Heartwarming story of how investors stick through thick and thin… NOT:
Blowtorch Entertainment Corp., the start-up that gathered $50 million to produce a slate of feature films and short-film content for young adults, is nearly extinguished after several of its hedge fund investors went out of business, VentureWire has learned.
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WatchMojo NewsletterIf Brown is the new Black… Then Dwell is the New Click Through Rate.
US Online Video Ad Spending has increased by almost $250 Million or about 50% from 2008 -2009, says emarketer.com. Although we see growth across all formats, Video is consistently the highest, while Display will likely shrink to 6% by 2013.
According to Eyeblaster Research, Analytics Bulletin: Trends in Time and Attention in Online Advertising, Dwell is split up into two categories, Dwell Time and Dwell Rate.
Dwell Time is defined as: the average number of seconds consumers intentionally spend engaging with an online ad. Taking into account, amount of time the mouse was over an ad, user-initiated video duration, user-initiated expansion duration, and any other user-initiated custom interaction duration. Unintentional dwell instances lasting less than one second are excluded.
Dwell Rate is defined as: the cumulative instances of where a user interacted with the ad divided by served impressions.
The chart below shows the difference between CTR and Dwell Rate:
These 8.71% are exposed on average
to 53.08 seconds of hands-on, active
engagement. This is equal to intently
watching two 30 second TV spots in a row!
The following chart show the impact video has on Dwell:
When looking at in-banner video advertising, we can see a 30% lift in Dwell Rate compared to non video rich media. Video nearly doubles the average Dwell Time, from 37.37 seconds to 71.51 seconds!
So just remember, it’s not so much shape or size or clicks that we need to address, it’s the potential for consumer complacency. Consumers want to explore brands right where they are ‘dwelling’.
To download the latest Eyeblaster Analytics Bulletin:Trends in Time and Attention in Online Advertising, simply follow the link
Editorially:
- success in online video content is random, but
- the right balance of coverage, frequency, quality, quantity and consistency will win
- diversification works in online video content, too
- any video content strategy based on “hits” is doomed to fail.
On the business front:
- Ultimately, online video content is a means to an end, a placeholder for e-commerce, subscription, licensing or advertising,
- over time, online video streams will monetize just as much (if not better) than search queries (search captures intent vs. video captures interest, which one is a bigger opportunity? I’d say interest, because few people want to buy but everyone has interest in things).
- so you need to become the Ad Sense of video content: the only way to have such a massive reach and be on every web page or linked off every web page is via content, because technology has become a commodity whereas content isn’t a zero-sum game.
- If you adjust for risk levels, with a smart business strategy, editorial direction, proper funding and the ability to execute, content provides a far better return than technology in video.
Back in September 2007, I emailed the CEO and CTO of Blip.tv - the company whose amazing video player we use on our WatchMojo.com property to partner with Tubemogul- the company whose amazing analytics and syndication tool we use to distribute videos.
Here’s the email:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan <ash@mojosupreme.com>
Date: Sat, Sep 1, 2007 at 2:02 PM
Subject: Syndication tool suggestion
To: Justin Day, Mike HudackI noticed you guys automatically syndicate to myspace, internet archive etc., which is really smart and useful.
But, you should look into tools like Tubemogul, I think these automatically add you to 6-10 other destinations like Veoh, Revver, Metacafe, etc. Could be a good add-on.
Cheers
Ash
Eighteen months later, it’s materialized… so yes, it takes time, but this shows that Blip.tv and Tubemogul listen to the needs of their market.
The deals were signed almost twelve months ago, but the folks at Blip.tv have been working on implementation and QA… which is no surprise given how robust their platform is.
But it didn’t stop there: today Blip.tv announced a bunch of integrations with main players such as Freewheel, Roku, Verizon Fios, Sony, NBC and YouTube.
It’s these kind of deals that are cementing Freewheel, Blip.tv and Tubemogul (and of course YouTube) at the intersection of content, advertising and technology…
A couple of quotes: one from CEO Mike Hudack, “for the first time ever, talent and hard work are a greater determination of success than contacts”. Quite true. I also echo Tubemogul’s CEO Brett Wilson’s assertion that “Blip.tv is the best solution for web creators”.
This was my third time in the Blip.tv offices and as an entrepreneur, I guess the nicest compliment I can pay them is that they serve as a blueprint for many ambitious startups.
For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been working out of New York City, the capital of finance, media, advertising, the arts and much more. I’ve not written much about NYC because it takes a while to let it sink in. But if any one thing captures one of the overriding motifs, it’s this snapshot of two headlines on AdAge:
If marketers aren’t blurring the lines between advertising and content to control their brands and save a buck, then ad agencies are worried about commodization and irrelevancy.
Sign of the times. I really think the changes we’re undergoing are not only significant but they are actually accelerating at a very rapid pace.
Nice to see more and more quality made for web programming coming to online video. More on IAC’s efforts called partnering with City Lights here. With a lot of the initial players like Mania TV and Ripe Entertainment having shut down, and this IAC effort being part of a big media company, I think we’re one of the biggest independent ones out there.
That’s a good feeling.
Update: a lot more here, company will be called Notional. I have no idea what the programming will look like, but I like this. 2009 will mark the death of UGC as a viable ad-supported medium, but also the year when premium content comes to the forefront. Not to sound cocky, but I like to think WatchMojo.com has been at the forefront of this medium… and the more participants are in it, the better.
You have to wonder, this news, combined with 5Min’s Series B funding earlier this week marks a shot in the arm of online video, which, let’s face it, was starting to look suspect.
Who hasn’t dreamed of shipping their folks down south for the remainder of their “golden” years? I know I have! Unfortunately with the current state of the economy, we’re all too happy simply keeping a roof over our own heads. Until now…
“Today’s chart is pretty self-explanatory. It’s the price of a single family house (with data from RedFin) in Palm Springs, CA. Watch it do a round trip from 2001 to 2009. The dip started in 2008, and we took a stab at what that buyer was probably thinking. (via PlanetMoney)”
With that said, never again will we struggle with the George Costanza dilemma of “If they go, my inheritance goes with them, but I’m happy. If they stay, I’m rich, but miserable.” For the annual cost of putting them up in some fancy retirement community, you can now afford to buy them one in Palm Springs California.
One of our distribution partners - 5Min - has raised a Series B round from Globespan Capital Partners. Existing investor Spark Capital also participated in the round. The company had previously raised $5.3M, bringing the total to just under $13M.
Globespan Managing Director Jonathan Seelig will join 5min’s Board of Directors. 5Min is one of our distribution partners that apart from YouTube actually drives some volume, which is promising and suggests that they get the kind of traction that VCs would look for in today’s climate.
The 5min platform collectively reaches a potential audience of over 200 million monthly unique visitors, and of this group, 14 million people watch at least one video per month. 5min has also built a multi-vertical content library of over 100,000 professionally produced videos through partnership with media companies such as Hearst Corporation’s UGO Entertainment, Elle, Car & Driver, The Doctors, Pet Side, Britannica, Ford Models, Kiplinger, Big Think, WatchMojo, Road & Track, Woman’s Day and more.
For example, in our record-setting month of June 2009 where we did 6.5M streams across our network (up from 4.8M the month before), YouTube accounted for nearly 3M of those, and 5Min clocked in at over 500,000 streams, which was an uptick from the previous months admittedly, but promising nonetheless considering that YouTube commands such a lead on all other sites.
Now that I am in NYC I’ve had the chance to meet some of the members of 5Min’s team personally and I like what they’re doing to differentiate in their category, so despite my opinion that the How To space is awfully crowded online, I can fully understand why VCs think they are worthy of more capital.
But, the space is crowded: Expert Village, VideoJug, Graspr, Instructables, SuTree, Howcast, MindBites, Monkeysee, WonderHowTo, FindHow, eHow, WatchDoit, to name a few.
It’s also worth noting that eHow is part of Demand Media who is armed to the teeth with over $300M in capital and VideoJug is no slouch with $40M in backing.
As we’ve seen and I have been saying all along, more VC money leads to more problems… but the point is: there’s lots of gunpowder left and these guys will be pummelling one another for months to come, so sooner or later, you will see some mergers and inevitable rounds of consolidation in the space.
Check out some of our content on 5Min here.
If you’re into financial news and data you might appreciate this site, it’s something created by Michael Yavonditte’s team. He was an executive at IAC, AltaVista, Ziff Davis, Juno and the CEO of Quigo when AOL bought it for $340M. More on him here.
His new site is called RakedIn and includes a Person, Company (public/private) and Stock Tracking system, called Tracker. A comparable to this would be Michael Arrington/Tech Crunch’s CrunchBase. One thing that worked for CB was the wiki platform. For example, to test it, I did a search for myself (yes, quite vain, but it allows me to get sense of what they are querying etc.) and no result came up… I guess I shouldn’t feel bad, since Michael’s own query yields nothing.
I am surprised they don’t tap into LinkedIn, or even Crunch Base. I guess over time they will add more functions. For a query of someone people might actually care about (haha), here’s Steve Jobs page, or Google’s (public company) and Facebook (private company).
From what I gather, they aggregate a number of offline sources. I took a sneak peek at the site when I saw Michael a few weeks ago, but you can personalize it the way you want to.
As an investor and entrepreneur, I can see the usefulness to see who comes and goes from companies…
They claim over 5M pages of data on rakedin.com, and they are gunning for 20 million pages on the site by year’s end.
You can view it as a contextual/vertical search engine… which is a tough crowd to be in (read: meet Google) but if they focus on this space it could catch on.
On Sunday I mentioned that YouTube was probably doing better than the naysayers suggested, and the very next day, YouTube published a post agreeing.
Earlier this year I suggested Soapbox was next to die, today MSFT confirmed that too.
Do we really need a crystal ball to imagine who is next to step under the guillotine?
