College admissions are getting more and more competitive by the year. No longer do high SAT scores, athletic achievements, good grades or winning personalities guarantee admission to prestigious universities. This year, the admissions office at Tufts is allowing applicants to submit one-minute videos that “says something about you.”
The New York Times today reports that “For their videos, some students sat in their bedroom and talked earnestly into the camera, while others made day-in-the-life montages, featuring buddies, burgers and lacrosse practice. A budding D.J. sent clips from one of his raves, with a suggestion that such parties might be welcome at Tufts.”
One applicant, Amelia Downs from North Carolina, has 6,000 views on YouTube for her video which combines “two of my favorite things: being a nerd and dancing,” in which she performs a bar graph, a scatter plot, a pie chart, and a sine and cosine graph.
The videos are optional but admissions officials at Tufts see it as a great way to get to know prospective students.
Posted in Professionally Produced vs. User-Generated?.
A note to all of you aspiring filmmakers: Fede Alvarez’s 5 minute video that features CGI robots invading the capital of Uruguay and cost $300 to make, has landed him a $30 million dollar deal from Ghost House Pictures for a full-length sci-fi thriller set in Uruguay and Argentina.
http://mashable.com/2009/12/19/youtube-movie-robots/
Posted in Uncategorized.
comScore Video Metrix reports that more than 170 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 31 billion online videos during November 2009. This means 84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video that month, a new record.
Americans watched an average of 182 videos per viewer during the month. And the duration of the average online video was 4.0 minutes. This means the average online video viewer watched 12.2 hours of video.
The data shows that 128.1 million viewers watched more than 12 billion videos on YouTube.com. That’s 94.3 videos per viewer.
Posted in Stats.
Joost, the online video service brought to you by the founders of Skype and Kazaa, was one of the first video platforms to offer professionally produced video programming for free. They were backed by CBS and Viacom and had big syndication deals. Joost was acquired by Adconion Media, who said in a statement that “Video is a top priority for our company, and through the acquisition of the Joost assets we will be able to provide advertisers, content owners and website publishers with an end-to-end global video platform and cross-channel video and display ad-serving solution.”
Adconion had previously offered targeted distribution of content, including video and TV commercials, to audiences around the world via Adconion.TV. By acquiring Joost, Adconion.TV will add to its library of professionally-produced video content available for targeted pre-roll ads across 2,000 publishers. Adconion claims to reach nearly 300 million unique users on a monthly basis.
What went wrong to an online video platform with some much promise early on? Some say celebrity CEO’s with too much cash to burn. Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington said, “Applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems isn’t an interesting business.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/24/AR2009112401492.html
Posted in Professionally Produced vs. User-Generated?.
New York Magazine’s website, NYMag.com has increased its traffic significantly thanks to its new online video stratetgy and reprots a 287% ROI in only six months. New York recently partnered with Magnify.net, an online video service that allows publishers to integrate user-generated video, their own video or video from alternate sources to build a large collection of video content.
At TMG, we often tell our clients that the best way to do online video is to mix professionally produced content with user-generated videos for a vibrant and engaging library. Not only has New York achieved this, but in only six months they have increased revenue. NYMag.com sells pre-roll ads with their professionally produced videos and display banner ads on the user-generated content.
New York General Manager said in a press release, “The big impact has been to allow us to offer much more brand-appropriate video on the site and drive more video views as a result. We’ve been able to double the number of videos offered without any significant additional work. It fits very well into current workflow for our bloggers, editors and video producer.”
Link to article: http://www.foliomag.com/2009/new-york-mag-sees-287-percent-roi-boost-video-platform
Posted in Professionally Produced vs. User-Generated?, Revenue.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, which compile online-ad spending totals every quarter reported yesterday that internet-advertising revenue in the U.S. went down by 5.3% to $10.9 billion in the first half of the year compared to the same six-month period a year ago.
Ad Age notes that one of the big bright spots from this study was online video. Search and display advertising went up 2% and 1% respectively, but online video ad spending is up 38% from this time last year. That’s a lot of growth in a recession and an incredibly soft ad market.
Posted in Uncategorized.
According to PaidContent.org, there’s a rumor going around that Google, who famously bought YouTube for more than $1 billion in 2006, may be looking to buy Brightcove, which offers a more sophisticated player and hosts higher quality videos. Publishers from the New York Times to Time Inc to us here at TMG use Brightcove – looks like Google wants to get in on the higher end video business too. The price? About $500 – $700 million.
Item on PaidContent.org:
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-google-in-talks-to-buy-brightcove/
Posted in Professionally Produced vs. User-Generated?.
Online video streams are continue to climb, even during the dog days of summer.
Nielsen Co.’s July 2009 VideoCensus says total video streams climbed 31.4% to 11.2 billion, with a 14.2% increase in unique viewers to 136 million — per eMarketer.com.
Viewers’ average usage rose 42.2% to about three-and-a-half hours a month in July. Also, the average number of streams per viewer witnessed a 15.1% gain, to 82.4 streams per month.
Posted in Stats.
Print publishers have had an on-going problem generating the kind of ad revenue online because let’s face it: print ads are more interactive. While you may be able to overlook a banner ad, sometimes you can’t help but let your eyes wander to an ad that you are holding in your hands.
A possible solution: The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other major publishers will test a new ad model designed to block Web-site content with video commercials for a minimum of 10 seconds before users would have the option of closing the ads, which would then transition into traditional banner ads.
Posted in Revenue.
eMarketer’s latest study shows that online video is continuing its trajectory into web users’ daily lives. This latest study says that the number of U.S. online video viewers will grow to 188 million in 2013, from 144 million in 2009 according to eMarketer. These figures represent individuals who download or stream video content at least once per month. Online video viewers will make up 85% of Internet users in 2013, up from 72% in 2009. This will put online video within range of Web activities such as search and e-mail, which are nearly at saturation points among U.S. Internet users.
Posted in Stats.
