Larry Kless' Weblog: research

Showing posts with label research. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Getting Online Video to Measure Up - Dan Piech, comScore

2010 was massive year of growth for online video, throughout the industry and the way consumers accessed video content. Analysts are seeing a sharp rise in online video viewing compared to traditional television, which has huge implications for online video advertising and marketing. Digital media measurement firm comScore noted in its “The 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review” that eCommerce spending in 2010 grew 9% to $227 billion in sales. Social networking site continue to drive views as audiences build, share and engage on sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. For businesses, there's no other tool more important than online video analytics to capture how your video content is consumed on the web.

Dan Piech, Senior Product Management Analyst with comScore says, the best way online video publishers and marketers create and sustain value is through differentiation, and the way you do that is through your data.

"It's not just about understanding your audience," Piech says, "but then putting together a pitch that sells that audience to advertisers."

Piech says that online publishers will not have the reach of a television audience, and for small publishers it will be even harder. So he suggests that publishers find that niche audience, develop it and sell that niche based on what you've learned about it from your metrics, because the agencies are not going to do that for you. He says that digital market intelligence services like comScore help you better understand your audience.

comScore believes that they have the most accurate methodology for measuring digital media. Each month, the digital media measurement firm comScore releases its Online Video Rankings from its Video Metrix service, with the most recent comScore May 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings, that showed 83.3 percent of the U.S. Internet audience (176 million) watched online video content in May for an average of 15.9 hours per viewer. Video ads accounted for 12.6 percent of all videos viewed and 1.2 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

How comScore gets at the data is a secret sauce merged from two sources. The first source is a panel of two million Internet users worldwide that they track their behavior. One aspect of that behavior is watching videos. So they're able to understand where they are watching videos, how long they're watching videos, get a good sense of unique viewers , and project that to the total populations. The second source is census-level data collection method, commonly referred to as unified digital measurement, and comScore works with all the top publishers in the video and media space to get that data. In the method, publishers send data every time a video is viewed.

"By that we're able to get a very census-level, total population look at the video activity on that site," Piech says. "and furthermore, break that video activity down to very granular levels."

As an example, for clients like NBC, CBS or MTV, comScore is able to break down how people are engaging with those shows on a a census level from that unified digital measurement, as well as on the panel. Like Nielsen, comScore tracks that activity across all screens and as Piech notes

"Obviously we're paying close attention to the cross-media space and the three screen developments that are taking place. Because at the end of the day, content is king, as you always hear and to the extent that that's the case, we have to follow that content wherever it goes."

Piech says, currently that's mostly online but we're at a turning point in the space where mobile and OTT are growing very fast. So comScore is working on developing the indicators to know where the space will be in five years, mostly through surveys that help forecast audience perceptions. In a recent survey, comScore was working to understand the level of ad loads that users would be willing to watch, or rather willing to endure. What they found was that online viewers are perfectly willing to watch twice as many ads for their content. Piech says that when it comes down to it, the numbers are people, and by putting a face to the numbers puts an emphasis not just on numbers, but attitudinal changes happening in the space which helps publishers better understand how their content is consumed so they can best monetize it moving forward.

As the current trends in online video continue to show massive growth, so does the opportunities for online video publishers and marketers. Many analysts say that for the last several years we've reached a tipping point for online video.

"We've reached a state in the online video space now where almost everyone online is watching video at some point in the month," says Piech, "so we've now got that reach. But what's interesting that we're finding out is that now that everyone is watching online video, people are starting to watch a lot more."

He says it's more than doubled in the last year and is fascinated by the trend, because online video is still a small part of the overall activity of any individual day as compared to television, but what's happening is that's growing incredibly fast. Engagement levels are up, number of videos views are up and that's across all demographics and all across the board, and it's happening at a very high rate.

"So if you do a simple extrapolation that, in the very near future where online video is a major, major player out there," Piech notes, "and that's what makes me really excited about the space. We're not a dying industry, we're in our birth and really high growth state which makes this a very exciting space and a space that changes quickly."

This interview in this post was conducted at the Online Video Platform Summit where Piech was a panelist on the session, Online Video by the Numbers: Analytics, Reporting, and Metrics. He was joined by an all-star panel that examined what type of important data you should be collecting and how to use that data to improve the effectiveness of your video and increase your ROI.

Piech also spoke earlier this year at OMMA Video on, The State of Online Video, where he provided a picture of today’s online video consumer which can be viewed in the video below.

Video streaming by Ustream

"Who is watching, how engaged are they and what has changed over time? Where are we seeing the biggest shifts – long-form or short-form videos? What impact is online video having on traditional TV viewing, and when it comes to online advertising how are consumers’ preferences shaping the market?"

About comScore
comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo. Follow comScore, Inc. (comscore) on Twitter

About Dan Piech

Dan is a Senior Product Management Analyst at comScore, Inc. and President and Founder at evoxio. At comScore, Dan manages comScore’s online video measurement products and is responsible for ensuring that measurement insights support the growth and development of the online video industry. Previously, he was anInteractive Strategy Intern at McKinney, Project Manager at HG Media, Inc and Advertising Intern at Success Communications Group. comScore is a marketing research company that provides marketing data and services to many of the Internet's largest businesses. Follow Dan Piech (danpiech) on Twitter

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Tuesday, March 22, 2011

What Counts as a Video View? - Online Video Conversations: David Burch, Tubemogul - Part 2

So, what constitutes a video view? Is it considered a view just when the stream is called up and served to the viewer, even though only a portion of the video is viewed? Does the entire video need to be viewed to be counted? After several years of inconsistencies, the online video industry has not yet adopted a standard definition for a view. So to get some insight on this subject I spoke with David Burch, Director of Marketing at TubeMogul, Inc. According to Burch, while the industry standard is to count a view once someone clicks play and the streams starts, there still is a lot of misconception among media buyers on constitutes a view.

Burch says the technology is definitely there and Tubemogul has been putting out benchmark data on video completion rates for some time. Back in 2008, Tubemogul put together a study on What Counts as a View? which identified the differences in view counting among popular video sites. Most of the sites counted any interaction with the video player (full view, 1/2 view, refresh, embed, embedded autoplay) a view and as the report states, "The implications are relevant for video advertisers, content publishers, and those that might seek to artificially inflate the popularity of a given video."

Jim Louderback

Jim Louberback, CEO of Revision3 Internet Television, has been very outspoken on the need for standardization and has railed against the industry practice of counting an autoplay-start, as a video view and the growing prevalence of "stream fraud". He cited Tubemogul's updated study from September 2010, which reported that the problem of counting views was getting worse and nearly all video sites, except YouTube, counted anything including embedded autoplays as a view. According to YouTube, "A view occurs when a person watches your video. In order to preserve accuracy in view counts, we identify irregular playbacks such as spam and remove these from the view count."

Burch suggested that for publishers and advertisers it becomes a tradeoff. Another Tubemogul research report looked at drop off rates for pre-roll ads, which found that for many viewers, sitting through a pre-roll just isn't worth it. In fact, the overall number of viewers that clicked away from a video during 10-30 second pre-roll ads was close to 16%, and that number varied with top magazines and newspapers, where 24.85% of viewers click away; large broadcasters, only 10.9% of viewers click away during an ad, and video sharing sites saw 38.4% viewers click away and never actually watch the video content they originally came to see.

For advertisers, it becomes a bit of quandary when it comes traditional CPMs (Cost-Per-Impressions). If an "impression" or "view" is logged at the beginning of the pre-roll, for instance, and not after the ad has been viewed in full, then it's quite possible advertisers could end up paying for viewers that never saw their ad. For publishers, they risk losing a quarter of their audience based if they run pre-roll ads.

Burch concluded that:

"There is consensus around the industry about when to count a view, that's just a stream. But I think there's also consensus that that's obviously not enough. The technology is there to track it but benchmarking is just the beginning."

About Tubemogul
TubeMogul is a video advertising and analytics platform that connects advertisers with highly targeted audiences. TubeMogul's advertising solution is powered by the company's unprecedented data platform that tracks billions of video streams every month from the Internet's top publishers. This unique technology enables TubeMogul to help advertisers find consumers who want to watch their videos - and watch them longer. Advertisers and marketers never again have to choose engagement and accountability over reach if they use TubeMogul's video advertising and analytics platform.

Follow: tubemogul (tubemogul) on Twitter

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Online Video Conversations: David Burch, Tubemogul - Part 1: Why Video? Marketing tips, Online Video Industry Trends

In this latest installment of Online Video Conversations, I caught up with David Burch, Director of Marketing at TubeMogul, Inc., to find out why video is important for all types of businesses – small, medium and large – and how video distribution, analytics and social media marketing helps build brand identity and viewer engagement. He also talks about trends and the current state of the online video industry. Burch is well-known within the industry and is frequently quoted as an expert in online video in leading media outlets like AdAge, NPR's Marketplace and Wired.

Burch leads media relations for the Emeryville, California-based online video ditsribution, analytics and advertising platform. He also is the author of all TubeMogul's data-driven research. Prior to joining TubeMogul, Burch was a Content Manager at Delivery Agent, and worked on digital strategy for many top media companies, including ABC and NBC. He received his BA in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley, which is where Tubemogul was born.

To start the conversation, I asked Burch one of those "what is the meaning of life?" questions by asking:

"Why video? What's so compelling about video that companies should get involved with it?"

According to Burch, there are a lot of good reasons, but the number one reason is that video is more engaging than any other media.

"Video is just a really powerful medium to convey branding messages. It's more effective than other formats, like banner ads or different mediums of advertisement. Why video? Why not video?"

Online video audiences continue to grow, with more and more people are watching more video across the board. According to Tubemogul research, people are more likely to click on a link if it's a video and on average audiences clicking on video links from Twitter watch a video 36.91% longer than viewers referred by Facebook and 49.98% longer than viewers referred by Digg. He says people love Tubemogul's feature that sends a Tweet when your video is uploaded.

In addition, Brightcove and Tubemogul's Online Video & Media Industry Quarterly Research Report, found that online video discovery is shifting from search to social media. Twitter and Facebook attract more engaged viewers than other sites and are growing faster than search engines, and while Google search is still king, social media marketing gaining ground fast.

Burch says that even though YouTube is the biggest online video entity – publishers, marketers and businesses of any size can benefit from distributing their videos to more than one site. Tubemogul provides a free video syndication service OneLoad, which is a single point for distributing videos to the top video and social networking sites. Tubemogul also provides InPlay, its free video analytics solution for publishers, online video platforms and video sharing sites. He says that publishers and marketers can learn a lot about their audience and their level of engagement from real-time analytics.

Burch says that if you're not using video, you should get started:

"A lot of small businesses get a lot of SEO benefit from video. Being in more places means – more people are watching. It's not like you're gaming anything, you're just becoming more popular."

In regards to the current state of the online video industry – and comparing the industry growth innings in a baseball game – Burch thinks we're in the forth or fifth inning.

"It's hard to remember, but YouTube's only been around for 5 years, so it is pretty young. I really think with the analytics space, we've got this technology that a lot of people are using – and I think the technology is getting there."

According to Burch the viewing experience is getting better and rebuffer rates (those annoying delays in the video loading) are going down. Fast load times are low rebuffer rates are crucial, as Tubemogul's research found that 81.19% of viewers choose to click away instead of waiting for a video to rebuffer.

"If you're willing to avoid that and want to pay to deliver professional quality video, there are solutions out there to do it. There's this while ecosystem of analytics built in, which is where we step in, advertising solutions which we recently launched, our PlayTime ad platform. It's a very developed ecosystem. HOw television will be viewed on the web and how mobile will fit in to that – there's a lot of open questions – but I feel that it's evolved quit a bit."

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my Online Video Conversation with David Burch coming soon.

About Tubemogul
TubeMogul is a video advertising and analytics platform that connects advertisers with highly targeted audiences. TubeMogul's advertising solution is powered by the company's unprecedented data platform that tracks billions of video streams every month from the Internet's top publishers. This unique technology enables TubeMogul to help advertisers find consumers who want to watch their videos - and watch them longer. Advertisers and marketers never again have to choose engagement and accountability over reach if they use TubeMogul's video advertising and analytics platform.

Follow tubemogul (tubemogul) on Twitter

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Friday, September 4, 2009

Check Out Part 2 of My Interview With Nate Elliott on ReelSEO, "Social Video Builds Value and Trust"

This is Part 2 of our interview with Nate Elliott, the Principal Analyst at Forrester Research from the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose in mid-August. Jeremy Scott drafted a great post on ReelSEO the describing how Nate sees the importance of social media and video with examples of social media gone right and wrong, the benefits of user-generated content, and how trust in brands play into consumer engagement. In Part 1, I spoke with Nate about the Groundswell, a book based on analysis by Forrester Research on how they look at social marketing.

In this follow up video Nate says:

"A lot of the best social media we've seen, a lot of the great examples of social media both positive and negative have focused around video. If you look at some of the most recent things we've seen online of course, the recent United Breaks Guitars video is a great example of social media gone wrong and of course that was a YouTube video. You can go all the way back to the Ford SUV contest that they ran on YouTube several years back where a handful of users wound up using Ford's own contest to accuse them of ruining the environment with large vehicle and lots of emissions. So there's certainly some downsides there but we've seen some positive examples of marketers using video and user-generated videos as well."

He added that social video builds trust and value in brands:

"We know that users want to see video and not just video content. We know that users are excited to see video from the brands, the companies they trust online. So when we ask in surveys, :What do you expect to see on favorite brand, your favorite marketer's website? Some people refer to social content but actually a lot users are saying they're expecting to see video content there. So we know it's powerful, we know a lot of users are getting used to watching video online and we know it's something they want to see from their favorite companies.

And the advantage to using social video is... you're increasing the value and the trust of that video. Users are a lot more likely to trust the things they see from other users then are trust something they see from you as accompany. Or even from a trusted their source like an independent reviewer or a media outlet. So when you're using social video you're adding the element of trust. It also opens you up to in many ways a cheaper way to create video content as a marketer and provides creativity that you might not have in-house or might not have come up with otherwise..."

Continue Reading - Social Media & User-Generated Video – The Power Of Trust » on ReelSEO

See more videos from SES San Jose on ReelSEO's YouTube Channel

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Friday, August 21, 2009

Check Out My Post on ReelSEO, "Video and Social Marketing Reach a Groundswell"

This post is part of the coverage of the Search Engine Strategies San Jose Conference & Expo in San Jose. It appears in full on Reel SEO - The Online Video Marketing Guide.

One of the highlights of the day-long track on Social Media & Video Strategies held in conjunction with in San Jose, was a presentation by industry leader Nate Elliott, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research on the Groundswell, a book based on analysis by Forrester Research on how they look at social marketing. All too often marketers launch a Facebook, Twitter or YouTube account without a social media strategy which according to Forrester is a backwards approach.

We had an opportunity to speak with Nate following his presentation and he described several practical, data-based strategies that companies can use to build their social strategy. According to Nate you need to look at consumer engagement and ask what they want. Social media has changed the way consumers participate in group action and if companies don’t heed the Groundswell they could be dealing with a public relations disaster, like the viral video hit, United Breaks Guitars.

He said:

“We actually encourage marketers to use the POST method. Focus first on the People they are trying to reach, second on their Objectives and finally look at what Strategies they want to pursue and what Technologies are most appropriate for achieving those strategies.”

Forrester’s Social Technographics:

Forrester’s Social Technographics® is a tool that classifies social media consumers into six overlapping levels of participation according to how they use technology. Based on their 2008 survey data Forrester was able to see how participation varies among different groups of consumers, globally. They’ve made available a consumer tool and a B2B tool that lets you rate the social technographics profile of your customers. (more)

Continue Reading - Video and Social Marketing Reach a Groundswell » on ReelSEO