Tubemogul Owns Video Deployment and Analytics on the Web

So if you are a video producer trying to make a buck with online video, you need to stop reading this blog and immediately surf over to TubeMogul's Video staging and analytics service. There is simply not other way to stay on top of all the various video networks. Six months ago all video producers were visiting each site (from YouTube to Revver) counting up views by hand. Well close excel because TubeMogul has you covered.

So I'm sure you have two main questions, what does it do and how much does it cost. Well you'll be happy to know that their root service is free to use for any producer big or small. And those root services include:

- a staging area for you to upload your videos once before deploying them to up to 12 video sharing sites. You get 200 deployments a month.

- viewership tracking for shared videos by site, video or by groups of sites and videos. Graphical and chart reports.

- promotion options including <'embed> codes, bookmarking links, and direct link urls.

Its so amazing that you are likely asking yourself, "How do they make money?" And that is a concern for them as well. Longtime users of the site have seen some growing pains in recent months. The word on the street is that Tubemogul's bandwidth costs have ballooned and are growing. Responding to this huge challenge TubeMogul has reduced some of the services that it was offering for free, limiting publisher tracking to 5 sites on all free accounts. And has begun offering a premium service package for a base rate of $500/month.

What does $500/month get you? You'll get more of everything. More uploads, more deployments, more access to historical data, and more importantly more analytic tools . One tool that will be of great assistance to any internet marketer is TubeMogul's keyword analysis tool.

Keyword analysis is a cornerstone of web advertising and marketing, but in the world of online video its a total mystery. If you try to look up a niche topic on YouTube you can clearly see that the one thing Google hasn't gotten around to improving is the search capability of the site. While YouTube has just released their analytic data to users, TubeMogul will provide that data across an increasing group of sites. Hopefully TubeMogul's keyword tool will shed some light on how the search algorithm of each video site organizes its content.

If you are an average video producer out there, you probably can't justify the $500/month. But is well worth signing up for free account and being part of what will be the Nealson Ratings of the internet in the not to distant future.

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Player Review: Revver

Those of you who have been working with Revver’s video player and advertising network, will know how powerful the service’s syndication tools are and the upgraded Revver player puts it back on top of the online video game (at least now that Stage6 has closed its doors). The new player was release a couple of months back, first on their site then on the sites of their content producer’s and syndicators.

Be for we examine the benefits of the new player, its worth mentioning that 2007 was a difficult year on many fronts for Revver. Unable to sell enough advertising to properly service their massive video library, Revver abandoned their sales effort and turned to third party ad networks (first Adbrite, now Google Adsense). At the same time ad value for “video” and video related keywords fell sharply across the web making it very challenging for producer to create a higher standard of short form production.

The new player, and its slick black skin, incorporates a number of functions found in competitor players that greatly increase its viral capabilities. The player now has a “menu” button that provides information on the creator, embed code, email sharing and related videos which can be viewed in a list or on a thumbnail gallery. The player is highly customizable, including the ability to brand the player with your show’s logo. But at the root of it, the Revver player provides the same high quality video you’ve come to expect from this great service.

The complaints about the player are twofold and both relate to the advertising portion of the Revver network. Ads are now displayed as overlays along the bottom of the player, and at the end in a block of three ads. First, even if your viewer completes the video and sees both the overlay and the post roll adblock, the publisher gets credited for just one impression, not four. The ads are also accompanied with arrow buttons to allow the user the option of viewing more ads, but that also does not result in additional impressions. Second, if Adsense is driving the advertising within Revver videos, then why are those impressions not reported within our Adsense accounts? It is currently impossible to see how one video is doing in relation or user interaction with the advertising, a well developed feature of Adsense.

As a side note, revver has quietly mothballed its podcasting capability. While still offering the service, it is rare that ads are served into iTunes the way they once were. This is likely do to the ongoing debate about the compression formats used, and which should prevail. Web based catchers prefer flash video, while iTunes continues to push its quicktime H.264 iTV compression format. Fortunately video publishers still have a choice to use both formats within Revver driven RSS feeds.

Content Update: ComedyCaster

ComedyCaster has added the very original series, The Future Dead to its directory. This reworking of indy short films into a sketch like series with high production value and entertaining stories. Check out the first episode, then watch them all.

T-Cast Content Update: Entertainment News

T-Cast producers have compiled a list of relevant news material and added a player to the site to syndicate that news. News feeds are provided by The News Room, and displayed on the T-Cast News Page.

Enjoy.

Revver the next Google purchase, or maybe Stage6?

Google has build an empire on buying up the best innovations and integrating them into a vast advertising network. Providing free content and making billions for it. In a lot of ways Revver has what Google wants, a better player, CPC based auto insertion ad technology, and a pile of copy-right responsible content.

At T-Cast, we like the Revver model and wish them success. But there are problems with the things as they are. There is still no analytic reporting for video syndication and the revenue from those clicks is not broken down for either the syndicator or the content producer. Value of clicks are falling, but then are still better than most of the adwords content market with pay-per-click of $0.12 to $0.27.

It would seem to be smarter for the content producer to sell their own advertising, and the T-Cast producers asked Stage6's Divx support team for just such an opportunity only to be disappointed with the response. No question that the Divx authoring software is the best encoding software out there for under $50, and the Stage6.com site has proven that the player is post-roll clickable. Content producers could be running their own advertising campaigns off a wide variety of CPC, CPM and CPA advertising networks, and Divx HD quality video would be everywhere. Stage6 could be Revver for the masses.

Google needs to figure this out or it could get away from them. And there are other divx encoders out there. One of these companies has to put internet video syndication and dynamic advertising together before some hacker does.

Syndication Player Review: Revver, AtomFilms, Veoh, YouTube, Stage6

If you are thinking about distributing original video content online, you will quickly realise that your profit wherever it comes from relies on as many people seeing the video as possible. That's were syndication comes in. Sites like Revver, AtomFilms, YouTube, Veoh and Stage6 are betting their futures on the syndication model and have developed flash based players that can be easily embedded in any website. But how do these players stack up?

Revver's flash player has enjoyed a resent upgrade which included a new full screen mode. The player can be launched with both <EMBED> and <SCRIPT> tags supplyed by revver. It is clean and fast loading, and with some tinkering if scales well. It should be mentioned that the player doesn't work well with MySpace and you will need to use a work around to post videos with the revver player.

YouTube's flash player is the benchmark for all the entire "shared video" p henomenon. It has full screen capability, volume control, a timecode window, it is scalable and has a simple grey skin. The player easily embeds (using <EMBED> tags) in any website or social networking site.

AtonFilm's player has a preview function letting the viewer skip the pre-roll ads for a brief glimps of what the video is like. But in general the player small, dull and not all that impressive. There is no full screen functionallity, but the share functions are embeded in the player. For one of the best and longest running video sites out there, you'd expect more from their player.

Veoh's player is billed as high quality and is a slick black. It has full screen capability and build-in sharing tools. Although the player is capable if high quality video (with rather large file sizes), Veoh does not have their own encoding software, so the quality of the videos are relient on the codec used to create the root file.

Stage6 is DIVX.com's attempt at a Youtuble like video sharing service, but is built on the divx encoding engine that has been at the forfront of pirated video via P2P and bitTorrent distribution technology. Until recently Stage6 was the site with the best quality pirated television on the net, but with the ink on recent distribution deals still drying DIVX has pulled all illigal content over the past few weeks and the entire service for an upgrade this week.

We'll have to wait to see their over all syndication strategy, but the player on the old site was light years ahead of the compitition. It has both windowed and fullscreen modes, loads quickly, and streams smoothly. For $20 you can buy their encoding software giving your videos syndication opportunities at DVD quality. File sizes for the divx codec have always been impressively small (under 700 MB per 2 hour movie, iTunes recent upgrade would require 3GB for the same file). We'll write an update when the new service is launched, but as it is right now, the Stage6 divx player is the most promising and highest quality player on the net.

Video Sharing Evaluation: Revver - Part 2

Revver.com is a trail-blazer in terms of advertising supported video syndication, in the first part of this evaluation we explored Revver's Website and syndication services which identified a number weaknesses but over all proved it to be a great syndication service. In this posting we will evaluate the service's monetization and promotion tools.

Monetization
With the release of Revver's new reporting took it is now possible to see which videos are downloading, but more valuable than that you can see which videos are holding viewers to its completion and which videos are converting clicks. This has radically changed our understanding of revenue streams on Revver's service.

When you look at revver's download numbers you will find that they are a fraction of that of other video sharing services, but as it turns out this is because until last week Revver only reported completed views. Now that the details are out we can see that only 10-20% of views started were completed, this is a huge factor in the success of a video clip as there is little chance of converting a view to a click if the viewer doesn't actually the clip long enough to see the advertisement. Conversion rates for completed views are actually quite good (10-50%), with some clips vastly out performing others.

Payment per click averages $0.25 - $0.30 which boils down to $0.03 - $0.12 per view for completed views. Shorter clips had many more completed views than the longer clips, while one of our clips entitled "Blogging" converted almost 50% of completed views into clicks. Metadata was the same for clips in the series, suggesting that file title has a large impact on the quality of advertising presented at the end of the video.

Over all average revenue for all views (completed or otherwise) calculates to less than $0.01, making it comparable to MetaCafe's per impression payment of $0.005. There are factors however that impact Revver's revenue potential including, video file length, title, metadata and relative entertainment value. If a clip is short, well put together, holds the attention of its audience to its completion and is positioned properly with suitable advertising, revenue potential on the service could be much higher.

Promotion
Promotion is the biggest problem facing video producer's large and small. What's the point of earning pennies on your videos if those pennies never add up to the thousands of dollars that are required to producer high quality content. So how does Revver promote your videos?

I already mentioned the problems with Revver's website and the strength of its syndication network, but Revver goes beyond that by promoting your clips on their iTunes channel as well as providing permlinks that can be used in RSS feeds for podcasting. Revver has deals with cellphone carriers, most notably Verizon, that can generate higher revenues than advertising.

Revver also supports syndicators like the T-Cast Network by providing 20% share of click through advertising revenue. No doubt all the video sharing services will eventually institute similar programs as a way of ensuring large amount of consistent traffic to videos.

Video Sharing Evaluation: Revver - Part 1

If you've been reading this blog you'll know that, for all its problems, we believe www.revver.com to be one of the best video syndication/monetization sites out there. In this first posting we will detail the pros and cons of Revver's website and syndication tools.

Website
The website has some real problems. Its ajax interface is sloppy, slow and may be the doom of the service since it isn't really all that enjoyable entertainment experience. The quality of the actual video playback and its transcoding is quite good, but unlike iTunes and Stage6, Revver doesn't have its own codec technology so video quality is only as good as the uploaded file. After uploading your video it will be in flash and quicktime, and your thumbnails are generated automatically.

The flash player is solid and loads quickly, and is used for video playback on the site. The search functions are pretty basic, as the metadata indexing seems to be weak in general. There are channels, most notably Lonelygirl15, Ask a Ninja, and V Cast Videos from Verzion. User uploads seem to be made into channels automatically, but you search by user not channel. Most noticeably absent from the site is the ability to create a content producer profile, at the vary least they could have a place to promote a link to the producer's website.

Syndication
Syndication is generally Revver's strong point. Even when website service was down during Revver's recent growing pains, our syndicated videos continued to play. Your syndication choices are:

- Flash using Javascript
- Quicktime for Myspace (<EMBED>)
- Flash Embed
- Quicktime using Javascript
- Thumbnail link

These simple cut and paste codes provide much more variety than YouTube, AtomFilms, and Veoh. They are easily modified and allow for syndication without having to delve into Revver's API.

Advertising is delivered with your syndicated content. Just as it does on the site, the ad plays at the end of the video only once ending on a still frame advertisement. The advertising is clean, varied and seems to be converting between 10-50% of the time. We will post details of the revenue sharing service in a second posting.

Certainly Revver is more of a syndication service than a social network. Your videos are screened to ensure copyright and content eligibility, and its player, streaming capability and advertising are clean and robust. Really a great video hosting/syndication service for independent producers, but is unlikely to bring you strong viewership. You will be responsible for promoting your videos on services like the T-Cast Network Channels ( www.comedycaster.com , www.dramacaster.com , www.scificaster.com).