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By Corey Kronengold, February 5th, 2010
After an almost two year experiment, Business Insider’s Dan Frommer has plugged himself back in to the cable TV ecosystem. He explains why in an editorial over at AdAge and, of course, on his own Business Insider column.
Frommer was an early cord cutter, taking an early leap into the “Hulu Household” domain. I took a more practical – albeit certainly more expensive – approach. I watched as much as I could online, but knew damn well that I wasn’t ready to give up all the perks of cable. Despite having a tricked out HTPC / Media Center, the cable companies still have a stranglehold on high-def content.
So for anyone who shelled out the $1500+ for a new HDTV in the past year or two, you ‘ll be underwhelmed when streaming standard def content on to it. Other than students living in dorms, and urban dwellers in 250 square foot apartments, there’s still too much to give up by cutting the cord completely.
Dan mentioned Major League Baseball’s MLB.TV subscription service, and sings it praise. But even with 6 games on the screen at once, and keeping all of your fantasy baseball scores and stats in front of you, its still no match for high def. Same for the NHL. Once you’ve seen hockey on TV as clearly as you do in real life, there’s no going back. Funny thing – people actually like being able to see the puck on screen. Who knew?
But cable companies should not rest on their laurels just because they won back a major influencer like Dan. He also calls on the cable companies to fix their damn user interfaces, and I couldn’t agree with him more. VOD on Cablevision flat out sucks. And the way you have to scroll alphabetically through hundreds of listings to find a program should be embarrassing for them. And, while I’m bitching, Cablevision isn’t playing the TV Everywhere game with the Olympics. (Thanks for calling me back, @jimmaiella ). That may be the final straw for me, and push me over to FIOS.
So, welcome back to the wired world, Dan. Its still to soon to go all-or-nothing, but it sure is fun having Boxee, Hulu, Netflix, Fancast, and even Windows Media Center to play with. But its also nice to kick back on the couch and watch a movie in high def on HBO or a game on HBO. Until you can clearly watch a 100mph Jonathan Papelbon fastball over broadband, I guess we’re stuck ponying up for cable.
By Corey Kronengold, February 3rd, 2010
Video ad network, Brightroll, today announced it has secured $10M in Series C financing led by Scale Venture Partners. That brings total VC money to $16M to date. True Ventures, Adams Street Capital and KPG Ventures also kicked in.
More interestingly, Brightroll said that it has been profitable for nearly 12 months. Thats genuinely good news for the space as a whole. However, since private companies can simply say they are profitable, we’ll take it with a slight grain of salt. Not that we have any reason to doubt them, other than the general issues that all of the video ad nets have suffered from over the past year or two. Still, whats good for Brightroll is good for the rest of the space as well. Maybe there’s something to this video advertising stuff?
Regardless, congrats to Tod & The Gang on both fronts.
By Corey Kronengold, February 2nd, 2010
Content is king. If you build it, they will come. Slow and steady wins the race. Pick a euphemism, and apply it. Any way you cut it, Revision3 had a bang up 2009.
According to a company press release, show viewership across the network climbed to nearly 1.5 billion minutes and revenue grew 30%. On the ad sales side, Revision3 also increased its average deal size by 50%.
CEO Jim Lauderback said it quite well, commenting, “What’s even more amazing is that we achieved this success during what’s now being called ‘The Great Recession.’ I’m proud of how our entire team worked together to deliver such an amazing performance, and am even more excited about our outlook for 2010 – which will be huge!”
I’m personally a fan of 2009 breakout HD Nation and Web Zeroes.
And a personal shout out – and apology – to Diggnation’s Alex Albrecht, who I embarrassingly failed to recognize when I was chatting with him at the NATPE digital cocktail party.
Congrats to Revision3 on a great 2009, and continued success in 2010!
By Corey Kronengold, February 2nd, 2010
Video syndicator and analytics provider TubeMogul has released a quick study of video abandonment rates caused by pre-roll ads.
The study found that 15.89% of viewers click away from a video rather than sit through a pre-roll ad. For magazines and newspapers the data showed 24.85% of viewers clicking away. For large broadcasters, only 10.9% of viewers click away during an ad.
What did we learn here? Frankly, not much (sorry, Brett!). Back in August of 2008, Tremor Media did a study finding a roughly 80% pre-roll completion rate (or 20% abandonment rate). Brightroll issued similar data, showing an 87% completion rate. The most aggressive data came from Nate Elliott, research director at Jupiter (now Forrester), who suggested audience loss as a direct result of prerolls could be as little as 5% (in Europe). Nate issued a new report on Benchmarks And Best Practices For European Online In-Stream Video Advertising last month. So it doesn’t look like the needle has moved to far in the last two years. I believe thats probably a good thing.
The disparity between newspapers/magazines and broadcasters also seems to make logical sense as well. Users aren’t sure what they are going to get when they launch a video from a website, but can be pretty sure they know what they are in for when visiting a broadcast site.
And never to go without at least a minor quibble, I’m don’t agree with the conclusion about changing how CPMs are counted. I’m sure its more of an oversight rather than an error, but the issue is what counts as a “view,” not what an advertiser will actually pay for that view.
I also don’t agree with the “trade off” that the study alleges that publishers are faced with. They aren’t faced with the choice of running pre-roll vs not, and losing 25% of their audience. The issue is whether or not they can make money from the other 75% or not. No revenue = No business. And while users are not captive to any particular publisher online, new monetization rights platforms will ensure that specific pieces of content will be monetized no matter where the user views it. The ad logic and monetization rules will be set at the content level, with the publisher receiving a set share of that ad revenue for the view.
Additionally, the IAB has been working hard to provide a formal definition of a view and when to count an impression.
My take away is quite the opposite. I think this data shows continued strength for the pre-roll ad format, particularly when the user knows what they are getting as part of the value exchange.
By Corey Kronengold, February 1st, 2010
Digital Broadcasting Group (DBG), one of the leading creators of long form branded entertainment for the Web, released their 2009 Long Form Video Benchmarks report while I was at NATPE (so rude!). The report focuses on two key metrics: Interaction Rate and Video View Time.
DBG’s study concluded that:
– Long form content generated a 9.3% interaction rate compared to 3.1% average for short form video units (according to DoubleClick Video Benchmark Study).
- Long form content averaged 63.04 seconds compared to 34.57 seconds of short form video units cited in the same DCLK study.
Now, the nitpicking.
The average video length of DBG long form branded content was 3:29 per video. Using some fuzzy math, users on average only watched about one-third of the branded entertainment. As far as the brand is concerned, that may not be a winning formula. When factoring in all the production expenses and media costs to push the content out, the benefit to the brands may not beat the 80-85% completion rates for pre-roll in front of premium content.
Assuming the short form content referenced by the DoubleClick report is essentially a repurposed :15 or :30 second spot, at least proportionally, the short form is getting better bang for the buck in the exposure department. However, I’d be extremely hesitant to compare the ad experiences between the two.
We’re digging deeper, though, to see how those average view times (and hopefully completion rates) compare to similar length webisodic content that isn’t produced by brands. I haven’t seen any specific data on that yet, but am actively in the hunt.
The interaction rate data is also questionable upon digging deeper. They don’t break out “positive” vs “negative” interactions. A “pause” or “stop” shouldn’t be counted the same as turning on the sound or replaying a video. The study also does not make mention of any interactivity from Flash overlays or other interactive opportunities outside of the player controls. A few more specifics would have been very helpful in analyzing the data.
Overall, however, DBG’s report is good news in my opinion. First, using similar fuzzy math, if 1/3 of the audience got all the way through the branded content, I’m betting that brands would be pretty damn happy with that. Second, I see room for a lot of other brand metrics that could have been included that – IMHO – would also look good to the brands, including metrics like brand awareness and favorability. I know for a fact that many advertisers don’t want to pay the high fees to execute brand studies that have yet to prove effective for this type of marketing, so I’m willing to give DBG and the rest of the branded entertainment world the benefit of the doubt. With all of the branded content being created today, surely the stuff works to some degree.
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