Posted by Patrick Donovan on Mon, Mar 08, 2010 @ 03:09 PM
Last week, I read Will Richmond's blog post "ABC.com is now Achieving DVR Economics for Its Programs" and was struck by this section talking about his discussion with Albert Cheng, EVP of Digital Media for Disney-ABC Television:
"Further, Albert said that there's plenty of room for improving online's economics. One key focus is increasing the ad load, possibly to as much as double the current 5 ads per program. ABC.com has experimented with this and its research shows that neither the viewer nor the advertiser experience is diminished. As a result, ABC is inclined to increase the ad load to continue improving online economics further, but is somewhat constrained by advertisers' desire to minimize clutter and their own desire to remain consistent with non-ABC sites' ad loads."
There are two main choices for increasing the advertising load in a broadband video. First, the publisher could serve back-to-back ads in the existing advertising breaks. Or, the publisher could define new advertising breaks that occur more frequently in the video and only serve one ad per break.
On TV, viewers are used to 2-3 minute ad breaks with multiple ads per ad block every 7-8 minutes. As we wrote about in our whitepaper, Content is King, But Metadata Rules, translating this to the web has some challenges. The broadband viewer has a shorter attention span, with many more available choices. There is also an expectation of an ad countdown timer in broadband that does not exist on TV. If you saw "Your show will continue in 1:30..." while watching your favorite web video because of multiple ads, aren't you more likely to switch to an IM window, check out Twitter, Facebook or some other site?
Instead of showing two ads per break every 8 minutes, publishers could show a single ad every 4 minutes. For the viewer, they get back to the content more quickly. For the advertiser, they are not bundled with other ads so ad recall should be greater. For the publisher, the viewer is more likely to stay on their site watching video - driving user engagement and session time. The graphic below taken from our whitepaper shows this transformation in advertising inventory.
The challenge then becomes - when can an advertisement be called with the least impact to the viewing experience? Where are there logical insertion points that do not interrupt dialog or disrupt the flow of the current scene of the video? How can these points be identified quickly, reliably, and cost-effectively?
This is precisely what the Gotuit Video Metadata Management System does. Our metadata defines each logical scene within the original source video, with the ability to serve ads at those boundaries. Publishers now have more monetization options and controls. No longer limited to the original ad breaks, they can serve an ad (or multiple ads) after a specified number of scenes watched, or after a specific duration of video watched. The more precise ad insertion points and larger advertising inventory give publishers the ability to optimize their user experience with their content monetization goals.
So, is it better to show multiple ads per block, or have more advertising insertion points in the content? The good news is we support both and make it easy for publishers to try different approaches to see what is best for their content and audience.
Content Is King, But Metadata Rules
Learn more about how Gotuit's metadata can unleash your video's full potential.
Download this free whitepaper.
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Thu, Apr 23, 2009 @ 11:14 AM
Last week, we released our latest whitepaper, entitled “Content is King, But Metadata Rules: Three Reasons Why Premium Metadata Delivers Premium Returns“. A must-read for digital media executives, it examines how the broadband platform and the user’s viewing behaviors demand specific strategies to drive the largest return. For those of you who want just the summary, here it is:
Summary
Because broadband viewing is very different from television viewing, publishers must not treat the “programming” of the two platforms the same. Delivering the best performance on the broadband platform requires solving the three key challenges: 1) driving a larger audience to the content, 2) delivering greater viewer engagement and longer session times, and 3) implementing an ad strategy that delivers the required revenue without harming the user experience.
Premium, scene-level metadata is the key that unlocks the full value of video libraries and solves these three challenges. By understanding the content down to the smallest usable element - the scene - the needs of the viewer, programmer, and advertiser are more effectively met. The viewer is able to personalize their viewing experience and easily get to what they want to watch, the advertiser can target their message down to most appropriate content, and the programmer realizes a larger audience that watches more video and generates more revenue. This is the roadmap to success for video on the broadband platform.
Figure 2: Gotuit-enabled advertising wheel
To give you one more incentive to read the full whitepaper, here is one of the diagrams showing how scene-level metadata transforms how publishers can serve in-stream video ads within their content.
Scene-Level Metadata Transforms Advertising For Broadband Video
Posted by Patrick Donovan on Tue, Mar 18, 2008 @ 09:10 PM
Yesterday, we went live with our latest product with Sports Illustrated – the 2008 NCAA Men’s Basketball FilmRoom, sponsored by RadioShack. This is our sixth video product with SI, with more planned for the upcoming months.
Just in time for people filling out their brackets, this SI FilmRoom showcases regular season highlights of the teams in this year’s NCAA college basketball tournament. Gotuit metadata presents multiple views into the video library to let the viewer take the path that is most interesting to them.
For example, fans can use the By Seed view to easily watch just the top seeded teams in the tournament. The By Conference view lets viewers watch a playlist of the teams in a particular conference, such as the Big East, Pac 10, ACC, SEC, or Big 10. The Still Alive playlist will be updated throughout the tournament as the field goes from 65 down to the eventual champion. Finally, there is also a By Team view to use an alphabetical list to access a particular team.
From an advertising perspective, this is an important milestone as it is our first live implementation with DoubleClick for in-stream video advertising, and Quigo for in-page text ads. Look for more details on this in a future post.
Like all our implementations, even though we never edit the original source video into clips, viewers can use the link and embed codes to share specific video scenes or playlists using our metadata to point to the precise sections within the video library.
I am personally more of a pro basketball (Celtics) fan, so I will leave you with this SI FilmRoom video for the Kansas Jayhawks, in honor of Kansas alum and Boston Celtics captain Paul Pierce.
SI FilmRoom: 2008 Kansas Jayhawks