Looking at Video on the Web with Ken McCarthy

After two years of very part-time experimentation, I’ve come up with a formula that this past month (July 2008) generated over 1,000,000 video views. 

Better yet, traffic for the test site is growing at 10% per month – and it’s all free –  so next year this time,  the site will be doing well over 2,000,000 views per month, unless I get ambitious and start pushing it a little.

Total time investment to keep the thing going and growing: 15 minutes per day.

More details later, but here’s the screen shot:

Click here for experimental site results

I had friends who played in virtual worlds in the late 1970s (they needed mainframe access back then.)

I didn’t get it then – and I don’t get it now – but whether I get it or not doesn’t matter.

This year $1 billion was invested in various "virtual world" ventures.  OK, there’s a lot of hot money around right now, but it can’t ALL be dumb money.

Also, if "community" is the key to the Internet, what could be more of a community than a place where you completely immerse yourself in another world with fellow virtual world inhabitants.

Two resources for you if you want to keep up-to-date with what’s going on:

!. Virtual World Management

The virtual world industry is big enough to have its own conferences, expos and industry analysts.

http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/

2. Machinima

What is it?

It’s "animated filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3-D environment."

Frankly, I’ve yet to see a good machinima (I haven’t looked all that hard), but clearly this is a medium to watch.  It’s growing fast and the current fan base is very passionate.

You can get a crash course here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima

Ken

A bit long-winded (he’s an academic) but when he finally makes his point at the end, it’s a pretty good one.

Actually, John Walker, co-founder founder of AutoCAD, made this same point brilliantly way back in the early nineties. The folks who are going to make a killing in software, he said, are the folks who create tools that let people make their own stuff.

There’s so much going on in Internet video, just tracking it could be a full time job.

Unfortunately, I already have a full time "job" (actually a couple of them): running a business; organizing and hosting the annual System Seminar; counseling non-profits in New Orleans.

So the number of posts to the blog has suffered, though I do think the quality has been sky high.

In fact, we accomplished the most important thing: alerting Internet marketers to the impending breakthroughs that were on track to put Internet video on the map as a major force in Internet marketing. Folks who took our advice were well positioned when the reality we predicted (with a pretty good degree of precision) arrived.

Now video on the Internet has practically become "business as usual."

With that in mind, let’s talk with a real Internet video veteran, a guy who, while he was at Microsoft, was already looking at video’s online potential seriously TWELVE years ago.

Hundreds of high level, high stakes online video presentations later, he has a lot of practical advice to share with us:

http://www.thesystemblog.com/2008/03/lon-naylor—vi.html

Did you feel the earth shake?

You should have.

Little Apple, Inc. (formerly Apple Computer) which many were ready to write off as dead as recently as ten years ago is now the world’s biggest music retailer. It just beat out the former champion Wal-Mart.

Who says this is so? The NPD group.

There was no online music industry to speak up five years ago. Chalk up another one to the Internet.

If you haven’t heard from me lately it’s because I’ve been far too busy making and promoting Internet videos to take the time to write about them.

If you’re new to the site, just check out the archive. It’s got plenty of very useful, on-target information on Internet video – including the original premise of the site itself.

This is my 15th year of talking about the impending impact of the Internet on TV and my third year of this blog. 

Since then, my clients and I have used Internet video to sell millions of dollars worth of products in all categories. I routinely get uploaded videos to 10,000+ viral view status and have occasionally hit 100,000 plus with one video crossing the 500,000 views mark – all viral without penny one of advertising (or real effort for that matter.) 

A casual, extremely part time video publishing experiment I started in August of 2006 with a mailing to 50 colleagues has now blossomed into an active subscriber list of 23,000 and growing.  Again, all without a penny in advertising. Amazingly, because it wasn’t my intention, the site accidentally nets over $3,000 a month. Imagine if I invested in it a little bit.

A quote in an article in yesterday’s New York Times by Alan Wutzel, the head of research for NBC put it best:

"(Watching video on the Internet) has become a mainstream behavior in an extraordinarily quick time. It isn’t just the province of college students or generation Y-ers. It spans all ages."

I know. I called it three years ago (fifteen really, but who’s counting?)

It was inevitable. After all, corporate TV sucks. Always has. The only reason they were able to get away with it for so long was because an alternate distribution hadn’t emerged. Now it has. "Game Over" for the bad guys.

In the same article, Quincy Smith, the president of CBS Interactive summed up the big broadcasting industry’s problem quite nicely:

"The four and a half billion we make on broadcast is never going to equate to four and a half billion online."

Well, boo-hoo.  After all the big networks have done such a good job maintaining and raising cultural standards and educating people about health, personal finance and citizenship that it would be tragic to see them go out of business. NOT.

Internet television will generate many billions of dollars in revenue and that revenue will be distributed broadly. Network executives may actually have to work for a living some day. Meanwhile, people with their wits about them and content that people want will be doing just fine.

Will it all be good? No, of course not, but a lot of voices that are currently not being heard thanks to what amounts to Corporate Amerikan censorship will be heard and the country and world will be a better place for it.

You gotta love this.

A web site and TV channel that are nothing but commercials.

It’s called Firebrand.com

Content: free. Production values: sky high.

Will people watch? I watched for a while last night in a hotel room. It was better than the cr@p that was on the local cable service.

Monetization?

They do a lot of call outs to people who view the channel online. I think they could be doing a lot better on the monetization front, but hey, it’s a start, and they’re both online and on cable.

To see it in action: Firebrand.

For over a year now, "Video" has been one of the choices Google has offered on its very spare home page along with other popular search services like "Images", "News", and "Maps" etc.

Well, I just took a look on my spanking brand new MacBook and "Video" is gone as a home page choice.

It’s been replaced with a button called "Products."

If you google "Google Products" what you come up with are lists of the all the software products that Google makes available above and beyond their search results (ex. gmail, Google Earth)

A very quick search on Google itself turned up nothing about this new initiative.

So what is it exactly?

First, "Products" is shorthand for "Google Product Search" and like all things Google it’s in "beta."

Second, it is a very slick, lightening fast search engine for…products. You name it and it appears Google has got it. Think UBER-catalog.

Not only that, but it appears Google has made is dead simple to shop across multiple online catalogs with a service called Google "Shopping List."

The experience ends, of course, with a visit to Google "Checkout."

Do you selling physical "stuff?" You need to get on this…like now.

By the way, Google’s catchphrase for the service is "search for stuff to buy." Talk about cutting to the chase. I have a feeling this is going to be huge. There’s got to be a cold chill going through the folks at Yahoo Stores and even eBay right now.

Here’s what the page looks like: Google Product Search

Here’s in the info page for sellers: Sell with Google

I happen to be in LA this week so I’m seeing lots of new about the looming writers strike.

Writers on strike?

Believe it or not those charming airheads on the tube don’t write the words that come out of their mouths. A back office of writers keeps the game going.

Now those writers are on the verge of walking off the job. Their complaint is that they’re not receiving compensation for DVD sales and other digital repackaging of their work.

Is this really a big deal?

Yes it is for two reasons, one micro and one macro…

Read more…

If you want to take a look at an NBC/Fox attempt to steal market share from Google/YouTube, you can take a look at the beta here: Hulu.com

It makes sense that some big "me too" ventures would crop up. The smart thing would be for these two networks to promote Hulu.com heavily on their broadcasts. They’ll be able to generate a surprising amount of spike traffic this way.

Interesting counterbalance to Google’s lock on search traffic.

TV still trumps search when it comes to eye balls, but of course the the Internet, the distance from screen to play button is a whole lot shorter.