for how-to searches.

    As far as best practices, Google says to identify the “I-wan-to-do moments” in which people have a need that your brand can help with. It says to find these moments across the whole consumer journey and put them at the center of your strategy. You should also figure out what questions and concerns people have related to the types of projects you sell or the projects they’re used for, and then create the content to serve as resources for those, it says.

    Google also suggests looking at when how-to searches occur, and making your videos easier to find by adding descriptive titles, details, and relevant tags to each video. Promoting the videos is another option.

    One thing that Mogensen didn’t really get into that is certainly worth considering is how frequently videos appear in Google search results. You have to imagine that there are plenty of these how-to searches happening right on Google.

    We recently looked at a study on Google Universal Search trends, and video is the most frequent type of universal result Google shows. They appeared in 55% of search results pages analyzed. While the percentage of search results pages showing video results actually fell over the course of 2014, videos appear more often than anything else by far. 80% of videos displayed in Universal Search results came from YouTube.

    Image via Google

  • Facebook Advises Pages Against Posting YouTube Videos

    Facebook Advises Pages Against Posting YouTube Videos

    Facebook is making it clearer and clearer to Page owners that they’re more likely to see better reach if they post native Facebook videos as opposed to videos from YouTube or other services.

    Are you having any luck reaching fans with non-Facebook videos? Let us know in the comments.

    According to a report from AdWeek’s SocialTimes, some Page admins have been seeing a message when they try to post external video links that says:

    People are more likely to see and engage with your video post when you upload your video directly to Facebook. You can also track the success of Facebook native videos in Page insights.

    Just as Google is said to favor results from its own services in its search results, Facebook is clearly favoring content from its own platform in the News Feed.

    This is nothing to new to savvy marketers, but Facebook is really going out of its way to convince others who are just going the YouTube route that they should really reconsider. My guess is that is succeeding in convincing many, as the company makes move after move that lead to a decrease in the overall organic reach of Page posts. Pages will try anything that will help expand that reach.

    Socialbakers recently released some research comparing the average organic reach of different types of posts. While photos used to dominate that, things have changed a great deal, and videos are much more likely to see better reach than any other type of post these days.

    “Because photos were the long-dominant post type, they are both the most common type of post and the most frequently promoted,” SocialBakers said in a blog post. “That alone would be enough to make them less effective than they were at their peak, but coupled with the introduction of videos in Q3 2014, the decline in photo reach has been sudden.That all adds up to a lot of competition for decreasing space.”

    “The real growth point today is in videos,” it added. “While they are relatively more promoted than photos – 27% of all videos are promoted, compared to 17% of photos – there are so many more photos than videos that the new format is still far more effective at reaching audiences.”

    The firm also said that just looking at organic reach for brands’ Fans, not including non-Fans who also get post impressions, videos are still “much more effective than photos” with a 148% increase in reach.

    The data for that particular report went up through February 4. It will be interesting to see an update on this after several more months, which have been full of stories about Facebook video.

    “Looking ahead, we believe video will play a significant role in bringing more marketers to mobile,” said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg during the company’s recent earnings conference call. “More than 75% of global video views on Facebook occur on mobile – and we believe mobile video will become more important to marketers over time.

    “I think all marketers have the opportunity to do video, and that’s pretty exciting, including SMBs who would never be able to hire a film crew and buy a TV ad. We’re seeing those put videos in,” she said. “Over 1 million SMBs have posted videos and done really small ad buys around them. And that’s pretty cool because I don’t think there are probably 1 million advertisers who have bought TV ads in that same period of time.”

    As far as Facebook versus YouTube, when it comes to video posting, you’re probably best off utilizing both. Visible Measures recently put out research comparing the effectiveness of both channels.

    “If something is hot and of the moment, such as a newly released campaign, the Super Bowl, or even a cultural phenomenon like Fifty Shades of Grey, Facebook and similar social media sites are incredibly effective for driving the spread of timely content due to the trending nature of the News Feed,” said CEO Brian Shin. “But the strength of Facebook to promote trending content also highlights how powerful YouTube remains as a platform for continued viewership.”

    “Content discovery on Facebook is very much dependent on the Facebook News Feed, which is a function of what a user’s friends are sharing, as well as recommendations based on trends and a user’s interests. Because discovery is so dependent on sharing, viewership soon after content gets hot’ is strongest on Facebook,” the firm added. “Conversely, YouTube acts as a depository for video and millions of users go there first, or arrive via Google search, to find video content. This user paradigm enables videos to have a much longer shelf-life on YouTube.”

    Brands are only going to continue to post more and more Facebook videos as both organic and paid posts. Businesses across the board are increasing their digital video budgets. Will the organic reach of videos last as everyone scrambles to post more of them, or will their effectiveness dwindle similar to that of photos?

    Do you think the impact of Facebook videos will last? Should Facebook give those uploaded directly to the social network special treatment? Share your thoughts in the comments.

    Image vis Socialbakers

  • Apple Is Working Hard to Kill Spotify’s Free Tier: Report

    Apple Is Working Hard to Kill Spotify’s Free Tier: Report

    Apple knows it’s going to be an uphill climb when it relaunches its Beats-based music streaming service this summer – and the company may be taking some rather direct measures to cripple the competition.

    According to a report from The Verge, Apple has been attempting to convince the major record labels to stop licensing their music to the likes of Spotify and its free tier – in the hopes that such a decision would devastate Spotify’s business model.

    Of Spotify’s 60 million users, only 15 million pay for the service. The rest subscribe to the free, ad-support tier.

    According to the report, “Apple offered to pay YouTube’s music licensing fee to Universal Music Group if the label stopped allowing its songs on YouTube.”

    And all of this maneuvering has apparently gotten the attention of the Justice Department.

    Sources say the DoJ is already interviewing people about Apple’s business practices. “All the way up to Tim Cook, these guys are cutthroat,” a source told The Verge.

    Apple plans to launch their streaming music competitor at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June. The offering will be wrapped up in Beats Music, which Apple acquired last year. It is expected to run $8 per month, or just a little less than Spotify premium.

    Image via Apple

  • Digital Video Ad Budgets Increase, Facebook Best For Short-Term Reach

    Digital Video Ad Budgets Increase, Facebook Best For Short-Term Reach

    A new study from Advertiser Perceptions and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) found that 68% of marketers and agency execs expect their digital video ad budgets to increase over the course of the next year.

    The study was conducted based on a survey of 305 buy-side professionals, who largely expect that greater investment in digital video will come from overall rising ad budgets this year and as funds shift away from broadcast and cable TV. 67% said they anticipate their broadcast and cable TV ad spend to stay the same or decrease in the next year.

    67% also believe that original digital video will become as important as original TV programming within the next 3 to 5 years.

    Across the automotive, CPG, financial services, retail, and telecommunications categories, advertisers expect to spend more on digital video. 67% expect to move a portion of spend out of TV to do so. CPG, financial services, and telecommunications marketers expect the biggest impact to be on their cable TV budgets. 63% in the automotive category expect to get the funding from expanding budgets.

    “This study demonstrates unequivocally that digital video is a fierce competitor for advertising dollars,” said Sherrill Mane, SVP, Research, Analytics, and Measurement at the IAB.

    A separate study from Visible Measures is out, which looks at video campaigns on Facebook and YouTube. It finds that “alternative video platforms” like Facebook have become more important to brands and that Facebook has not only grown “tremendously” for total viewing, but that it’s also now the most powerful tool for driving immediate growth in viewership for timely video content.

    That study found that for brands that post their campaigns on both Facebook and YouTube, Facebook dominates viewership immediately following a campaign’s release. For the campaigns it looked at in March, Facebook reached 85 percent of its viewership in the first week after launch, while YouTube only reached 63 percent of its viewership during that time. But don’t let that fool you. It also found that YouTube still dominates reach in the long run. It just takes longer.

    They credit both YouTube’s functionality and consumer behavior for making YouTube more effective in the long term. According to Visible Measures CEO Brian Shin, the decrease in Facebook’s share of viewership over the course of time highlights how differently Facebook and YouTube function for both consumers and brands.

    “If something is hot and of the moment, such as a newly released campaign, the Super Bowl, or even a cultural phenomenon like Fifty Shades of Grey, Facebook and similar social media sites are incredibly effective for driving the spread of timely content due to the trending nature of the News Feed,” he said. “But the strength of Facebook to promote trending content also highlights how powerful YouTube remains as a platform for continued viewership.”

    “Content discovery on Facebook is very much dependent on the Facebook News Feed, which is a function of what a user’s friends are sharing, as well as recommendations based on trends and a user’s interests. Because discovery is so dependent on sharing, viewership soon after content gets hot’ is strongest on Facebook,” says Visible Measures. “Conversely, YouTube acts as a depository for video and millions of users go there first, or arrive via Google search, to find video content. This user paradigm enables videos to have a much longer shelf-life on YouTube.”

    “While Facebook can be counted on for viral lift, if your video doesn’t ‘pop’ on Facebook it will vanish pretty quickly, whereas slow and steady evergreen content can pay dividends for a long time on YouTube,” marketing consultant Brian Honigman told us in January.

    According to Shin, Facebook will have to amp up its video discovery and search options if it wants to compete with YouTube for the long term.

    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke a little bit about Facebook’s search efforts during the company’s earnings conference call last week.

    “If you think about the overall web, there’s a lot of public content that’s out there that any web search engine can go index and provide,” he said. “But a lot of what we can get at are recommendations on products and travel and restaurants and things that your friends have shared, they haven’t shared publicly, and knowing different correlations, or interesting things about what your friends are interested in, and that’s the type of stuff, those are questions that we can answer that no one else can answer, and that’s probably going to be what we continue to focus on doing first. And I think what you’re seeing is that as we enable more use cases and as we just get a lot of the basics right around performance and bringing the mobile features into parity and beyond what we’ve been able to do on desktop, the volume is growing quickly.”

    Though he wasn’t talking specifically about video with regard to search, the huge increase in video sharing on Facebook will only add pressure on Facebook to handle video search better. Right now, Facebook’s search feature doesn’t even include a video option. That definitely needs to change, and I have no doubt that it will in time.

    Facebook has been testing some functionality, which could help in the discoverability department. It’s trying a feature that automatically plays another video once the one the user is currently watching ends. This is something YouTube started doing a while back.

    Earlier this year, Facebook announced that video on the social network had increased 75% over the past year. Socialbakers, at the time, found that for the first time, brands were sharing Facebook videos on the social network more than YouTube videos. And with good reason. Facebook is said to give more weight to native videos in News Feed ranking.

    Socialbakers also recently found that Facebook video tends to get better organic reach than regular status updates, links, or photos.

    “The real growth point today is in videos,” it said. “While they are relatively more promoted than photos – 27% of all videos are promoted, compared to 17% of photos – there are so many more photos than videos that the new format is still far more effective at reaching audiences.”

    Facebook expects video specifically to bring it more mobile ad dollars.

    “Looking ahead, we believe video will play a significant role in bringing more marketers to mobile,” said COO Sheryl Sandberg during the earnings call. “More than 75% of global video views on Facebook occur on mobile – and we believe mobile video will become more important to marketers over time.”

    Asked about video ad pricing, CFO David Wehner said, ”Video is effectively winning in the auction if it’s higher priced. So if somebody’s willing to pay more for a video, it’s going to get served before another type of format ad. But there’s not really a price differential you’re paying for a video, it’s just what are you willing to pay into the system. So there’s not differential pricing by product, it’s just what are you willing to bid for the format that you want to show to the people that you want to show it to and that’s how the system works.”

    Last week, Facebook announced the launch of Anthology, a new marketing program that gives brands access to a group of well-known video publishers to improve the quality of video ads.

    Images via Facebook, Socialbakers

  • YouTube’s First Video Turns 10, in Case You Weren’t Feeling Old Today

    YouTube’s First Video Turns 10, in Case You Weren’t Feeling Old Today

    If you woke up in a good mood, feeling young and spry, you’ll hate to know that YouTube’s inauspicious first video turns 10 years old today.

    “Alright, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants. Uh. The cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks, and that’s, that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say,” says YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim in the clip.

    The 19-second video, uploaded on Saturday, April 23, 2005, shows Karim in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. It’s called “Me at the zoo”.

    The video currently sports nearly 20 million views and 136,000 comments.

    It’s hard to imagine a world without YouTube. It’s also hard to imagine it’s already been around a decade.

    All I can say is thank god for HD.

  • YouTube’s Ad-Free Subscription Offering Is on the Horizon

    YouTube’s Ad-Free Subscription Offering Is on the Horizon

    Apart from Justin Bieber videos and comment trolls, ads are the most annoying thing about YouTube. But most of us have come to accept that we’re going to have to watch five, 15, or god forbid 30 seconds of an ad before our video plays – and even during our video plays if the video is long enough. It’s just a fact of life – death, taxes, and YouTube ads.

    But if there were a way to remove ads from the equation, what would you pay?

    If your answer is around 10 bucks a month or something, then you’re in luck. YouTube’s long-discussed ad-free subscription plan is on the horizon, and it looks like that’ll be the price point.

    YouTube confirmed the offering in a letter to its partners, saying the new ad-free paid subscription will “generate a new source of revenue that will supplement [thier] fast growing advertising revenue.”

    “We’re confident this latest contract update will excite your fans and generate a previously untapped, additional source of revenue for you,” said the YouTube team in the letter.

    According to YouTube’s updated Terms of Service, that will amount to 55% of total net revenues from the new subscription fees. Partners must participate in the subscription program, or risk their videos being set to private – according to source quoted by The Verge.

    “YouTube will pay you 55% of the total net revenues recognized by YouTube from subscription fees that are attributable to the monthly views or watchtime of your Content as a percentage of the monthly views or watchtime of all or a subset of participating content in the relevant subscription offering (as determined by YouTube). If your Content is included in and viewed by a user in multiple subscription offerings, YouTube will pay you based on the subscription offering with the highest amount of net revenues recognized by YouTube, as calculated by YouTube.”

    No official word on when YouTube will begin offering users the option to make the ads disappear or how much it will cost exactly. The Verge says it’ll cost around $10. Bloomberg says it should be coming in the next few months. The new terms for partners take effect June 15.

    YouTube would only give this standard response:

    “While we can’t comment on ongoing discussions, giving fans more choice to enjoy the content they love and creators more opportunity to earn revenue are always amongst our top priorities.”

    Ad-free sounds great. But who would pay for YouTube? Aren’t we all just used to YouTube being free?

    Here’s what I had to say when this option was rumored way back in October:

    The question then becomes … who would pay for YouTube?

    You may or may now know that YouTube has already been experimenting with paid subscriptions on a smaller scale. Since May of last year, YouTube has offered paid channels. YouTube lets the channel creator set their own price (which could be anywhere from $0.99 a month to a few dollars a month), and then takes a cut of the profit. Paid channels started with a few dozen partners and soon expanded, but the initiative hasn’t really taken off – at least not as much as YouTube would’ve hoped.

    Nearly a year and a half later, there are only 281 paid channels on YouTube.

    And the problem that befalls paid channels could also affect YouTube’s move into offering a site-wide paid subscription service.

    Is the content really worth paying for?

    It’s one thing to pay a monthly or yearly fee to watch Game of Thrones or to listen to Led Zeppelin. It’s a whole different thing to pay money to watch babies laugh, cats chase laser pointers, and drunk people falling down stairs.

    I know there’s much better content on YouTube than that – but you get the point.

    YouTube caricature aside, a lot of people would likely have a problem justifying a monthly payment for YouTube. We’re all so used to YouTube being free. You know what we’re also pretty used to? Ads. It’s just a part of the experience now. Are you really that annoyed by ads to warrant paying for YouTube?

    YouTube has already made a move toward paid models. You might recall its music service, YouTube Music Key, is currently in beta. It’s an interesting concept, for sure – one that would put YouTube in the same breath as streaming platforms like Netflix.

    But will people play for YouTube? And is going “ad-free” enough of a carrot to dangle? Maybe if YouTube made a show like Game of Thrones and put it behind a paywall.

  • Zayn Malik Releases Solo Ballad On Heels of One Direction Exit

    Zayn Malik Releases Solo Ballad On Heels of One Direction Exit

    Zayn Malik announced less than a week ago that he was leaving One Direction behind. Now the former boy band member has released his first solo song.

    ‘I Won’t Mind’ came out on Monday–first on Soundcloud, then later on YouTube. It is a soft ballad featuring Zayn Malik’s vocals against a background of acoustic guitar.

    A rep for Zayn Malik confirmed that yes, it is the former One Direction member, singing the song. The song is produced by Naughty Boy Music, and the company–known for working with music greats like Sam Smith–was accused of starting trouble with Zayn’s former One Direction mate Louis Tomlinson.

    Naughty Boy raised Louis Tomlinson’s ire by retweeting a video that included the words, “Naughty Boy Saved My Life Zaughty.” It seems Louis took it as a reference to Zayn Malik having left One Direction.

    Naughty Boy said the message wasn’t about Malik. That doesn’t necessarily ring true, however.

    Billboard jumped on the bandwagon and helped promote Zayn Malik’s new song.

    What’s your take on Zayn Malik’s new song. ‘I Won’t Mind?’ Do you think he was already working on his solo music before he left One Direction?

  • YouTube Is Going After Twitch with New Game Streaming Focus: Report

    YouTube Is Going After Twitch with New Game Streaming Focus: Report

    YouTube has been experimenting with live streaming for many years, finally letting any channel in good standing participate in live streaming in December of 2013, and the YouTube Live channel currently features livestreams of sporting events, music, news, and more. But if you take a look through the offerings you might come back uninspired. YouTube Live hasn’t really taken off as much as Google and YouTube would’ve liked it to.

    Apparently, the company thinks it needs a new focus.

    The Daily Dot is quoting sources in saying that YouTube plans to relaunch YouTube Live as a premier destination for game streaming – a move that would put it in direct competition with Amazon’s Twitch. When we say “game streaming,” we’re talking about the increasingly popular activity of watching other gamers play games live. This can be an amateur or a professional endeavor.

    Here’s what that source had to say:

    “Gaming and esports in particular are going to be a big driving force for the new-look YouTube Live. There’ll be huge opportunities for established streamers and organizations soon and I would say that the record numbers of esports viewers are only going to grow when Google start promoting and partnering with these events.”

    YouTube already has the framework in place to support this – it just needs the talent and promotion.

    Amazon completed its acquisition of Twitch in September of 2014. The price of that deal was $970 million. Before that, Google was in serious talks to acquire the game streaming platform itself, reportedly preparing a $1 billion offer. Reports indicated that Google backed out due to antitrust concerns.

    YouTube wouldn’t provide a comment on the report, but did send Ars Technica a cute gif of a girl shrugging, so there’s that.

  • YouTube Gives You New Ways To Get Conversions With Cards

    YouTube Gives You New Ways To Get Conversions With Cards

    Google announced the launch of cards for YouTube, which it describes as an “evolution of annotations”. Video creators can use them to tell viewers about other videos, merchandise, playlists, websites, etc. They can be displayed anytime throughout the video, and they work on mobile.

    “As a creator, you’ve probably been using annotations to engage with your viewers for years,” writes product manager Muli Salem in a blog post. “But one of the things you’ve told us is that you need more flexibility with the info you share through annotations, and—most importantly—you need it to work across screens and especially on mobile.”

    When a video has a card, it shows a “teaser,” at the designated time for a few seconds. The card pops out when it’s clicked.

    Throughout the rest of the video, viewers will see the icon appear when they hover over the player on desktop or when player controls are showing on mobile. It can be clicked at anytime to display the card.

    There are six types of cards that creators can utilize. The first one is for Merchandise, and you can see that in effect in this video:

    Luckily, the cards aren’t incredibly intrusive, so they shouldn’t be too annoying to users, and if you click on the one in the above video, you can easily see how this can help you get some sales. If you click through, the landing page opens in a new tab, and the video pauses, so that’s nice too, in case you want to go back and finish it.

    To use merchandise cards, you’ll need to accept YouTube’s terms and conditions, which it will show you at set-up.

    The second card type is for fundraising:

    To use this card, your fundraising campaign will have to come from a whitelisted fundraising site.

    The third is for other videos:

    The fourth is for playlists:

    If you use the video card, and link to an individual video within a playlist, it will default to the playlist.

    The fifth card is for websites:

    This card also requires accepting terms and conditions. To set up an associated website, you’ll have to make sure your account is verified, and you’ll need to add your site as an associate website in Webmaster Tools. This confirms that you own the site before you link it to your YouTube account. More instructions on getting this set up are available here.

    The sixth card is for fan funding:

    You’ll need to actually enable fan funding for your YouTube channel before using this card. Instructions for that are here. To be eligible, your account has to be in good standing, you have to meet the general criteria for YouTube partnership, you have to verify your account, and your network has to be enabled for fan funding, if you’re in one. You also have to have an approved AdSense account linked to your YouTube account. Only Australia, Japan, Mexico, and the United States are supported by the fan funding feature.

    There will be additional types of cards in the future from the sound of it.

    To take advantage of the cards, find the new “cards” tab in the video editor. You can create them, and edit them any time. You can provide a destination URL from a list of eligible sites. It will display a top-level URL. Cards will let you customize images, titles, and call-to-action text.

    “Because cards work across mobile and desktop and give you more flexibility to share what you want, our goal is to have these eventually replace annotations,” Salem tells creators. “But this will happen only once they can do everything annotations can do today, and more. Until then, we’re looking forward to your feedback on cards, including what you want them to do for you in the future.”

    “Cards are designed to be contextual to the video and should help creators reach their goals, while providing an enriched viewer experience,” Google says. “As the system evolves, we plan to optimize it to surface the most relevant teasers and cards based on performance, viewer behavior and the device they are using.”

    The company advises against pointing to a card in your actual video, because they won’t always be displayed the same way, depending on the device the viewer is using. Your account will need to be in good standing to be able to take advantage of them. They do work on live streams.

    It’s also worth noting that if a video has a featured video or playlist, it will be hidden on videos that use cards. Branding watermarks are now displayed in the bottom right corner to make room for the cards. Videos that display cards will not show call-to-action overlays. Google also advises against using cards too close to one another.

    YouTube Analytics provides performance reporting for cards, so that will be helpful if your’e trying to sell something. You might have some testing and optimizing to do.

    Images via YouTube

  • Check Out YouTube’s Cool New 360-Degree Videos

    Check Out YouTube’s Cool New 360-Degree Videos

    There’s been talk of 360-degree videos coming to YouTube for a while now, but on Friday, the company began to offer them to the world, and I have to say, it’s pretty awesome.

    First, let’s just get right to the good stuff. YouTube has this playlist of six videos, which take advantage of the technology. For now, you’ll only really be able to experience how cool it is if you’re using an Android device, but if you’re using Chrome, you can still kind of get the effect by using your mouse to drag the point of view around. On Android, just move your phone around to alter the perspective. I recommend sitting in a chair that swivels.

    Support will come to iPhone, iPad, and other devices soon, according to Google.

    “You share incredible videos with your fans every second of the day, but what if you could share even more in that video? Like, sharing the entire moment that you’re filming?” Google says on the YouTube Creator blog. “You could let viewers see the stage and the crowd of your concert, the sky and the ground as you wingsuit glide, or you could even have a choose-your-own-adventure video where people see a different story depending on where they look. Only you know what’s possible.”

    “Remember when the vantage point of the fisheye lens blew your mind? Now let’s see what you can do with every possible angle at your recording fingertips,” it says.

    Cameras that either support 360-degree video, which are either available now or are coming soon, include: Bublcam, Giroptic’s 360cam, IC Real Tech’s Allie, Kodak’s SP360 and RICOH THETA.

    Documentation for spherical video is available here. The python script for running on the video file to insert the correct metadata can be found here. Google says it is working to make this automatic, but until then, the script ensures the video will be uploaded to YouTube as a 360-degree video.

    It’s going to be very interesting to see what people do with this. There’s no question that brands are already salivating over the opportunities.

    YouTube is hosting a technology showcase from now through April at YouTube Space L.A., where creators can stop in and try the new cameras and get some hands-on training from YouTube staff.

  • Can Twitter Have Facebook-Like Success With Video?

    Can Twitter Have Facebook-Like Success With Video?

    Video has become huge for Facebook, and Twitter is hoping it can follow a similar path. Autoplay has certainly lent itself well to Facebook’s success, and it sounds like Twitter is about to follow suit.

    While Twitter video is still new to users, the company introduced Promoted Video for advertisers back in August after months of testing a Twitter video card with one-tap viewing. At the time, Twitter said tests showed that tweets containing native Twitter video generate better engagement and more video views than before.

    That engagement is about to become even stronger if a new report from AdWeek is any indication. It says that the company is meeting with top ad execs at SXSW to talk up its video capabilities, and that these talks will “possibly” include an autoplay option. The report, which cites “several marketers scheduled to powwow with Twitter reps,” says:

    Autoplay video is at the top of advertisers’ wish lists for Twitter, according to an agency executive headed to SXSW. Twitter is still working on video that automatically starts in a user’s stream as he or she scrolls down, according to multiple sources.

    Twitter has already launched its native video product. Ad insiders said it still plans to introduce an autoplay option that will enable six-second clips—including preroll ads—to automatically play before the user clicks for the rest of the video, two sources said.

    In December, we heard that Twitter was torn on whether or not to offer up autoplay videos. Since then, however, we’ve learned just how much success Facebook has seen.

    Facebook adopted autopplay videos back in the fall of 2013. In January, the company revealed that the number of video posts per person had increased 75% globally and 94% in the US over the past year, while the amount of video from people and brands in News Feed increased 3.6x year-over-year.

    While you certainly can’t attribute Facebook’s video growth to autoplay alone, you’d have to imagine that it has played a role. When the images are moving, the videos get your attention as you’re scrolling. That’s probably why brands are now posting more Facebook videos than YouTube videos on Facebook. Look at how drastically that has changed over the past year.

    That data is from SocialBakers, which according to the new AdWeek report, also says that while 82% of brands posting videos on Twitter share YouTube clips compared to 16% who share videos from Twitter or Twitter-owned Vine, Twitter and Vine videos account for about 70% of retweets and favorites generated by all video on Twitter. That’s huge for Twitter’s video platforms, and autoplay Twitter videos should only fuel that fire.

    Last month, AdWeek reported that JCPenney’s 4 cent (per view) video ads on Twitter “could threaten YouTube’s longtime dominance”. It shared a comment from the company:

    “Natively placing the video on Twitter offered a seamless way for consumers to view and share the content. That ease of use helped make Twitter the top platform for views,” Sean Ryan, director of social media at JCPenney, wrote in a report about the campaign. “While we could have promoted a link to the video on YouTube, the native placement was much more effective in cost per view.”

    Of course we’re not just talking about promtoed videos here.

    In January, Twitter unleashed its native video offering, enabling iOS users to capture, edit, and share videos from the Twitter app. It has since rolled the feature out on Android.

    “We designed our camera to be simple to use so you can capture and share life’s most interesting moments as they happen,” said product director Jinen Kamdar. “In just a few taps you can add a video to unfolding conversations, share your perspective of a live event, and show your everyday moments instantly, without ever having to leave the app. Viewing and playing videos is just as simple: videos are previewed with a thumbnail and you can play them with just one tap.”

    Twitter has always been about mobile first, but the company should really consider adding the video feature to the desktop web experience as well. It certainly can’t hurt to give users as many ways to use it as possible. Users may wish to record themselves with their web cams or capture video from their screens to share with followers.

    The potential viewability for Twitter video is only going to increase. Last week, Twitter launched video embeds, which will allow Twitter videos to be posted all over the web just like YouTube videos. You could already embed tweets, including tweets with videos in them, but now, Twitter video can be used as a standalone piece of content.

    But that’s only one of the ways viewability is likely to increase. As you may have heard, Twitter and Google have gotten back into bed with each other, and soon, Google will have full access to indexing tweets in real time. Now we’re talking the potential for relevant videos from Twitter to appear highly in Google’s search results almost as soon as they’re posted. This could be particularly effective for breaking news. This by the way, should instantly make Google itself better, provided it executes the deal well.

    A recent study found that even before the deal is implemented, Google appears to be more heavily indexing tweets wit images in them. It stands to reason that it will place some emphasis on video as well.

    Twitter has a well documented issue with user growth, and more search visibility means more people landing on Twitter (which means happier investors). If Twitter video becomes a significant part of this (as it should if Google doesn’t discriminate against it in favor of its own YouTube content – which does seem like a possibility) it should make Twitter’s video views skyrocket.

    Twitter’s improvements to search should also factor heavily into Twitter’s video views making for a more evegreen experience to complement the real-time nature of sharing and consuming on Twitter. In November, Twitter gave users access to every public tweet from the past 8 years with its search feature. Search is of major importance for online video. I’m sure you’ve heard YouTube touted as the second biggest search engine in the world a time or two.

    Still, Twitter will continue to be thought of as a place for real-time information first and foremost, and that will continue to be extended to video. The company just bought a video streaming startup called Pericope, which hasn’t launched yet, but is said to be similar to another streaming app for Twitter that’s gaining popularity – Meerkat.

    The Verge called Meerkat the “little app that’s turning live video into a big deal again.”

    TechCrunch called it “the livestreaming app Twitter should have built.”

    The app lets you start a livestream, tweet the link out and alert your followers of it. The video disappears when it’s over, unless you save it yourself. Between Meerkat, which is suddenly getting a lot of attention, and Twitter’s new acquisition, it’s likely that we’re going to be seeing a lot of livestreaming from tweets.

    Again, it will be interesting to see how this factors into the Google deal.

    If nothing else, video could go a long way toward improving engagement on Twitter, which for many users, has been significantly lackluster.

    Images via Twitter

  • YouTube Kids Launches as Google’s ‘First Building Block in Tech for Tykes’

    YouTube Kids Launches as Google’s ‘First Building Block in Tech for Tykes’

    YouTube is one of the biggest resources on the planet for content that can entertain, educate, and in the best cases, entertain and educate your kids. Of course, YouTube is also filled with a lot of stuff you probably don’t want your four-year-old watching – at least enough of it to make any parent wary of handing their kid an iPad and letting them run wild in YouTube land.

    Google is attempting to help with this problem. Today, Google has unveiled the new YouTube Kids app, a lite version of YouTube that it says is tailored to kids’ needs – mainly easy navigation and content control. We’ve known Google was working on building a YouTube Kids app, from the ground up, for some time now.

    The YouTube Kids app does exactly what you’d expect it to do. It attempts to filter out non-kid-friendly content, gives parents better control over the experience, and makes it easier to navigate.

    “For years, families have come to YouTube, watching countless hours of videos on all kinds of topics. Now, parents can rest a little easier knowing that videos in the YouTube Kids app are narrowed down to content appropriate for kids,” says YouTube Kids Group Product Manager Shimrit Ben-Yair.

    So Google is curating content for the Kids app. The app experience has been whittled down to four main categories of browsing – Shows, Music, Learning and Explore – but there is a search feature on the app.

    Google admits that some stuff might slip through the cracks –

    “When your child browses the app’s home screen, they’ll find a vast selection of kid-appropriate channels and playlists. When families search in the app, we use a mix of input from our users and automated analysis to categorize and screen out the videos that make parents nervous. And for added peace of mind, parents can quickly notify YouTube if they see anything questionable directly from the app,” says Google.

    But even with that slim chance of something adult-oriented slipping through, it’s clearly a much safer prospect than just handing your kid a phone and a browser open to YouTube proper.

    The app also has a handful of parental controls, like a timer feature that will shut down your kids’ watch time when it’s up and a quiet mode where you can disable all sounds while still allowing your kids to watch the videos.

    And most importantly, parents can turn off the search function altogether.

    Google says this new YouTube Kids app is just its first step – the “first building block in tech for tykes.” Reports have indicated that Google is getting more serious about building products and services for the sub-13 crowd. As tech becomes a more integral part of our daily lives and parents become more comfortable with letting tech help raise their children, products and services geared toward kids will continue to become more and more important.

    Take for instance Vine, Twitter’s video app, which just launched a standalone app for kids. Or look at StumbleUpon’s 5by. Despite the app’s fast growth, one drawback is the lack of a “kid-mode”. CEO Greg Isenberg recently told WebProNews that kid-friendly features are “likely something we’ll explore in the long term.”

    YouTube Kids is now available on iOS and Android.

  • Cat Draws YouTube Copyright Claim with Its Derivative Purring

    Cat Draws YouTube Copyright Claim with Its Derivative Purring

    In this story, cats and lame copyright bullshit collide. It’s the perfect internet story.

    Have you ever heard a cat purring and thought, man this really sounds like that one song? Well, YouTube did. And it recently flagged one cat video with a copyright notice.

    In March of 2014, YouTube user Digihaven uploaded this hour-long video of his cat Phantom purring – you know, if you like that sort of thing for relaxation and such. The video existed on YouTube for nearly a year before Digihaven was hit with a copyright notice.

    According to TorrentFreak, Phantom’s looped purrs were deemed to have ripped off a musical track called “Focus”, which belongs to EMI Music Publishing and PRS.

    From TorrentFreak:

    The video was not removed by the false claim, but according to Digihaven monetization was disabled. Luckily he’s not going bankrupt due to the loss of income, but it’s baffling how easy it is to hijack legitimate videos.

    “I’m sure EMI/PRS made Phantom a sad kitty. It seems like companies such as EMI are pirating ads on people’s legit videos, so I’m wondering if they apologize to, or reimburse people for those false claims,” he tells TF.

    The claim has since been retracted.

    The real problem here is YouTube’s unreliable Content ID system, whose software can make musical connections where they don”t really exist. This causes quite the headache for YouTubers.

    We’ve seen YouTube flag videos in the past for musical copyright infringement and thought well that’s pretty dumb. But this is the first time we’ve seen a cat flagged.

    Godspeed, Phantom.

  • YouTube Deprecates Flash Embeds, Flash API

    YouTube Deprecates Flash Embeds, Flash API

    Google announced that it is now defaulting to the HTML5 player on the web for YouTube embeds, moving to iframes. Along with this, they’re deprecating the “old style” of Flash <object> embeds and their Flash API.

    The company is encouraging all embeddes to use the iframe API, which as it notes, can inelligently use whichever technology the client supports. Google says in a blog post:

    Four years ago, we wrote about YouTube’s early support for the HTML5 <video> tag and how it performed compared to Flash. At the time, there were limitations that held it back from becoming our preferred platform for video delivery. Most critically, HTML5 lacked support for Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) that lets us show you more videos with less buffering.

    Over the last four years, we’ve worked with browser vendors and the broader community to close those gaps, and now, YouTube uses HTML5 <video> by default in Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and in beta versions of Firefox.

    The benefits of HTML5 extend beyond web browsers, and it’s now also used in smart TVs and other streaming devices.

    Google credits technologies like MediaSource extensions the VP9 codec, encrypted media extensions and common encryption, WebRTC, and Fullscreen with progressing HTML5 video. As it notes, other companies like Netflix, Vimeo, Microsoft, and Apple have all embraced HTML5.

    Google also credits HTML5 with enabling new classes of devices such as Chromebooks and Chromecast.

    The company tells developers to support HTML5 by using the iframe API everywhere you embed videos on the web.

  • Report Finds YouTube To Be Biggest Loser Of 2014 For Social Media Traffic Referrals

    Report Finds YouTube To Be Biggest Loser Of 2014 For Social Media Traffic Referrals

    Each quarter, we look at Shareaholic’s reports on social media traffic referrals, which give us an idea of how eight different social media platforms are performing in terms of driving traffic to websites. The latest one came out on Monday morning, and shows that Pinterest has plateaued and that StumbleUpon is the only platform besides Facebook to experience growth in the quarter (again, in terms of share of referral traffic).

    Besides looking at the last quarter, this particular report looks at the whole of 2014 and compares December 2014 to December 2011. YouTube is declared the biggest loser on every count.

    Just looking at last quarter, YouTube traffic referrals fell 65.49% according to the report.

    They fell 93.24% between December 2013 and December 2014 and 94.76% between December 2011 and December 2014.

    “YouTube was the year’s biggest loser; its share was annihilated, dropping 93.24% (0.18 percentage points). It currently clings onto a 0.01% share of overall traffic,” writes Shareaholic’s Danny Wong.

    “Though YouTube delivers the most engaged social visitors, it drives the fewest,” he says. “Since 2011, YouTube experienced a sharp drop (94.76%, 0.23 percentage points) in share of traffic. Formerly, it maintained a 0.24% share, which is now a paltry 0.01%. For brands and publishers, video is hard (and expensive) to create, but that’s not stopping anyone. Video is a necessary storytelling medium. The fact is: YouTube is no longer the sole gatekeeper of video views. With auto-play videos, Facebook has cannibalized YouTube’s traffic share. Thankfully, this is more a problem for YouTube than it is for you. To maximize the potential reach of your videos, you can (and should) publish them to Facebook and to YouTube.”

    As a matter of fact, we posted an article about that very point last week. We spoke with marketing consultant Brian Honigman, who said, “Right now I don’t think either necessarily should come ‘first’.I would say to either use them in conjunction (like Buzzfeed does) to get as many views as possible, or to use one to compliment the other.”

    “While Facebook can be counted on for viral lift, if your video doesn’t ‘pop’ on Facebook it will vanish pretty quickly, whereas slow and steady evergreen content can pay dividends for a long time on YouTube,” he added.

    Earlier this month, Facebook revealed that the number of video posts per person has increased 75% globally and 94% in the US.

    Shortly thereafter, SocialBakers reported that brands on Facebook posted 20,000 more Facebook videos than YouTube videos last month.

    Globally, 65% of Facebook’s video views happen on mobile. Facebook attributes this to faster connectivity, cheaper access, better phone screens, etc.

    “The most important thing to remember when creating video for Facebook is that it will be a part of News Feed,” the company says. “As a creator, you should be conscious that people will discover your video in News Feed next to a photo from a friend or a status update from a relative. Your video needs to fit in, and it needs to be something that your audience will want to watch and share.”

    “With the launch of auto-play and the surge in mobile use, it’s also important to focus on posting videos that grab people from the first frame of video,” it adds. “Shorter, timely video content tends to do well in News Feed. Keep in mind that auto-play videos play silently in News Feed until someone taps to hear sound, so videos that catch people’s attention even without sound often find success.”

    Facebook sent 24.63% of all visits to websites as measured by Shareaholic in December 2014. Its share grew 277.26% compared to December 2011.

    Images via YouTube, Shareaholic, Facebook, SocialBakers

  • NFL Highlights Are Finally Coming to YouTube, Google Search

    NFL Highlights Are Finally Coming to YouTube, Google Search

    The NFL has finally joined YouTube. Welcome to the future, guys!

    The new channel is part of a deal with Google, which will see the NFL upload official highlights and more video content on YouTube.

    “It’s pretty simple: On any screen you watch YouTube, NFL’s YouTube channel will bring you the sights and sounds this week in Arizona, from pre-game analysis to the highlights that everyone will be talking about. After the Super Bowl, don’t let the worst Monday of the year get you down. NFL’s YouTube channel will post more videos all through the offseason,” says Tim Katz, Sports Partnerships Manager.

    Of course, it’s not that simple.

    Re/code has the details on the business end of it all:

    The NFL says Google will sell ads against the league’s information and clips and share revenue with the NFL; the deal also calls for Google to promote the NFL on YouTube and in other places.

    Of course, clips are all you’re going to see. The dream of the NFL allowing full games to be shown on YouTube, if even possible at all, is likely pretty far on down the road.

    There’s also a big search element to this deal. Google will integrate video clips into its search results.

    The NFL already has deals in place with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, and this deal with Google was a long time coming. It’s just nice to see the NFL make any moves to open up its content distribution – however microscopic they may be.

  • Facebook Video Is Huge. How Should This Affect Your Strategy?

    Facebook Video Is Huge. How Should This Affect Your Strategy?

    Earlier this month, Facebook revealed that the number of video posts per person has increased 75% globally and 94% in the US. Shortly thereafter, SocialBakers reported that brands on Facebook posted 20,000 more Facebook videos than YouTube videos last month.

    These stats have sparked a lot of discussion about video marketing throughout the industry. We caught up with marketing consultant Brian Honigman, who wrote a great piece earlier this week called “Facebook Video vs. YouTube: Maximizing Results in the Evolving Video Landscape.” He shared some additional thoughts on the subject with us.

    How could Facebook continue to lure brands away from a YouTube-first strategy?

    “I think the most aggressive move Facebook could make is to aggregate all of their videos onto a central page and incorporate their Social Graph search and ‘Trending Topic’ algorithms to make all of the videos on the site easy to find either by what’s popular on the whole or what’s popular amongst your friends,” Honigman tells WebProNews. “Search is where YouTube currently has an edge, and Facebook incorporating their own unique approach to search is the final step towards becoming a direct competitor.”

    That would certainly be an interesting move from the social networking giant. The company has already shown that it’s starting to take search more seriously, particularly with the addition of post-based search.

    Facebook-first?

    In Honigman’s article, he talks about Facebook’s algorithm favoring its own videos over YouTube’s, and notes that Facebook videos get further preferential treatment with the autoplay feature. Is it wise for marketers to adopt a Facebook-first strategy with their videos?

    “Right now I don’t think either necessarily should come ‘first,” says Honigman. “I would say to either use them in conjunction (like Buzzfeed does) to get as many views as possible, or to use one to compliment the other.”

    “While Facebook can be counted on for viral lift, if your video doesn’t ‘pop’ on Facebook it will vanish pretty quickly, whereas slow and steady evergreen content can pay dividends for a long time on YouTube,” he adds.

    Honigman’s article makes an interesting point about how social networks like Facebook have historically been half of the equation for what makes YouTube videos go viral With more video originating on Facebook and Facebook controlling its algorithm, one may wonder if Facebook itself in the driver’s seat with what actually becomes viral.

    Honigman says, “I don’t know if either platform has ever decided WHAT became viral. What I can say is that Facebook is certainly in the position to decide WHERE things become viral.”

    Let’s not forget about Twitter, whose video offering is apparently on the way very soon.

    Asked about how he sees this factoring into the landscape, Honigman says, “Twitter’s last experiment with video was Vine. While this has been interesting and constitutes a unique following worth paying attention to, it definitely didn’t make the splash everyone hoped. Twitter is definitely supposed to offer improved video functionality soon, and I’d imagine they could seriously disrupt Facebook’s strategy of edging into the viral niche. That being said, Facebook has a serious head start and always will.”

    Facebook further emphasized video at Adexchanger’s Industry Preview conference as it indicated that it’s moving away from Facebook Exchange (FBX) as mobile continues to become a greater focus. AdExchanger managing editor Zach Rodgers, who interviewed Facebook’s VP of Advertising David Fischer, retweeted some video-related tweets from the session:

    Facebook says 13.5 million people watched White House Facebook videos related to the State of the Union Address.

    YouTube has dominated video for a long time, and will certainly remain a top player for the foreseeable future, but it’s looking like 2015 is set to be a big year for mobile video with that dominance being further challenged.

    Image via SocialBakers