Not a bad way to start a Friday morning over at YouTube! They just made the blog announcement today that they’ve now reached over 1 billion views per day on the video sharing site. In five years, three of which has been spent joined with Google, YouTube usurped Yahoo as the number two search engine (only surpassed by Google itself).
Chad Hurley, YouTube’s CEO and co-founder, listed in his celebratory blog post this morning the three key principles that the company has stood by since their inception:
- Speed matters
- Clip culture is here to stay
- Open platforms open up possibility
While competitors such as Vimeo and Veoh have sought to incorporate other standards to their business models, it’s clear that YouTube has lead the way in video and information sharing all over the world. From providing an easy platform for user-generated content to branded partnerships, they’ve come a long way from their humble May 2005 beginnings when they even posted their own video of their CTO’s cat. Which reminds me, does anyone know what happened to that video? If you can find it, send us the link via comment or hit us up on Twitter (@VideoArmy).
Category : Blog
If your business isn’t already implementing social video marketing, now is the time to get involved.
But first, what is social video marketing? We all know about the power of social media; Moonfruit, a 10 year old company that survived the first dot-com bubble, held a contest on which they spent only the cost of 10 Macbook Pro computers and managed to dominate Twitter for a week. We also know about the power of video; whether it’s video SEO domination of organic search results, or simply the ability for web video to go viral, video is the best way to interact with your audience online.
When you combine the two, you get a powerful marketing tool. Over on ReelSEO there’s a great article by Noah Weiner about the advantages of social video marketing. Weiner outlines three factors to measure a user’s experience with social media: speed, quality, and interactivity. With video, you can deliver your message to your audience faster than any other medium and create more entertaining content. Combine that with social media, and you can interact with your audience and engage them on higher level than ever before.
Social video marketing will be around for a while, so why should you get involved in it now? I think Weiner explains it best- “The next big thing, whatever it is, will come sooner rather than later. Establishing a video presence on the Internet now can be practical for the long range development of a business’s ability to deliver content quickly to an audience, especially when that audience is thirsting to interact with that content just as quickly. That trend has lived through all the ups and downs of the Internet’s evolution.”
Here at Video Army, we know the power of social video marketing first hand. One look at our social media examples will show you some of the people and businesses we have helped utilize social video marketing. Now is the time to act; don’t wait to be the last in your field to use social video marketing to reach your audience!
Category : Blog
There’s an article over on AdAge about Samsung’s recent viral ad success. We’ll get to that, but first, the video:
The video, created and produced by UK-based The Viral Factory, has been a YouTube hit, generating over a million hits on the original version and thousands more in reposts. Probably the most important aspect of the campaign was the way it challenged viewers to try and figure out how they did it. According to AdAge’s interview with Matt Cutler, vice president of marketing & analytics at Visible Measures, a company that analyzes video watching data similar to Nielsen in the TV market, “the average viewer [of this video] watched over 1:50 of a 1:43 spot, so it proved highly engaging; people rewinding, rewatching, and trying to figure out what’s going on.”
In addition to that, a follow up video was posted that first showed the many different ideas by YouTube users about how the video was made, followed by comments that correctly pointed out the clues that gave away the true answer. Here’s the follow up video:
As Matt Cutler summarized, “We think [the Samsung campaign] is indicative of modern brand-building and advertising, sort of a glimpse of the future.” There have been successful similar campaigns in the past; in August 2007 a YouTube user posted a video of a glitch in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 that allows a player to hit a ball from a water hazard, and in August 2008 EA released their response, a video of Tiger Woods recreating the glitch in real life, ‘walking’ on water and hitting his ball from the middle of a water hazard. The video was wildly popular, generating over 3 million views to date.
While some companies have been very forward thinking in their online advertising strategies, many others have been overly cautious. But with broadband access and internet usage growing every day, and the measurable success of web video advertising campaigns, the question of “Who is advertising with web video?” will soon become “Who isn’t advertising with web video?”
Category : Blog
For most people, the issue of how standards are reached for HTML and XHTML isn’t of particular concern. Although HTML has grown and evolved immensely since the early days of the internet, few people know about the various organizations involved (such as the W3C and the WHATWG).
However, it is inside these organizations where developers and web browser companies help define the future of the internet at its most fundamental level- determining which coding standards browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer should all implement. No matter what, browsers will still always try to implement their own technologies as well (such as Microsoft’s ActiveX), but in the end it is the open standards that are the most widely used.
The next revision in the works is HTML5. Now, there’s no guarantee that HTML5 will become the standard, because as usual competing companies are demanding their technology be included. That said, HTML5 gives us a preview of features to come, and its worth taking a look at them, particularly the new <video> and <canvas> tags.
There are two particular examples I want to point out. The first is Dailymotion’s open source video player demo, which can be found here (although it will only work if you’ve downloaded the beta version of Firefox 3.5, downloadable here). With it, you can rotate the player, hide playback controls, blur the videos, add a skin to the player, grab screenshots, and more, all done on the fly in your browser with no plugins necessary.
Now, that’s already pretty cool, but there’s more. Check out this video from TechCrunch showing off the video capabilities:
The most intriguing part of the video is when other elements, such as images, animations, and other videos are placed over the original video. The brilliance is in the simplicity- to do this, the video on the left is actually a <canvas> element composed of individual screen grabs from the source video. The web developer can then find the two brightest spots in that image, and create another object to be placed with those two points as the corners. And as I can’t emphasize enough, this is all done on the fly directly in your browser.
So will HTML5 be the next big thing? There are certainly forces at work against it, particularly Flash and the owners of proprietary video and audio codecs, but with technology this innovative, efficient, and just plain cool, this could likely become the new standard.
