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Lessons learned from the industry on creating Original Online Video, Part 3 Tips to get your video found
Part 1 looked at understanding your target audience, and some things to think about as content creators. Part 2 looked at production quality, and in this final part 3 some tips on getting a better page rank for your video.
Less than 20% of marketer use keywords in the filenames of their videos, the number are even smaller for those that use advanced techniques like writing keyword-rich captions and annotations or creating online video libraries.
Blended Search is a method by which many search engines use now for videos, images etc. By optimizing your videos you can more easily get your video to a first-page organic ranking on Google.
There are few interactive marketers that spend time on video optimization which means many of the videos in Google’s index are not well optimized – so if you do, you increase your chances significantly.
Tips to optimize your online videos:
- Insert keywords into your video filenames
- Host your videos on YouTube and embed the YouTube videos in your site. Google algorithms look at how many times a video is viewed, and views from the embedded video on your site will add to your YouTube view count as well
- Optimize YouTube video by adding keywords into your video title, descriptions, and tags
- Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The text on those pages will help the search engine figure out what your video is
- Create a video library on your site, so Google will know where to find your video content. Add keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.
Blog post by Juliette Tai, Director of Research & Competitive Intelligence, Greenlight360
Resources: paidcontent.org, streamingmedia.com, mashable.com, blogs.forrester.com
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Part 1 looked at understanding your target audience, and some things to think about as content creators. This week production quality.
Content quality
In some cases you don’t want to overproduce, for example, a home movie clip that’s put up on YouTube shouldn’t be perfect and produced, it’s the imperfections that make the video authentic and connect with the viewer.
With the popularity of professionally produced media, e.g. TV shows now being available on the web – these videos have the eyeballs because they bring with them a built-in audience, and to protect their brand they have to supply high quality video online.
ESPN provides the same production value as they do on TV, but there are times where they may do things differently. “One size does not fit all.” For instance, when they increased the production value of fantasy sport shows their eyeballs increased as well. To the audience it meant that ESPN was treating fantasy sport shows more seriously like their NFL Countdown.
Major media companies have a distinct advantage – they really already have all the right “tools” – the production crew, the equipment. These companies have realized that producing for online shouldn’t be any different than television.
Revision3 CEO, Jim Louderback contends that high quality isn’t important just to these major media companies. If you want to create episodic programming and want to continually draw in viewers you need to maintain high quality. If you’re a one-off video, then quality isn’t so important.
Richard Glosser, executive director of emerging media for CondéNet says it’s important to think about the shelf life of the video you’re producing. Daily updates of what’s going on in the stock market are generally only useful for a certain amount of time vs. a How-To video which has a much longer shelf life. So the key is balancing quality and cost, you want to produce the best quality you can at a reasonable cost.
Another thing to balance or think about in some cases is – some video is better than no video – this is particularly true for streaming live events such as a sporting event, a concert etc. MTV had great success with the Jonas Brothers concert – they handed out a bunch of mobile phones including to the Jonas Brothers, and then streamed all the backstage mobile videos, and concert footage they got from these phones.
Louderback believes what’s even more important than high quality video is audio. If the audio is crappy, no one will want to watch it. So having good mics is very important as well as knowing or understanding the acoustics of your studio or shooting location.
Steve Garfield, a well respected video blogger agrees and lists:
- Think about audio
- Think about framing
- Think about holding the camera steady
Be it an expensive camera or a mobile phone camera – he puts a lot of consideration into video production.
Oh the flip side, Kevin Nalty, marketer and YouTuber, thinks differently -
“I try to work on my production quality, but it’s not a high priority,” says Nalty. “I don’t give a crap about lighting, and I’ll put my camera on a tissue box to get a shot. Where I work hard is on the editing and timing because that’s what can harm videos. I probably spend zero time planning a video, 10 minutes shooting it, and an hour or so editing it. And I think that’s kind of right, though maybe I should spend less time planning. I’m not like Hitchcock, drawing up a storyboard. I’d never start if I did it that way.”
HD or not
This too is a matter of shooting the highest quality possible as it’s easier to compress from high quality, but you can’t get HD out of standard definition. For major media companies it’s easy for them to do HD for everything; for the rest of us, it’s a matter of where you plan to distribute. Many sites do not yet support HD so if you have no plans to ever distribute to an HD site then it’s not particularly necessary to shoot in HD.
Video length
One thing’s for certain – the shorter videos have a better likelihood of going viral. These are the ones that get shared, get blogged about, and put on social networks. These are also the videos we would watch in our extended viewing hours, e.g. in the office during lunch, or for a brain break during the day, or even on our mobile phones.
Long form has its case as well. Events definitely keep viewer attention.
New media is not the same is traditional TV, so don’t expect the TV format to necessarily work – 22 minutes of content with several ad blocks. Louderback states –
On the internet you can be 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, whatever. Just do enough for what you’re trying to do and the story you’re trying to tell. People say it’s got to be short-form, but we’ve found that if it’s the right content and the right host, people will watch for half an hour and even longer.”
This is what it all really comes down to. The Internet is not television. So it does give us the freedom to do so much more than what is done on television currently. If all we need is 8 minutes for a storyline, new media can do that. We should be happy that the Internet allows us that freedom.
Formula
Well, there is no formula for success in this space, not yet anyway. Major media or not – everyone is faced with the same issues – providing content that draw in viewers, keeping abreast of viewer feedback to assist with production decisions.
This is a new frontier that we’re in, and it’s great! It can be daunting, but look how exciting it is, the creative freedom we have by not being boxed in to a 22-minute slot. Interestingly enough, it almost puts us on even standing with the major media companies. Yes, they have mucho budget, equipment and crew, but for those of us just emerging into this business, we’ve put out some pretty amazing content and have had to be more creative about it because of lack of funds. We also have the flexibility of not following traditional rules…major media has to be pretty sure of something before they decide to move forward.
In the end…
For the major media companies – quality is of utmost importance because they need to protect the brand, also they have the manpower to be sure their videos meet their network minimum standards and requirements. It’s also important that they put out content regularly so they can build a following, have people subscribe or bookmark it, and then it must be distributed so that viewers can access it when they want it.
For the emerging new media companies – I couldn’t have said it better than Revision3 CEO, Jim Louderback
To new media startups: “Here’s the thing—we all think we’re really smart, but we’re not,” says Louderback. “We create a lot of stuff, and we think it’s really good. But the audience is really smart, and you’ve got to listen to them. Some stuff we’ve done and [we] think, ‘Oh we’re brilliant.’ Other stuff, we think that, but we put it out there and say, ‘Oh, we’re so stupid.’ The important thing is to not sit around and tweak and hone and make it the best it can be. If you’ve got a good idea, put together a pilot and get it out there. In the end, it doesn’t matter how smart you think it is—the audience is going to tell you what they like.”
In Part 3, a few tips to get your videos found on the net.
Blog post by Juliette Tai, Director of Research & Competitive Intelligence, Greenlight360
Resources: paidcontent.org, streamingmedia.com, mashable.com, blogs.forrester.com
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The new media industry is still in the process of being defined. Unlike traditional television there is no “formula” for creating a successful program. New media in many cases is still a “hit or miss” process for all in this industry.
There is no doubt that online video has become more mainstream in recent years. According to James A. Pitaro, VP of media at Yahoo, states that 47% of the U.S. now watches online video. In September 2009, 11 billion videos were streamed which is up 24% year over year. Of the videos being viewed more and more are original web videos.
Because web videos have become more mainstream, companies are moving towards some sort of video model – this includes major media as well as the smaller start ups.
Given that there’s no clear cut way of being successful in new media – several companies have disappeared despite having well known names attached to them. For Yahoo – they have found success with their short-form videos with shows like Yahoo! Sports Minute, Prime Time in No Time.
So what are some of the lessons learned? How can you benefit from these past mistakes?
It has to be more than a good idea – go where the fish are, find the popular
Make sure the idea is relevant for the Internet. Stick with trends, people or brands that are already proven. Ok, so it’s not the most original idea, but this can drive successful online content. Major media companies take advantage of this concept – it’s easy for them, their shows have a built-in audience, for example, creating an Internet program based on a popular TV show like the After Show, for the show The Hills, or Big Brother After Dark for the Big Brother show.
Develop your own voice, your own identity. Find something you can own. If you choose to be a comedy site, decide if you can compete with the major sites that are already out there – funnyordie, MyDamnChannel, YouTube etc. Or choose as niche a topic as possible.
If you have a host for your show, find someone who’s engaging, someone who knows the subject matter, who’s the expert, who’s passionate, and can relate to the viewer – don’t just find a body that can read a teleprompter. The host need not have Hollywood or TV experience. A different style and skill works for online video according to Revision3 CEO, Jim Louderback. It’s more important to find a personality that can create a community around their interest.
Pay attention to the feedback of your audience
Research, research, research – if you do that, you should come up with what your target audience wants. As an obvious example, Yahoo’s Finance site decided based on – search, and click-thru-rate that most of their user-community was doing tech stock searches – this led Yahoo to create a daily tech stock program called TechTicker and is their most watched finance program online.
Knowing what your audience wants to watch, you can engage and cater to those viewers and get more feedback which will prove very useful for video productions. However, feedback isn’t always useful, helpful or nice – it is at this point where you have to choose comments from the median.
Also note that comments vary from site to site. Comments on YouTube where there is a broad set of viewers may have more free-flowing comments that are not quite as on-point as a smaller more specific site. This is where it becomes a task of reading between the lines to try and find the truth in the feedback.
Involve sponsors early in the creative process
As early as possible, get an advertiser involved with your idea, and co-develop the idea together. Make sure to strike the right balance so as not to turn off viewers by over branding. For a small startup, easier said than done. I see this as more for the companies that have established some sort of reputation where a sponsor finds you interesting, and has potential…but that’s my 2 cents.
Be quick
Your web content must be timely. Yahoo employed “fast twitch” programming – their Primetime in No Time recaps the previous evening’s prime time TV shows. Every night, the host watched East Coast feeds of the shows, writes and then tapes the show to air hours later.
Live or near-live programming will need resources and skills; otherwise, the information is not valuable. Beyond live video, it’s just as important to continue to provide access to the video. What viewers want most is not when to watch a video (like linear television), but know that they can watch the video when they want to watch it.
Super-serving fans vs. attracting new viewers
Super-serving is a buzzword that determines much of the decisions around what content goes online.
If they like it – give them more. If you’re doing a good job at providing “more”, then you’ll likely retain your audience and develop a reputation as the place to go to for that type of content. But be careful not to super-serve to a point that you’re hindering audience growth.
Adding new content gives you the opportunity to reach new viewers beyond the current followers. If you know your audience, it makes it easier to determine what their online video habits might be.
With the exception of sports sites which enjoy some exclusivity and niche viewers. Generally, content drives success less than distribution and syndication, so it’s key to distribute through multiple channels so that audiences are able to find it.
Don’t spend a lot
It is possible to create quality content without an enormous budget or even have your own studio. Sure, money can solve a lot of problems, but this forces us, content creators, to be creative and look to solve problems in new ways rather than just throw money at it. Also, as I’ve written in past blogs, advertising money is not yet there in new media, so we have no choice but to product content dirt cheap.
In part 2, the article continues with production quality.
Blog post by Juliette Tai, Director of Research & Competitive Intelligence, Greenlight360
Resources: paidcontent.org, streamingmedia.com, mashable.com, blogs.forrester.com
Short Form or Long Form Web Video – You Decide?
Which do you prefer? It seems that short-form videos still dominate online viewing, but I also believe that’s because it’s what came first; in fact, initially YouTube had a 100 MB upload limit. Metacafe recently commissioned a study (July 2009) on – who in America is watching, what they are watching, and how much. They surveyed nearly 2,000 people between the ages of 12 to 64.
This survey found that over one-third (37%) of viewers watched short professional videos, and found them to be as entertaining as full-length TV shows. These shorts are especially popular with the younger viewer – this should be a cue to Brand advertisers to stretch their marketing to both television and online.
Other stats worth highlighting:
- 43% of all Internet users watch online videos weekly
- 70% of males 18-24 watch weekly, including the 25% who watch daily
- 56% of females 12-17 watch weekly, including the 13% who watch daily
- 30% of all 55-64 year olds watch online videos weekly
- 34% of TV viewers also use their computer at least half the time while watching TV (that would be me!)
- 20% of all online video viewers say they watch less TV due to online video
On the flip side, due to the success of Hulu and other pure-play providers, over the last couple years they’ve been able to convince us, the viewers, that the Internet is a good place a watch long form video. Twenty-five percent of online video viewers are watching full-length TV shows, and 15% are watching full-length movies online.
YouTube definitely is the leader in online video, as they’ve built up an amazing 5.5B streams (April 2009), so they are clearly one of the top destinations. But even, YouTube now provides us with long form video, be it TV shows to movies.
So which form will reign supreme?
There are monetizing issues with both short and long form. YouTube has still not seen its full earning potential. Hulu has business model challenges in that they advertise 4-minutes per hour, which is great for the viewer, however, Hulu is still a business and how will they maintain the ability to show premium content? This is just food for thought….as the intent of this blog entry was to find out – which do you prefer – short form or long form online video?
Learn more at reelseo.com, mediapost.com, contentinople.com
Download this pdf for a complete list of the survey findings
Blog post by Juliette Tai, Director of Research & Competitive Intelligence, Greenlight360
We at Greenlight360 are committed to creating great content on a super low budget…What is low budget when referring to a movie or a series? Some would think for a movie maybe it’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, for a web series maybe in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. If you can’t do a low-budget project, try a NO-budget project….
At Greenlight360, we would like to follow the footsteps of some of these notable video projects which were created on zero to low budget. We are about to “Change Television, One show at a Time.”
Colin, a zombie movie made for an unbelievable $70 where it was premiered and hailed at Cannes this year, was directed by a young Welshman, Marc Price. Locations were shot in and around his London home. He was able to leverage the social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, to find 50 volunteer zombies. He also utilized Facebook to help generate buzz. Make-up and make-up artists were inherited from Hollywood blockbusters, they came from a film crew website, and were promised they could do anything they wanted – one of the make-up persons came from X-Men3…imagine – some actors used the same latex that was used on Wolverine.
Price basically let everyone involved in the project know that he didn’t have money or equipment, so bring whatever equipment you own.
The story was uniquely told from the perspective of the zombie, which had never been done before. Colin was filmed over 18-months all while Price worked nights, part-time as a booker (dispatcher) for a car service/limo company. He shot in the mornings and on Sundays.
Besides being too costly – large, over-the-top effects seen in major Hollywood films are exciting but predictable and possibly becoming a bit mundane. Price took a lesson from George A Romero’s (Dawn of the Dead), he felt that setting a zombie plague in the suburb was more effectual – the story takes place where most of us live. Price pairs everyday life with the terrifying.
So where did Price spend the $70?
It was spent on a crowbar, digital videotapes for the camcorder he used, and small snacks for his 100- cast and crew. Price was unable to afford location permits, so he chose to film in the backstreets of a sleepy town where he was able to create his desolate world with little interruption from cars and people.
No one was paid.
Everyone was asked to bring a weapon they could use when playing humans, and to bring old clothes when they played zombies.
Kaleidoscope, a distributor, has picked up Colin and will hit selected theaters in October 2009.
A labor of love, Malo Casa, is a web series that had no-budget, no crew, and received an “Official Honoree” distinction at the 12th annual Webby awards (2008). This distinction recognizes work that shows remarkable achievement, ingenuity, skill and vision of the creators.
In 2008, the Webbies received approximately 10,000 entries from the US and 60 countries, less than 15% receive get an Official Honoree.
Malo Casa is a thriller/drama web series about the Massey family that moves across the country from Ohio to San Diego, California. They are escaping some events that occurred in Ohio with hopes of putting their lives back to normal, however, their new San Diego home has a dark past.
And of course, we can’t forget the one that started it all lonelygirl15 from 2006, about a young 16-year old video blogger, Bree, who blogs about typical teen issues and having a religious family. Viewers are kept in the dark and are led to believe that Bree is a young video blogger, just like any other YouTuber.
But really it was the creation of co-creators Mesh Flinders, Miles Beckett, and husband and wife lawyers Greg and Amanda Goodfried.
How Lonelygirl15 initially built her YouTube audience – Lonelygirl15 posted her first video poking fun at a then popular video blogger, Emily, which tapped into her built-in audience; this resulted in many comments from Emily-followers to continue posting lonelygirl15 videos.
How Flinders and Beckett got actress Jessica Rose to play Bree
She met them thinking she was going to be in a feature film and after signing a nondisclosure agreement was told that they wanted her to play the lead in what will become “the future of entertainment” and they wanted her to do it for free. She tuned out after that and heard something about the Internet and some a male actor to play “Daniel”. It sounded all too shady.
She eventually gets convinced to sign on, and after about a month an episode shows a spike in viewership…and they’re on their way. They found a topic that connected with the audience. In 48 hours, this episode hits a half million views. Successful cable shows gets 300,000 to 500,000 viewers…they just hit that mark so it seems they’re onto something.
The audience participates. Comments and theories left by viewers…some get incorporated into the story.
In need of money, Jessica Rose is about to take a waitressing job at TGI Fridays. Beckett fearing the secret getting out, that Lonelygirl15 is not real, gets an investment from his father. Rose is given $500 a week to play Bree and asked to stay indoors as much as possible.
Wandering the halls of CAA. Greg Goodfried got wife Amanda, who worked at CAA to let him in the door. At that point, he literally walked the halls trying to catch the attention of someone and getting waved off by busy agents on the phone. Goodfried managed to corner a couple in a hallway, and asked for 5-minutes. They granted him 5-minutes, and an hour later they were still talking.
What it really comes down to is this…making no-budget video projects is the next wave of the future! Sundance Film Festival 2010 will have a new section called “Next” where the focus will be on 6-8 innovative, original zero to low budget films for the 2010 festival. “Next” is designed to promote and discover new filmmakers whose vision might otherwise be hampered by lack of funds and/or investment dollars.
Blog post by Juliette Tai, Director of Research & Competitive Intelligence, Greenlight360
How Much For That Episode In The Window?
As a startup company trying to find investors, as well as a cast and crew for the series we are currently developing, we have experienced pushback on what dollars should be going out. We maintain that we can create compelling, high quality content for essentially coffee money.
As new media begins to take hold, we along with other content creation sites hope to help shape the way Internet Television is done.
Note: the following research is based on short-form media. We at Greenlight360 intend to produce long-form content.
Internet Television as it stands today is not richly funded by advertising like traditional network broadcast television. The reason is that everyone wants the Internet for free, and until advertisers feel that there’s an audience they won’t want to buy larger shares of ad space. Next New Networks, Herb Scannell (CEO at the time of this Business Insider article in 2007) stated that “Internet video only works if it’s dirt cheap or less.” There was a thought at the time that web video could be made profitable for 10% of conventional TV programming – he felt that was still too high. He looks for programming that costs “hundreds of dollars a minute.”
The Writer’s Strike in 2007 seem to help push along the popularity of webisodes. The cost of webisodes has been a well kept secret. As noted in an article by NewTeeVee in 2007:
- The low end of the spectrum, Yuri Baranovsky estimated it cost him ~$500 per episode out of pocket to create the web sitcom Break a Leg – the cost is kept low by cashing in favors
- John Norris (not of MTV fame, but White Rock Lake Productions) spent under $500K to produce his horror series Buried Alive, which is equivalent to a 2 ½ hr movie (100, 1 to 5 minute episodes) at $3,333 per minute
- Michael Eisner’s Prom Queen cost him roughly $3,000 for 90 seconds
- The high end Sanctuary, an award winning series picked up by Sci-Fi Channel cost ~$4.3M to produce. This effects-heavy series cost $32,000 per minute for 135-min. Compared to the other Web series it’s quite expensive, but compared to traditional network television….
Two years later, producing a Web series at low cost is still the mantra today, as indicated by Web Series Magazine. The payscale for Web series:
- Actor – generally series producers can’t afford to pay emerging talent
- DP – most producers handle their own photography
- Director – most producers direct their own webisodes
- Editor – most producers cut their own webisodes
- Extras – most producers use friends and family, there’s no pay
- Producer – if you’re lucky to get hired…$200 for 12hrs on the low end
How big a difference is there really in advertising on broadcast television vs the Web.? HUGE! The best description I’ve seen is from David H Lawrence XVII of Heroes fame. His example showed a 1000-fold difference. Rounding out numbers for easy understanding….a network like NBC makes about $10M from advertising each time an episode of a popular show is aired.
For further details that speak to CPM and CPC, please view the David H Lawrence XVII video (above link).
The math for a popular Network show:
- One 30-second spot costs $300,000
- In a 60-minute episode there are 22-minutes of spots, which is 44 30-second spots. These spots are split up to national and local…approximately 75% are national and assuming all are sold, 75% of 44 is 33 spots
- 33 spots x $300,000 = $10M — Income earned by the Network(NBC) per showing of an episode of a popular show
If the Network (NBC) gets 10M viewers this means that the Network gets $1 per viewer per episode.
Using the same number of viewers for webisodes (which by the way is entirely unrealistic) but keeps a common denominator for the example. The most common form of advertising is Cost per Click (CPC) – this is what an advertiser pays the network every time a viewer clicks an ad. On average the CPC is 5-cents. Just from that alone you can see there is an enormous difference between Network Television vs Internet Television.
According to Google if you can get 1% of your viewers to click an ad – that’s awesome!
The math for a Web episode:
- Assuming 10M viewers, and 1% click the ad – that’s 100,000 clicks at 5-cents a click, this totals up to $5,000, this assumes one pre-roll, and even if you add in product placement maybe you’ll up the total to $10,000
This, $10,000 is a far cry from the $10M the Network made per episode on traditional television.
So until advertisers fully support Internet Television, those of us who are in the business of creating content can’t solely rely on advertising money alone, it just isn’t there yet. We must creatively find a way to do this, and be great at it on coffee money.
Blog post by Juliette Tai, Director of Research & Competitive Intelligence
