Things I'd like to know: The value of time?

Questions I'd like answered for a Thursday morning:

Is YouTube a time machine?

Seems the site is capturing 15 hours of uploaded video--much of it with music--every minute of the day. That's 2.46 years worth of video every single day. That's alot of clutter to shout through...and alot of potential time to spend with a network that lets you decide whats on. No wonder they call it 'consumer control'.

What's would you do for a Klondike bar...or a Tweet..or a positive review?

Seems Belkin has been paying $0.68 for positive reviews of its electronic gear on Amazon (here). In an era of transparency (thanks to the ubiquitous, always on network), you'd think this type of old school marketing + PR would have died already. Paying people for their time is one thing...paying for a product review seems like a misguided shortcut.

And in another real world experiement, we confirm the power of pride as a motivator for directing where people spend their time. Seems someone (many?) has been offering to pay for people to use Twitter to vote for their entry in the Shorty contest (a contest for short prose via Twitter. What were you thinking?)...a contest with no prize money, no swag...just being able to say 'I won'. Price for each vote: $0.48. Getting to say you won: Priceless (apparently).

Sounds alot like a calendar contest we ran a few years ago: our analytics data showed that some people spent as many as 8 hours of their day voting to get their pet's picture included on a calendar! Now that's the power of pride.

When does late become too late?

Remember the venerable encyclopedia? Or the last time you actually opened one? Yeah me neither. I have a stack of them in my basement (they've been for more than a year having migrated, unused, from a book shelf to a corner by the sump pump...I haven;t found the time to get them to the county recycling station).

Well, Encyclopedia Britannica 2.0 is launching online...and they are throwing down the challenge to Wikipedia (here). Seems like a good idea if they had started 5 years ago. Now, if they can just convince everyone to start their Google search with 'Encylopedia Brittanica'...

Gratuitous YouTube headline link:

Time and motion: online video

While Federal Reserve Governors continued to list inflation as their 2009 new year's resolution, at least one aspect of our lives into the new year is already rapidly inflating: the amount of time spent watching videos online.

Comscore released its numbers and the rise looks like this: a 40% jump in one year in the number of videos viewed online. In addition, the average length of a video viewed was a whopping 3.1 minutes. (See chart below or press release).

So what?

Google (which is YouTube) dominates...more than 5 Billion served in one month...followed by MySpace (which is the Fox Interactive Media number). But what the numbers also may be saying is this:

1. Broadband is enabling the rapid growth of video online.

2. Cheap digital video capture devices are continuing the growth of user-generated video online (prior post on mobile video here)

3. There is a role for professionally produced video online (via traditional network sites like Hulu, Disney, Turner) it just doesn't look like double-digit share online.

We've said it before, but if you are a network, you want all the content you can get your hands on. If you are a content producer, you want to be on the network with the broadest exposure...YouTube fits the bill. As does MySpace and certain others who let anyone be a content creator...

And in another irony of the online marketplace of ideas, some are even taking YouTube video to the big screen (see here)

Now, if the Fed, er, Google could just figure out how their YouTube debt can be monetized...

YouTube Video gets to the point

One of the challenges of video snacking on YouTube is that sometimes the best part of a video is buried inside a longer cut. When forwarding to friends and colleagues, YouTube now allows you to send a link to the specific part of the video by adding the timestamp to the end of the link.

Like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjBFb9rj-Zs#t=0m24s 

Getting to the point...or the lack of one.

Online Video: Battle of the Internetwork stars

Having been distracted by the new Google browser for a couple of days, here's some news on the video front of interest:

Hulu (NBC's online video site...see prior posting here) will be showing some of its new Fall Season premieres online...first...before you can see them on TV. And not just the loser shows, but established properties like The Office, Prison Break and, well, yeah I guess that is kind of a loser show (jk PB fans).  Read all about it here

Why would NBC do that? Because it's working for them.

Hulu is making money...as much as YouTube if you beleive some. 

The gist is that hulu is making as much money on ads as YouTube is delivering ads on a much larger volume of video. What's missing in the equation is the cost of produced content on Hulu. 

YouTube is winning the value battle when it's measured in terms of where people spend their time...rather than where advertisers spend their money. 

"For all its business challenges, YouTube remains the most popular video service on the Web. The site commands 34 percent of all Web videos streamed in the U.S. market, while the second-place service, MySpaceTV, only controls 6.4 percent, and Hulu brings up the rear with 0.7 percent (according to May, 2008 numbers from comScore Video Metrix)"

The challenge of course is aligning the two. Many models remain to be tried...Amazon, for instance, has a video-on-demand service that effectively bridges what Netflix (rentals) and iTunes (purchases) do  (see more).  

But all roads would seem to include an inverse relationship between audience size and the per unit advertising price paid...Hulu, which serves about 88 million video stream a month, is effectively generating only about 10% of the ad inventory for each online stream that it does with the traditional TV screen version (two 15-second ad breaks in a 30-minute episode online vs. 3 minutes offline). YouTube, it appears, is only generating ad revenue on about 3% of its 4.2 Billion videos each month. 

People have choices and every choice has its price. Ad pricing deflation would seem likely as the supply of choices people have for content AND distribution far exceed the growth in demand (what with 24 hours in a day being a fixed limit).

One screen to rule them all?

TiVo will let users view YouTube videos on the television screens beginning this week. See article.

This on top of recent announcements that Netflix will enable video downloads onto Xbox 360 game consoles, AppleTV enabling web video to tv screen, etc.

Just what TV networks--the cable and broadcast kind--needed: more competition for attention. Only this time the competition is content from their audience. Yes, yes, we'll debate the qualitative differences between YouTube video and HD by land and by air on a large screen...these are temporary distractions that cheap computing power will address.

As the three screens (smartphone, computer, TV) begin to resemble each other--essentially becoming variations in size for delivering the same content in different contexts--one continues to wonder whether it's finally time to redefine the word 'television' to the piece of commoditized hardware it is.

Time is on their side: GooTube

There is a bit of a kerfuffle about Google's purchase of YouTube last year.

In one corner, you have Marc Cuban (Billionaire Dallas Maverick's owner, founder of HDNET and sometimes-rumored aquirer of the Chicago Cubs). He thinks Google screwed up buying YouTube because they aren't making money on it...now...and he doesn't see the near term potential for them to. Marc thinks a TV network site like Hulu (see my previous posting on Hulu) has it right (see Marc's testosterone-fueled blog posting on the subject).

Then there's the others, like Forbes columnist Quentin Hardy (see posting on Quentin's panel at the South by Southwest Interactive panel). He thinks they have it right using YouTube as a data goldmine. In essence, YouTube is the biggest station on the planet.

Personally, I think it's hard to argue with numbers like these, which might indicate that YouTube has it right (source, comScore Media Metrix):

For one month, March 2008:

• 73.7 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• 84.8 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
• 47.7 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (8.4 videos per viewer).
• The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.
• The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.

When contemplating what people do online--and therefore where they choose to spend their time--it would appear that the long tail of YouTube has sticking power.

Numbers like these support the idea that a distribution network (like YouTube or NBC) wants all the content it can get...while content providers want to be where there potential audience is. For a distribution network like YouTube, they can have both the best content (in the sense of well-produced by people who do it professionally) AND the most demanded content (even if the demand is from small groups of 10-15 friends, family, and colleagues who could care less if the shot was in HD or from a single camera). A network like Hulu or Joost are tied to the content providers who have locked in with the traditional broadcast networks...amateurs content producers need not apply.

Google has time to make it work...both the YouTube audience's and their cash flow statement's.

Blending ads and games

What happens when you blend video game controllers and YouTube? Why, word of mouse marketing of course!

I've been following the Blendtec 'Will it blend?' series for about 9 months...and the latest installment made me laugh out loud (I'm easily amused, so your guffaw reflex may vary).

The entire series uses low-cost video and a finely tuned pop-culture sensibility to demonstrate the serious blending power of the Blendtec line of blenders...more than 70 videos blending everything from iPhones to Chuck Norris have worked the word of mouse magic to the tune of more than 10 million views.

In the latest video, Blendtec borrows interest from the smash hit Nintendo WII game Mario Cart...and creates Nintendo Smoke (don't breathe it!).

Moving Pictures (on Flickr)

The photo sharing site Flickr (owned by Yahoo) now allows it's Pro users to add video next to their photos (which poses the problem of how to henceforth describe what Flickr is!). See here for how Flickr describes the whole thing.

But wait, doesn't YouTube have the lock on video sharing? Well, yes. Flickr does not appear to be competing with YouTube for the following reasons:

1. Only paying 'Pro' members have access to upload video (everyone can see them)
2. Videos are limited in length to 90 seconds and 150MB

So what's the dealio then?

Mostly, I it's the idea that 'slice of life' video as often taken from a camera phone or cheap camcorder is now indistinguishable from the 'slice of life' photos that Flickr has always enabled.
In other words, it's simply taking the core function of the site (photo sharing) and expanding it to include short segments of moving photos.

Maybe your slice of life is event photos and videos? Maybe you are a sales rep diagnosing a problem on location with a brief video of the issue. You upload it, and someone in support has diagnostic context? Flickr users will determine how it serves their needs best.

Here's one example: A narcoleptic cat


All the usual features of Flickr are applied to video, including tagging, thumbnails, creative commons licensing and uploads directly from camera phones. In addition, the videos are able to be embedded elsewhere on the 'net using a player provided by Flickr (though as a free user I am unable to make it work easily).

Gratuitous headline musical reference