Larry Kless' Weblog

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Encoding.com Launches Vid.ly Pro, "The Universal Video URL Platform" to Help Solve Video Publishing Pain Points

One of the biggest pain points for video publishers is how to deliver video to every user on any browser or mobile device. As the fractured video landscape continues to grow in complexity and scale with no standard across platforms, San Francisco-based cloud encoding start-up Encoding.com, has built its business creating innovative solutions to help ease that pain. One such product is Vid.ly, which Encoding.com released earlier this year as a beta version and now months later, after a successful launch and overwhelming market response, Vid.ly has been released as a Pro version primarily targeting the tens of thousands of media brands, agencies, and application developers.

Vid.ly is both a clever and unique service that allows publishers to upload videos and get back a universal video url that will play your video everywhere, on any desktop browser or mobile device. When the video is uploaded to Vid.ly, it converts it into a variety of different formats and bit rates and once the video is transcoded, Vid.ly provides a short url and embed code for publishing. The beauty of Vid.ly is that publishers don't have to worry about the pain of video encoding, transcoding, file formats, display resolutions or any of the headaches involved in preparing, storing and delivering video online or to mobile devices. Vid.ly takes care of it all and when viewers click on the url, Vid.ly detects the device or browser type and delivers the correctly formatted and optimized video.

Publishers can embed the HTML5 code provided by Vid.ly directly into their web pages or Flash players, or can share the provided short URL via SMS, Facebook, Twitter or other social media outlets.

According to Encoding.com's President Jeff Malkin, Vid.ly takes on the heavy lifting that is usually done by online video platforms (OVPs) by delivering important and basic functionality (transcoding, storage and delivery through partners) along with device and browser detection all wrapped up in a single url, and he says, "The feedback we're getting is how simple it is, that's what's resonating."

Malkin says that the key features of Vid.ly Pro include, first and foremost, the API, which mobile app developers and video platforms can now all build Vid.ly directly into their content management systems, apps and workflow. Among the many new features in Vid.ly Pro, developers can now control the 25 output profiles, create unlimited source video file size, adaptive bitrate streaming for all Apple iOS devices and have a choice of CDN, either Akamai or AWS Cloudfront and more CDNs will be added throughout the year. Down the road Encoding.com plans to add analytics and a customizable HTML5 video player, and as Malkin says, "The whole goal is to maintain the simplicity of the platform."

One of the key verticals that's embraced Vid.ly, Malkin notes, are the ad agencies, which he says are signing up left and right. Mainly because they are all moving into video for their giant consumer packaged goods and branded customers, and they don't really have the video infrastructure to manage large campaigns.

"For them it's all about speed to market," he says, "so Vid.ly just removes all of that headache for them, and obviously does it for them in a very simple way."

The other key factor for agencies, says Malkin, is that up until now they've really had no choice but to use YouTube which has been what he calls "a necessary evil", but they'd rather not use YouTube. Brands want to build their own sites and not be branded as a YouTube video. "So with Vid.ly," Malkin says, "they can do that."

Another vertical that he says is very obvious, is the mobile app world, which is waiting to explode with video as the mobile photo app world already has done so. The mobile video apps world hasn't yet exploded because it also requires a massive video infrastructure, and only a few like SocialCam, Qik, Skype and Ustream each have its own massive video infrastructure. But Vid.ly takes that all off the table, says Malkin, and in fact Encoding.com is creating a wrapper for its Vid.ly API right now in Objective-C code for iOS devices that they will be releasing in about a month to make it "drop dead easy" to create video apps for the iPhone and iPad and from there move onto the other platforms.

Another use case that Malkin says they never imagined, but seems to be generating a lot of Vid.ly usage is the QR code vertical. It's gaining serious popularity with advertisers, retailers and big box stores to tie print to digital. While video is a perfect medium for QR code campaigns, it hasn't been well utilized because you never know what phone is scanning the QR code and therefore you don't know what video format to serve to that device. But storing a Vid.ly url in that QR code is simple, he says, and a prime example is a giant real estate platform that produces thousands of mailers of homes for sale and can embed a video walk through of an open house within the code. Another is big box retailers that use QR codes that can be scanned to bring up how to product videos.

Malkin says that they are getting some amazing data on where video views are coming from by platform, based on approximately 5 million views from the past 3 months of Vid.ly operations. iPhones lead the pack with 62.52%, Android 23.98%, Blackberry 11.12% and followed by iPad 2.38%. Browser views were: Firefox 51.3%, Chrome 22.2%, Internet Explorer 20.6%, Safari = 3.3% and Other 2.6%. This information will be updated quarterly on the Vid.ly homepage at http://m.vid.ly/

In April of this year, the company announced a $2 million funding round from current investors, that was used to expand the scale of Encoding.com’s operations and customer acquisition efforts. Revenue growth has been steady month over month, but Malkin says, that Vid.ly Pro will likely be the tipping point to move its revenue to the upward trajectory. While the company has received several acquisition offers, it has turned them down and it continues to focus on enhancing its products and customer experience.

"For us, our sweet spot seems to be the tens of thousands of video content publishers, agencies and app developers that live between YouTube or Vimeo and the big OVPs." says Malkin. "With Vimeo on one end of the spectrum and the heavy OVPs on the other end of the spectrum who simply need a solution that's going to have their video work regardless of where the end user in trying to view that video. That's the huge gap that Vid.ly's filling."

About Encoding.com
Encoding.com, the world’s largest video encoding service and provider of Vid.ly, the universal video platform, powers over 2,000 companies, including leading brands across media and entertainment, eLearning, retail, telecommunications, lifestyle, and advertising. Blending a flexible SaaS model using cloud-computing platforms, Encoding.com enables publishers and developers to instantly scale, while eliminating expensive video infrastructure investments, and supports all popular web and mobile formats. Gartner recognized Encoding.com as a “Cool Vendor 2011.” For ongoing company updates, please see http://blog.encoding.com, http://blog.vid.ly or follow @encodingdotcom, @vidlyURL on Twitter.

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Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Wowza Media Systems, "Any Screen Done Right" - Dave Stubenvoll, CEO and Co-founder, Wowza Media Systems

When Wowza Media Systems first was conceived, Dave Stubenvoll says he and his co-founder, Charlie Good, saw a market need for a better media delivery solution which incumbent media server providers (Adobe, Microsoft and Apple) could not address. When Wowza Media Server 1.0 first came to market in February 2007 it was originally offered as a low-cost alternative to Adobe's Flash Media Server and had great success. But when Wowza Media Server Pro 1.5 was released in May 2008, it expanded its abilities by introducing H.264 video and AAC audio streaming support.

Today, Wowza Media Systems provides a flexible multi-platform media software for streaming of live and on-demand video, audio, and RIAs (rich Internet applications) over public and private IP networks to desktop, laptop, and tablet computers, mobile devices, IPTV set-top boxes, internet-connected TV sets, and other network-connected device, with some 70,000 licensees all shapes and sizes worldwide.

Wowza Media Systems premiered its "any screen done right" delivery at the 2011 NAB Show, intoducing the third generation of its streaming system, Wowza Media Server 3, which will implement Adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming, time-shifted playback and integrated rights management. The full release will be presented at IBC 2011 in September. (Read more: New streaming systems from Wowza - Broadcast Engineering)

Wowza Media Systems was founded in 2005 by Stubenvoll and Good, both former Adobe employees, and they knew back then their boot strapped startup could be more than just a competitor to the big guns of online video. At that time, Flash and Windows Media video ruled the web as the dominant players in live and on-demand video. But as the video delivery formats changed over time and as AVC/H.264 video workflows began to extend to extend to the web and beyond, Wowza Media Systems re-engineered its product to offer Microsoft Smooth Streaming support aimed at Microsoft Silverlight clients and Windows Phone 7 devices; Apple QuickTime player and iOS platform (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch); 3GPP mobile devices (Android, BlackBerry OS, Symbian, etc), and IPTV set-top boxes and game consoles.

I caught up with Stubenvoll earlier this year at OTT Con in San Jose, to talk with him about the company's first product release and how the company has grown since then.

"When we started… we had a great position in the market. We architected it from the ground up to be an industrial strength server. We saw the need to have something that was really rock solid, high performance, high reliability, but also super super extensible."

After finding great success with the first media server release the company embarked on a H.264 strategy, which Stubenvoll says all the pieces fell right into place when Adobe announced that it would support H.264 playback within Flash Player 9. Wowza began to work with every H.264 encoder so it could ingest all the various flavors of H.264, which he says was a lot of work, because things tat normally wouldn't go to Flash could go to Flash and customers loved it. The next logical step beyond taking in all these flavors or H.264, was to deliver all those flavors of live and on-demand H.264, and did that with the December 2009 release of Wowza Media Server 2.

"As a result, Wowza as a company has grown dramatically. We were actually a boot strapped startup, and while I had an office in a venture capitalist firm, we decided not to go with that. But now, we have over 70,000 licenses worldwide; 40% of content delivery networks base their media delivery on Wowza; we just have a fantastic reputation and a fantastic footprint worldwide."

Wowza Media Server is highly regarded within the online video community and has received numerous awards, including multiple Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards, Streaming Media Editors' Pick and 2010 and most recently, the best AV Over IP Distribution System by AV Technology Magazine

Another important thing to note, says Stubenvoll, is that Wowza is extraordinarily architected and Wowza Media Server itself with all its features and functionalities is 2.5 MB in size.

"So we can literally fit on your phone. But at the other side, with off the shelf hardware, we can get out 10 Gbps and that's a lot of performance."

Stubenvoll says that Wowza Systems is looking to the future beyond the mere media server at what else is required to deliver content in the very robust fashion. With the new features available in Wowza Media Server 3, the company is focusing on value-added components for "any screen done right".

"What else can we do in terms of content transformation to make sure that it's properly adapting to all the relevant bit rates. Other things we can do around enhancing the consumer experience and giving them better features that they can rely on; and the key thing here is, not just having it for the desktop and not just for certain mobile devices, but have it work across. So what you're seeing is that this 'any screen done right' is really what Wowza is about and we're building a very rich platform for a number of services that will allow you to do any screen done right, and that's Wowza Media Server."

About Wowza Media Systems
Wowza Media Systems® is the premier media server software company delivering an industrial-strength infrastructure for live video, video-on-demand, live recording, and video chat. Wowza® has a singular focus on delivering high-performance media server software to service providers, media properties, enterprises, and other organizations serious about delivering video to any digital screen — computer, mobile phone, or home TV. More than 70,000 global licensees in entertainment, social media, advertising, enterprise, education, government, and Internet commerce have deployed Wowza’s media server software to date. Wowza Media Systems is privately held with headquarters in Evergreen, Colo. More information is available at http://www.wowzamedia.com, or follow Wowza Media Systems (wowzamedia) on Twitter

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Wednesday, July 6, 2011

BitTorrent at 10, Seeding Its Future in P2P Live Streaming - Bram Cohen, Inventor of BitTorrent

It's been 10 years since Bram Cohen, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of BitTorrent, Inc. first invented the revolutionary peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol for transferring large files over the Internet. Now on its 10 year anniversary, BitTorrent's disruptive technology has an installed base of over 160 million clients worldwide, and has grown to become a viable distribution platform for content producers around the world. The company, which first incorporated in 2004 has shifted its focus back to its roots in content delivery, and looks to seeding its future in live streaming.

While the P2P file-sharing protocol has long been associated with digital piracy, BitTorrent has worked with a variety of filmmakers, musicians and authors over the past year, to help distribute films using the company’s P2P technology.

I caught up with Cohen at last year's NewTeeVee Live where he discussed BiTorrent's future in P2P live streaming. In an interview with TorrentFreak, Cohen said that solving a challenging technical problem while creating value was his motivation to get started on a P2P live streaming solution.

“I am fundamentally a technologist, and am simply not interested in working on something which doesn’t solve the fundamental problem it’s supposed to tackle, especially in a market where there have already been so many bad technologies which failed to succeed based on sales and marketing,” he said. (Source: Bram Cohen To Deliver BitTorrent Live Streaming | TorrentFreak)

Source: BitTorrent.org » For Users

The BitTorrent protocol works differently than the client-server model by breaking files up into small pieces, rather than downloading a file from a single source, like how http and ftp work. The file is downloaded piece by piece from one or many different sources, known as a "swarm" of hosts. Since the file is broken up into smaller pieces, it requires less bandwidth since more parts are available from multiple sources. Once the file is finished downloading, the BitTorrent client software continues to share the completed file (or "seed") with others looking for it.

Cohen has been working on his P2P live streaming protocol over the past few years and admits it's been challenging. Low latency is the biggest issue, as he points out that data is being handed across several peers along the way.

"BitTorrent is peer-to-peer file distribution. Live streaming is a very difficult and challenging and rewarding problem, because there are a few things you have to get it work all at once." he said. " You have to get offloads to as close as 100% as possible. They should be at least 99% if you've got a million people watching something. You want get it very robust, so it doesn't fail horribly; and, you want to get the latency between when the video is taken to when it is displayed on everyone's machines as low as possible and I'm shooting for around 5 seconds."

Cohen says he has some very unorthodox techniques he's come up with to deal with these issues and plans to roll it out anyway now. (Ed. note: I spoke with in November 2010 and he estimated the roll out within eight months timeframe.)

BitTorrent's two main software products, the Mainline client and flagship uTorrent, have amassed a huge user base and the company has been shifting it's resources to developing clients to reach that audience. Cohen says right now the company is working on their engagement with our existing user base and trying to get others to reach them. They are also working with device manufacturers to make software run on their devices to help with file distribution.

About BitTorrent
BitTorrent creates advanced, innovative technologies to efficiently move large files across the Internet. The company's two main products today include the original BitTorrent software and the tiny-but-mighty µTorrent, which combined boast over 100+ million users. BitTorrent is based in San Francisco, Calif. For more information, visit www.bittorrent.com, and follow on Twitter, or Facebook.

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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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Thursday, June 9, 2011

Funny or Die's Recipe for Success: Great Content, SEO & Social Media - Patrick Starzan, Funny or Die

Core to any good video content strategy is a blend of ingredients that compel and engage viewers to discover and share your content. You can have the most compelling content in the world, but if people aren't aware of it and can't find it easily, it won't make any difference. According to Patrick Starzan, Vice President of Marketing and Distribution for Funny or Die, its recipe for success is a combination great content, search engine optimization and social media. I caught up with Starzan at the Online Video Platform Summit where he discussed how Funny or Die developed its content strategy and some of the common mistakes publishers make with online video.

Funny or Die is both a video content site and brand focused on funny videos, and since its founding in 2007 by Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and Chris Hench, it has become one of the top destinations for comedy on the web. It's known for celebrity-driven comedy and has a steady stream of topical viral hits, including its most viewed video, The Landlord, with over 76 million views that features Ferrell, McKay and McKay's two-year-old daughter Pearl who plays the foul-mouthed landlord that berates Ferrell for overdue rent money. Other celebrities are featured regularly in Funny or Die exclusives, such as Zach Galifianakis' hilarious web series Between Two Ferns. The October/November 2010 issue of Streaming Media magazine features an in-depth cover story on Funny or Die, The Art and Science of Funny or Die - Streaming Media Magazine, that chronicles the rise and success of the popular comedy website, which Streaming Media editor Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen calls, "a shining example of marrying the best of Hollywood to the best of Silicon Valley."

Starzan says:

"For us, social media has been a core part of how we get our content discovered, and it's something we've working on for years."

How Funny or Die got there, Starzan says is that:

"Everything starts by defining your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and your metrics and what's important for your company's success. So we did that and we went out and developed a content strategy, separately for each of the platforms, understanding that the type of person on each platform is consuming and engaging in content in different ways. We really follow a strategy of building social capital, trying to give more than we get, trying to interact with the user, trying to give them a platform for access to Funny or Die, but also a platform where we can celebrate who they are."

Starzan says the Funny or Die team spends a lot of time working on their content strategy, about eight to nine hours a day on each of the platforms, because they feel that users are more engaged with content they want to watch.

"After your content strategy," Starzan suggests, "you start with your acquisition strategy and figure out how to target more people to come to join each of your platforms."

For many brands, the question of whether or not to drive traffic to its own site rather than establishing a presence on YouTube is quite common. For Funny or Die, its content strategy was to first establish its brand and then go to YouTube.

As Starzan explains:

"For us, coming out of the gate we really wanted to establish Funny or Die as a brand and we took a very walled garden approach. So we really wanted to control the experience and optimize the experience to out users, until we felt we had a brand that had a solid foundation. We didn't want to dilute it by actually going out and doing a lot of distribution, especially with YouTube. Once we felt we had that brand equity, that's when we went to YouTube and established a windowing strategy of our content over on YouTube, because obviously YouTube has a huge, huge audience."

Funny Or Die's photo: This is our new social media expert: Robobot.

Starzan says though that YouTube distribution hasn't cannibalized its brand or the video views on its own website and sees about the same amount of consumption on YouTube as on its our own site.

So for Funny or Die, it's now about exposing its brand to the largest audience. But as Starzan notes, a lot of Funny or Die's traffic comes from search and they've done a lot of work optimizing their video players and the specific type of keywords. Direct traffic though continues to grow as Funny or Die has become more of an established brand. But by far, social media has been one of its critical success factors for audience building and has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, StumbledUpon, Reddit, and so on, which are all places that people can search and discover Funny or Die's content.

By the numbers, Funny or Die's social media presence continues to prove successful by doubling its number of followers in the last six months, with 2.2 million Twitter followers and with 938,749 Facebook fans (but more than 3 million Facebook fans along with co-founder Will Ferrell), 40,000 followers on Tumblr and 468,306 subscribers to its YouTube channel. The website is also getting 2,000 “Likes” per day with an overall audience reach of 32 million through its social media channels.

"We make funny videos with celebrities in it," Starzan laughs, "and it lends itself well to the social media world."

The advice he offers to online video publishers and marketers to get their content discovered is that:

"It's about really having a comprehensive strategy. I don't think you should look at one, search over social media, as two different things, or two different variations of what's important. They're both just as important as the other. Because at the end of the day, you want to have your content discovered as quickly as possible by relevant audiences… So, put as much time into both of them as you can."

Starzan admits that they've learned a lot from trial and error, and for search, he recommends that you make all your content embeddable; that you have links coming back to your site; and that your tags are using the optimal keywords that you want to be discovered for, because it becomes a huge back linking strategy and you define what people are seeing when they back link to you. He says it's about making sure you do the simple things; like making sure your sitemaps are indexed with all the search engines and identifying the keywords that drive traffic to your site or to specific pages. If they'e driving a lot of traffic, go to that page and optimize that keyword for that page so you can rank better in search.

For publishers looking to build out their platforms using social media, Starzan says that it's not just about driving traffic to your site but about being a part of the community. While Funny or Die has an edge over other media properties through its celebrity power, he says it really comes down to the basics, which first and foremost, is to make great content.

"You have to have great content if you're ever going to survive on social media," he says, "and make a lot of it. Then just make sure you're in those communities. I think a mistake a lot of people make, and we made it in the beginning, is we just put up these pages and we'd put content up there and expect people to engage with it, share it and do everything we wanted them to do with it, but it just dies. You have to be there everyday – it's just like any other social interaction – you have to be there, you have to have that conversation, you have to listen as much as you talk. So take the time to learn all the nuances and definitely realize that, a lot of people say social and SEO are free, organic ways of driving traffic, but it take a lot of time in terms of resources to really develop these platforms and really optimize them."

Funny or Die recently introduced a new feature to its video player to help drive traffic from social media sharing by adding a clickable embedded Twitter hashtag. According to NewTeVee's Ryan Lawler, the latest episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifinakis features the new social media element which is located in the bottom right corner of the video player.

"The embedded hashtag is a call to action that enables viewers of the video to share it with their friends," says Lawler, "Once clicked, it launches Twitter with a link back to the episode and the #btwn2ferns hashtag."

In an email to NewTeeVee, Starzan wrote:

“We are pretty excited about the potential of the in-video hashtag in driving usage and overall Twitter traffic. Since no one else is doing this it’s the first video we tested in, [but] I expect usage to increase as our users gain more exposure to it.”

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Will Ferrell from Will Ferrell

About Funny or Die
Since its inception, three years ago, Funny Or Die has emerged as an award-winning, top destination for comedy on the web. With hundreds of exclusive celebrity videos and a steady stream of huge viral hits, Funny Or Die has become the "place to be seen" for comedic celebrities, and the obvious destination for a daily comedy fix. Funny Or Die's founders are Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and Chris Henchy. Judd Apatow is also a principal partner in Funny or Die. http://www.funnyordie.com

Follow Patrick Starzan, VP of Marketing, Funny or Die

Head of Marketing @FunnyOrDie. I tweet about the interweb, marketing stuff and the FOD. I like coffee, tobasco, punk music and you!

Starzan (starzan) on Twitter
Things I Think | Tumblr

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