Last week, we sponsored the Chicago Interactive Social Club (CISC) “End of Summer Social” last week. CISC is popular in the interactive and agency space, and it’s easy to see why — fun was had by all. We’ll be having more events like this in Chicago as PlayTime continues to grow — despite only launching in March, we’ve run over 150 major brand video ad campaigns to date — and would love to meet if we haven’t already (drop us a line here).
Online publishers have free tools like Quantcast available for free to measure site traffic, but no one to date has offered robust and free video analytics to sites — until now. Today, we are changing that, giving away the very same InPlay video analytics that are counted on daily by top media companies to any publisher for free.
The suite works in any Flash player, like Adobe OSMF, LongTailVideo’s JW Player or a generic Flash player (HTML 5 and Silverlight due later this summer). Real-time metrics include uniques, views, time-watched, traffic sources, city-level audience geography and more — all easily exported and shared.
This launch is a big deal for the Internet’s video publishers! Now any site that is running video can access the world’s best analytics to understand how their viewers are interacting with each and every video on their site.
At OMMA Video today in New York, our CEO presented unreleased research on Facebook’s unique position in online video, in particular outlining tradeoffs between video ad types on Facebook. The presentation (below), was followed by reactions from the agency side (by Robert Davis, Interactive Marketing Director at Ogilvy) and the brand side (by Michael Parker, VP of Digital Marketing at Symantec). Our special thanks go out to them.
The full research report can be accessed here; TechCrunch’s take here and MediaPost’s take here.
Everyone at TubeMogul is very excited to launch Destinations today (release here, step-by-step how-to guide here). We are confident that our OneLoad users will get tremendous value from this new feature that we’re giving away an iPad as part of the launch!
Here’s how the promotion works:
The 1,000th user to set up a valid custom destination or custom feed and upload a video will win a free iPad (16GB, Wi-Fi version)
To be eligible, users must adhere to our Terms of Service
Just remember that the iPad will go to the 1,000th user – not the 1,000th custom destination or feed. So feel free to set up as many custom destinations/feeds as you like, but only the first one per user will count towards the promotion.
Over the last two years, we partnered with dozens of video and social networking sites to enable automated distribution and analytics via our OneLoad service. However, we know that each user has different needs. Many magazines, for instance, publish videos to Comcast On-Demand, iTunes and other venues in addition to YouTube and Brightcove for their own site. With Destinations, you can now send your videos to ANY location.
We tried to make the process of distributing your videos to a custom destination extremely simple (click here for a quick-and-easy guide). Just input the FTP or SFTP credentials for your target site, choose a transcode option and we do the rest. As part of this feature, we are thrilled to be able to offer universal, automatic transcoding completely for free.
Destinations also includes a feature to set up custom feeds, which you can use to distribute your videos to any site or individual. You can choose iTunes or Yahoo! MRSS feed formats.
Finally – and most importantly – ALL of these features will be available to every one of our users for free. The only exception is for customers who set up custom feeds and want TubeMogul to host their videos – for these users, we will charge a fee to cover our storage and bandwidth costs.
We are very excited to announce that in conjunction with our partner, Brightcove, we will soon be publishing a new quarterly research report that will examine trends in the online video industry and include a variety of interesting data points from our wide-reaching customer base. Every quarter, the report will also highlight a specific industry vertical segment, beginning this time around with the music industry.
Brightcove has a unique perspective on the music industry, as we are the online video platform behind the “Big Four” music labels – Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and EMI Music. The Brightcove platform powers hundreds of music label websites, artist websites and portals for these labels, as well as for their subsidiaries around the world. Since we are their analytics partner, we are tracking detailed viewership and engagement analytics in every stream.
Research Findings
Today there is so much going on in the music industry both in terms of distribution of video, to changing business models around video, to the format itself. The forces behind the distribution of music have evolved and are helping labels of all sizes to drive increased fan engagement with music video content.
Video Views
Based on comScore data and our own data from Brightcove, in January alone VEVO had around 226 million video views, while individual artist and label websites accounted for around 25 million views. Over the past three months, the artist and label websites have an aggregated run rate of around 23 million video views per month.
Consumer Engagement
Consumers tend to be more engaged with online music video content on artist and label websites as compared to video sharing sites. We found that average viewing-time across the Brightcove-powered artist/label sites was 1:51, compared to 1:12 for syndicated video sites (i.e. YouTube). The Brightcove sample includes 109.7 million streams; the benchmark sample 7,648,490 streams from top labels (including Universal, WMG). Also, consumers watch an average of nearly 10% more of each video when it is being viewed on an artist / label site compared to a video sharing site. 29% of consumers also watched videos through to completion on artist/label sites versus 12% on video sharing sites.
Social Media Interaction
Also of interest is the way music fans are interacting with video content via social media outlets like Twitter. Our research found consumers that find online music videos via Twitter watch an average of 2:30 minutes per stream compared to the 1:30 minutes viewed on average by consumers discovering online music videos via search engines like Yahoo!. However, 76% of online music videos viewed on artist and label sites are found through Google searches.
Global Comparison
On a global scale, we found that the majority of online music video views are occurring in the U.S. (40%), followed by Japan (10%), UK (9%) and Germany (3%).
It will be interesting to see how these figures evolve over the next year, particularly as sites like VEVO continue to expand their reach. For now, the data points to the fact that consumer interest in online music video content remains high, and the rise of mobile video and outlets like Twitter and Facebook will surely help artists and labels around the world to increase customer engagement with their video content in the future.
It’s been amazing to watch the outpouring of support for victims of the tragic earthquake in Haiti. Collectively, footage from Haiti and pleas for help from everyone from The Red Cross to lesser-known video bloggers total 33,496,643 views on YouTube in the past week. We also recently learned that one of our clients, Eric Harr of the social media agency of the same name, will be reporting from the ground in the coming days.
Our thoughts and prayers obviously go out to the people of Haiti, who still urgently need help. You can donate here.
Today, we announced a wide-ranging strategic partnership with Brightcove, the leading video platform. Included in the deal:
- TubeMogul’s suite of InPlay video analytics are a standard out-of-the-box feature of Brightcove 4, tracking real-time viewership and engagement data for all Brightcove customers.
- TubeMogul’s engineering team is working closely with Brightcove to delvelop next-generation advanced video analytics that will be made available in 2010 as a premium product and add-on to the Brightcove platform.
As Ryan Lawler notes, “this is a pretty big win for TubeMogul, which has gone from being a longtime member of the Brightcove partner program to powering analytics for the largest video platform provider out there.” So we’re obviously pretty excited! More here.
Today, we