Akash's Views & Opinions

Influencers segment

2011-12-21T20:31:00.000-08:00

In the world of ads, we sell various segments to advertisers - audience, demographic, psychographic, etc. And categories - app categories, IAB categories, etc. We are now in the brave new world of social media, the market is looking for a new segment, i.e. word of mouth audience categories, or influencers.

Is this a new segment ? I don't think so. Advertisers have always looked for word of mouth marketing. Arguably the most influential form. Don't we all ask for opinions from our friends. When I bought my 65 inch TV, I looked around what my friends had bought and asked for their opinion. I actually bought a model, which was not rated very high by review sites such as CNET. Remember the Tupperware advertising model - tupperware parties, which is nothing but a glorified advertising model for word of mouth advertising.
Facebook caught on to this trend by allowing purchases to be advertised to your friend circles. A good idea but something which was revoked and reeks of privacy violation. I don't think it can be resurrected.

Influencer segment is highly viral and effective. So, how do we identify these influencers. One approach is to use the # of followers on Twitter as a measure of your "influence". The other is to identify the most subscribed person in G+ or FB. But can we do more? Can we identify individuals within your friends who can talk about a product?

And how will advertisers sell their products to these segments. i.e. how do we incentize these influencers or "publishers" to talk about product in such a way that it appears genuine? Do we give them schwags?
And who are working on these business models? Adly comes to mind.
What is the market potential of these segments? What do you think? More on this in my next post.

What are businesses and brands looking for in Facebook

2010-11-16T14:41:00.000-08:00

I wanted to do a short write-up on what we heard and learnt from customers when we deployed Oolium apps for them. Our target customer was SME/SMB in the verticals of apparel, professional services, restaurant and food (local), niche equipment manufacturers. Though what I write is applicable to most verticals.
First of all, some facts.

Businesses want to follow their audience. i.e. consumers are spending time on FB, businesses are following
Brand's web site is losing its value. Its more meaningful to get consumer's attention on FB vs. spend loads of money getting people to your site.
Consumer time spent has seen the highest growth on mobile (40% Y/Y growth). And if you look globally, mobile is the most important medium.

Brands and businesses have few simple advertising goals:

Build or increase brand awareness
Get leads using various means - performance/affiliate marketing, etc
Sell good and services to the leads using various techniques such as direct response, offers, etc.

Today, facebook does a decent job at (1), however its not there from (2) or (3) perspective.

Here are some recommendations

Brand awareness - Facebook must continue to act as a platform and enable third party providers and developers create rich brand awareness pages for businesses. And it needs to be supported by a full fledged developer network. Look at MSDN (from Microsoft), they do an excellent job at providing developer support. Today, Facebook policies are favoring few preferred provider and not the general developer community at large. Its in Facebook's best interest to enable creation of rich brand awareness page.
Metrics - have a page statistics page. I know today facebook provides some simple stats on pages - # of fans, new activity etc. But it needs to do more. Just look at Google analytics for web sites.
Getting leads - these are your "fans" or likes. In this FB, has done a good job. You can not only get fans from your facebook fan page but you can embed it on your web site. Very powerful - they have allowed the "like" feature to "off-network".
Walled garden - sales fulfillment support is critical if FB wants to be the walled garden of this decade. Keep people on your site. Check out the most popular page on FB today - Lady Gaga. If you've to go to an event or purchase an item, you're taken to ladygaga.com website.
Sales fulfillment - provide platform support to the facebook page to enable storefronts and sales fulfillment. Few startups have started providing this but core platform support is needed. This is critically important to enable sales fulfillment.
Mobile, the deals platform is good start. I can view what my local businesses are and what they are offering. There is check-in available as well. More needs to be done - the combination of location and mobile creates an ideal direct response and loyalty end point. i.e. random check-in are not of much value but check-in with an intention to purchase or respond to a direct response ad or offer is needed. Direct response mechanism seems to be missing in the Deal platform today. The deals platform has loyalty deal but its based on check-ins, there needs to be sales fulfillment piece to it as well. i.e consumer gets a deal only if she checks-in (& broadcasts it to her friends) and purchases.
Mobile - pages for local businesses. There are basics of pages built in and I'm sure FB must be working on more. We need images, videos, offers and friends likes built in as well.

Zynga - interesting statistics

2010-10-29T10:52:00.000-07:00

Zynga is all rave nowadays. I was reading an article in AdAge and wanted to share some interesting statistics.

Top 4 apps in facebook - time spent, are all from Zynga. What is more interesting is that on an average players spent 68 min/day on Farmville and 52 min/day on Mafia Wars!
Virtual goods market is slated to be about $2.1B in 2011, however in-game advertising is tiny at $142M today and expected to grow to only $192M by 2011.
Nearly all Zynga games play occurs in Facebook and in US (97%).
It had 25M UUs in Sept and overall 250M MAU

Wow!

Google TV - some early thoughts

2010-10-28T16:21:00.000-07:00

I've been reading reports about new interactive TV buzz - Google TV and its shenanigans with content providers. Goog has a fine demo out on Best Buy and on their web site. Looks neat but is it going to live up to its buzz.

My quick two cents on this, the world of TV is a typical multi-sided business model with each sides often having different demands. i.e. we've content providers/owners (people who produce TV shows), end-users, advertisers, content distributors or channels (ABC, NBC), and network operators (the distribution channel - AT&T, Comcast, etc.). And the lines get very blurry - Comcast own NBC Universal, Netflix is delivering content over Comcast and AT&T lines potentially competing with content distributors (ABC, FOX of the world). Talk about getting completely lost in this value chain!

But few things I've learnt over the years - two universal truths:

Content is king! Believe me, this is the universal truth on TV. You need access to premium, high quality content on big box. You can get away with it on PC, mobile but not on TV. The end-user (consumer) is tuned for premium content.
TV is lean-back experience. The consumer is tuned to be in a lean back mode on TV. Her mindset is very different compared to mobile or PC. What I'm saying is - do not design with lean forward mindset - e.g. three different PIP display with multiple chat windows, etc. Consumer are not going to be chatting on a TV.

If you keep these two principle in mind when designing TV experience, you'll win.

Please note, the consumer behavior differs very widely with different customer segments - if you test interactive (lean forward) experience with early adopters or enthusiasts, you'll get very positive response. But the key is to test them with mass-market. I sincerely hope that Google TV has done that. We found very different responses back when I was at Microsoft.

Secondly keep your content providers happy, so that you can get access to premium content. I think Netflix has done an outstanding job in that. They are moving the needle in getting better quality streaming content. Can Google TV do that? Their model is to allow users to search for content (e.g. ABC shows) and play them. I can easily see why content owners will balk at it. They need a piece of the pie - show me the money. They are never going to allow Google to play their content without getting paid for it.

So, what should Google TV do?

First of all, decouple TV from Web thinking. I doubt that consumers will search a lot on TV - have you tried typing with a remote. Even if they provide a remote app on Andriod, I really doubt that consumers will be in a mood to search. I know this is contrary to Google thinking but TV is a different beast.
Focus on providing widgets on the main Google TV workspace which are anchors for monetization - local events, sports related, automotive, etc.
Provide richer integration with Android phones - sharing photos, videos, etc.
And last but not least - do rev share deals with content providers to feature content on the main Google TV workspace.

Some interesting facts about twitter

2010-10-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

I found this an interesting read about twitter. A peek into its numbers - it has 100M registered users. However, per RJMetrics research :

40% of its users have never tweeted
80% of its users have sent less than 10 tweets
1/4 of the accounts have no followers
Average twitter user had 27 followers

Well, its the old Pareto principle or law of the vital few (80/20).

Twitter seems to be more like a feature-add on vs. a destination. Its something which is "syndicated" vs. being site where users will spend time on. Unlike facebook, Twitter's monetization potential is not in its site but in figuring out new revenue model based on the syndicated feeds. Had they focussed more on create a destination features such as new Twitter interface, sooner. They might have had a better chance. Instead they allowed myriad partner to create businesses filling in these holes (e.g. Twitpic, yfrog, etc).

Social apps stages - measure & management methods

2010-10-04T22:20:00.000-07:00

Over the past few months I've spent a lot of time researching social apps and their lifecycle. I wanted to share some of what I've learnt in terms of how to manage and measure a social application. A lot of this data comes from tons of blogs that I've read and my own interpretation and learnings. Special thanks to FrameThink blog which has done a great summary of the customer acquisition metrics.

I created this table to put things in context, it lists the key items to track during a lifecycle of a social app, the levers to pull for improvement, metrics to track, and examples. This is assuming that we’ve a social app ready to go and that it’ll live for perpetuity (no end of life). In summary, the lifecycle stages of interest to us - product folks:

Customer acqusition. Get users and more users. And ideally with zero customer acquisition costs (CAC=0). So, how do we do this ? Viral growth.
Engagement. Now, that you’ve users, keep them engaged and coming back for more.
Revenue generation. Make some money while you’re at it.

Social app stages-->	Customer acquisition	Engagement	Revenue generation
Mechanism / methods	Viral growth	Applications and widgets	Virtual goods Real goods Lead generation Revenue share (storefronts)
Levers to pull	Increase 1. Active users making contact with non-users 2. Contact rate - avg. num of contacts per time period 3. Duration of active users 4. User conversion - prob. that non-user get converted to users.	1. Understand user type. The apps should have the following features: 2. Organic: encourage user to take action that has a side effect of causing other customers to re-engage 2. Promotions 3. Positioning: make it a must-have for your user.	1. Features such as collecting/decorating, frienship/love, gambling. 2. Scarcity of goods 3. Differentiated and targeted offers 4. Virtual goods lifecycle - goods wear out, so should virtual goods.
Metrics	DAU and MAU DAU/MAU ratio is a very imp. ratio: of your monthly users how many are coming back on a daily basis. Ideally 0.2 to 0.3. Farmville is at 0.28. K-factor (viral coefficient) = Distribution X Prob of conversion Ideal value between 1.4 and 2 (super viral growth) Distribution: how many non-active users will an active user contact. Prob. of conversion: probability of converting a non-active user. . CAC (customer acquisition cost) LTV (lifetime value of customer) = Total sales & marketing costs / customers LTV > CAC. A factor of 3 is ideal.	Engagement ratio: Reactivation of dormant customers exceeds the rate of customer fatigue.	Revenue / DAU or Revenue / 1,000 DAU. Should be around $150-$200. $300 is great! Transactions/DAU Repeat customers Velocity of money. Keep it high.
Examples	Message user’s friends on activation of the app - i.e when the app goes live, send message to all fans. Active users with non-actives: Contact rate: invite 10 friends to get additional coupon Duration of active users: insert collaborative filtering - ratings, rankings and comments; these tend to increase time spent. User conversion: use image or videos to convert non-users in user to user messaging.	What is your user’s usage profile - is she killing time, socializing, browsing... Organic: linked-in sending email listing status changes. Oolium sending notification about a user taking part in a social app. Promotions: sweepstakes, video contest, polls, in the app. Positioning: if the customer’s goal is to “kill time” make your product the goto product for killing time. i.e. associate the thought of killing time with your product. So when the user sees the icon in iPAD she instinctively clicks on it when bored.	In an ideal scenario, scarce virtual goods should be sold in a player to player secondary market. Target sale of goods to women 25-35.

SME and social media

2010-09-30T06:57:00.000-07:00

I've conversed with many small and medium sized businesses. And one thing that keeps on resonating from them is - "what do I do in social media? Help us address it".

SME fully recognize the importance and relevance of social media. To them its a cost-effective channel to reach their audience. However there is confusion in their minds on multiple fronts:

What is the best way to get their message out to users? i.e. should they put up a facebook fan page and have twitter presence? or both?
What about mobile? What do they do - create a smartphone app or advertise in mobile. If so, how?
How to measure ROI?
They have invested heavily in building out their web presence, however audience growth is in social media. "Can I leverage my web site in there?" This is especially true for SME who have built out storefronts on their web site. How are they going to mimic it in social media.
If everyone talks about "engaging with users", how is that achieved? Is it via simple ads or more engaging ads? If its engaging ads, what format works the best? Display or social apps?
If they in the market for performance advertising - generating leads, etc. How to do it?
How to do it in a cost-effective manner? Today companies in this area are charging arm and a leg - min. of $5,000 to start the campaigns.
And, last but not least - "I want to do it now and in a cost-effective manner".

These are some of the questions we grappled with in Oolium when we built out customizable, simple to use social application for SMEs.

Twitter's new look - finally a path to monetization?

2010-09-26T12:16:00.000-07:00

I like the newTwitter interface - its morphing from a timeline stream to a destination. Now, with few Twitter partners (twitpic, etc), you're not taken to a different page but it opens in the right pane of the new interface.

A lot has been said about monetization for Twitter. At a high level, any monetization involves these three steps:

Build subscriber base
Get your audience engaged in your app. i.e. get the engagement time up, and
Monetize.

Facebook is doing a good job at this - it has the highest audience engagement time (time spent on site) for any site. Its this metric that is adding to it valuation and growth potential. You can monetize this audience. Let's dissect it further - where are people spending most of their time in Facebook - its in the games (and some apps), timeline updates (status checking), and media browsing (photos and videos). The beauty of Facebook is that it has created a walled garden - a destination wherein an end-user spends hours on end. Twitter on the other hand didn't force or provide incentive to users to spend time on its site; instead tools syndicated its stream and put their UI on it (e.g. Hootsuite). This, in my mind, is a serious issue - unless users spend time on the site, your potential to monetize is diminished. I'm not sure that features like promoted tweets will generate as much interest in the advertiser community.

Now, let's look at the changes occurring in the land of brand advertising due to social media. For the first time, brands are not in total control of their message. i.e. brand managers cannot do a simple broadcast of their message and influence consumer's opinions. Instead they have to engage and interact with their audience. Its now a 2 way communication channel.

So, what is going to be most effective ad format in this new social world? I don't believe its the good old display ads or search ads. Its branded social applications. Its applications where in user interact and share their opinions to items relevant to them. And the reason is simple - user mindset, the ad format must match the user behavior; search ads in Goog were successful because users were doing targeted search. So, what works here - games, contest, giveaways, social catalog. In each of these apps, the brand has to allow user's to post comments (good or bad) and share with their friends.

We can get these apps up and running in Facebook but we cannot do so today in Twitter. The way we do it is to provide an external link in the tweet. That's a huge issue - the user is now going out of the twitter site. Twitter needs to enable partners to write to the right tab, this tab should be the workspace where links open up displays to show simple applications. Of course, Twitter will have to provide a controlled sandbox otherwise third parties will rum amok. Recently Virgin America ran a campaign - giving discounts to first 500 customers. Just imagine if they could run this promo and provide details in the new Twitter's right pane. That would be rich! and very lucrative for the brand.
This is a huge monetization potential for Twitter.

Startups - show a path to revenue or LOVE?

2010-09-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share a few thoughts on whether startups should show revenue first or love? i.e. once the product is ready should it generate immediate revenue or display customer desirability and love. Of course, having both is ideal but tough.

I've seen and researched startups in many areas till date - social, mobile, etc. My thoughts are relegated to companies with some sort of consumer element to them (where the eventual customer is the end-user). My theory is that displaying immense customer desirability is a must-have and absolutely essential even if that comes in deference to immediate revenue generation. I can point out to many startups that became great companies (YouTube, Facebook) and new and upcoming ones which are generating interest. I'll not name them but you've ones that are reinventing Q&A using a social angle or displaying location based check-in and services using innovative display on your mobile phone. These are not new ideas but regurgitating old ones. YouTube was not the first video site nor was Facebook the first to market in social media. So, why have these worked and not others. Is it luck or something else?

It's their understanding of the end-user and making their product immensely desirable and loved. The world is all about how things are perceived, viewed, and consumed. Once you've these elements taken care of, audience follows. So, who is your user, there are generally multiple ones

The eventual user or end-user or consumer. This is the audience that you've to please.
Economic buyer, e.g. advertiser. She/he is the one who will pay your bills.

Ideally you've got to get love from both but given a choice follow this priority order.

So, what is the takeaway, in your startup team, make your product be loved. Love = more customer traction = eventual revenue. And how you can do that, apart from deeply understanding the customer and having a great product? Get the services of a great designer - a very important trait in addition to the engineering team.

Mobile & Social and Advertising

2010-09-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

Are mobile and social related in a consumer mind? I think so; when we talk to advertisers, I hear the following - "how do I make my campaign work in social media". If I dig into this, by social - they mean not only facebook and twitter but mobile devices as well - smartphones, iPAD and its upcoming clones.

And consumers (end-users) think the same. They are not doing technical differentiation as we, Silicon Valley folks do - social media is the site while smartphone is a platform to deliver the message. Nope, the consumers don't differentiate it, for them all of these are channels to get the information about their friends, share messages, get relevant messages delivered to them.

So, ad campaigns for social must be tailored to not only facebook and twitter but all mobile devices as well. I call these new media advertising. This give advertisers the greatest ROI - most bang for the buck.

In effective advertisers are following the audience, as they shift from reading (portals like Yahoo) and searching (Google) to engaging. The latter being serviced by facebook, twitter, smartphones, and mobile devices.

Welcome to the new world.

What is an effective ad campaign in Social Media?

2010-09-22T07:36:00.000-07:00

Advertisers have been asking this question for the past few years. What is an effective ad campaign in Social Media. What they have found is CTR for display ads in any social site is lower than the already poor display ad CTR on portals like Yahoo. Well then what works? Is it search ads? But there is hardly any search traffic (how many times do you search in Facebook?). So that is not it.

Before we get into a discourse on what works and what doesn't; let's understand the end-user behavior in these sites. What is the user trying to do in any social site - they are interacting - engaging with their friends in discussions, commenting, sharing, etc. In reality social interaction is similar to what we humans have been doing since time immemorial - we interact and engage. And therein lies the answer. The effective formats in social media are the ones that engage and interact the user in some action.

Just look at display ad sold by Facebook to large brands - these incorporate polls within a display ad which can be shared with your friends (Facebook requires an annual brand commitment of $20,000 prior to using these ads). Similarly fan pages which attract an audience must have engaging applications built into it. These don't have to complex, but you need elements of polls, comments, contest, etc. Without these simply broadcasting a brand's message is not going to be effective in Social Media.

Storefront in Social Media

2010-09-21T10:35:00.000-07:00

There are lot of companies putting out storefront on FB nowadays. That's a great idea but what about the investment that brands have done over these years in creating online storefronts. What we need is a way to tie the two experiences together - product catalog and storefronts.

Check out the new social app template from Oolium called social catalog, it does just that and more.

Or better still check it out on facebook.

Facebook Likes - a lot of "interest" data being collected

2010-09-21T07:24:00.000-07:00

Facebook likes are becoming commonplace - not only in facebook pages but off-network (outside of facebook.com) as well. Blogs use it, brands are incorporating it. Just check out the use of facebook "likes" in websites.

So, the question arises - how can we use this data more efficiently? I've always believed that, apart from being the place that folks are spending most time on the internet, facebook is a very rich data store. Facebook knows what its audience is doing both on and off-network. And that's a rich source of data. Think of its benefits:

Tracking trends. Urban outfitter knows not only the number of customers who "like" their product but their specifics as well (demo and profile)
I should rephrase, its not Urban outfitters but Facebook. They can sell this data back to the client!
Word of mouth marketing. There is no better way to sell than word of mouth from your own friend. 80%+ sales are from word of mouth marketing. Sharing feature of like is best suited for it.
Virality. Sharing with friends.

Social Media Ad Growth

2010-09-20T18:36:00.000-07:00

We all know that Social Media marketing is the new buzzword in town. And for the right set of reasons. Just look at the eMarketer report on social media ad growth projections

I've been following analyst report in various industries for a very long time. And in most cases they overestimate. But what I found surprising this time round was - these forecasts were revised two times in the upward direction! Wow! The ad growth here is phenomenal. And rightly so, where the audience goes, so do the advertisers.

And they are coming into this field in a hurry.

Back again

2010-09-20T17:55:00.000-07:00

Wow, I didn't realize that its been a year since I started dreaming up of this idea. Much has happened, I conceptualized the idea of platform to enable advertiser quickly and easily customize and brand social applications and deploy them onto social media sites and mobile devices.

From a concept in a notepad to a business plan to team formulation to productisation and customer acquisition. It has been a fun journey.

Check it out at http://www.oolium.com

Well, I've been doing the rounds at the VCs and now the angels. I can write books on it now. After countless versions of ppt, we are still on the road.

Social Media Statistics ...

2009-08-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

There is an amazing post on Socialnomics on statistics related to social media. Have a peek at the embedded video. The key takeaway being - social media is not a fad, even if we halve the statistics from the post, we are looking at a Juggernaut. Ad serving will undergo a fundamental change in the next 3-4 years with more dollars moving into social media away from search and display. Goog is going to suffer and Y! will most probably cease to exist.

Social media advertising

2009-07-21T20:47:00.000-07:00

So, what's so compelling about this picture? Apart from it being an eye candy, it won the first Sugoi Facebook photo contest. Sugoi giveaway was a simple performance wear and its generated 100s of votes and fans on the Sugoi page. Talk about engaged promotions and "word of mouth" marketing.

Social media advertising is not about display ads , it all about engaging the consumers in the brand message.

There was a great article published recently from Josh Bernoff - Forrester analyst on media spend budget. I had made a conjecture around a year ago (when the recession started) that media spend on digital (aka internet) related ads will increase; and Josh fully concurs with this. Here are some interesting nuggets -

The result is that digital, which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall advertising budgets won't grow much
Social media, which will account for $716 million this year between social network campaigns and agency fees, will generate $3 billion in five years. And this doesn't even count displays ads on social networks (which are in the display ads category.) Of all the parts of digital marketing, social network marketing one is poised for the most explosive growth.

The key to social media advertising is engagement vs. the traditional "push" or broadcast model. Consumer are now looking to engage with and drive what they want to see in a brand vs. brand pushing its strategy to naive consumers. The world is beginning to change and the interesting thing is that its a global phenomenon.
Consumers , all over the world, are spending oodles of time on the social media vs. traditional portals (bad news for Yahoo). And this phenomenon is seeing the largest y/y increase. As per Nielsen report, the engagement is growing 6 times more as compared to other mediums. Currently, almost 10% of internet time is being spent on social media - and this is a global phenomenon.
So, my prediction is that social media type of "engagement ads" will supplant display ads in the near future and soon "search ad" budgets will decrease as well. That's definitely not good news for Yahoo or Google. But hey, there needs to be a change every decade or so and I can see it happening.

Cable - are its days numbered?

2009-02-10T22:44:00.000-08:00

Old timers in (online) video land have a saying - "video is only six months away". How many times have we said that the days of viewing linear TV are over. Old ways of distributing video via broadcast or cable are ending. But its been well over 10 years and these folks are alive and kicking, and might I say, rich!

But, I do feel that the day of cable and broadcast distribution are numbered. It'll not happen in the 6 months or 6 years but their hold over our media lives is slowly but surely diminishing and will soon become minimal when the current generation (born post 2002) gets out of high school. I don't know what the demographic segment has been assigned to this generation (e.g. millennial, Gen Y, etc) but I call them the "YouTube generation". Now, I shouldn't be uttering the word - YouTube, given that I'm from Yahoo! but YouTube is the crowned king of UGC online video.
The current generation - millennial, have been exposed to non-linear viewing (in YouTube) but have not grown up with it. For them its an important part of their media viewing along with TV.

However I see a seminal change coming. My 2 year old son watches cartoons on YouTube! He asks for YouTube by name and not TV. This generation is growing up with the non-linear viewing as its default media habit. Linear TV appears weird to them. For them, the norm is to watch on demand, rich interactive media. They will look back and say - "what weird folks lived 15 years ago, they watched linear media"

Identifying opportunities in video - a model

2008-12-20T08:30:00.000-08:00

I've always been curious on how to model video opportunities from a core strategy perspective.

Here is my take.

We should use the strategic positioning model to

identify opportunities by specifying various positioning areas,
identify problems faced in each area,
define target market for these problems,
and set of benefits to solve these problems.

This enables us to have a crisp definition of the product - which is nothing but a set of benefits for a target customer or a market segment.

Strategic positioning in the video market can be divided into:

Variety based positioning - the video workflow
Customer segment based positioning - customer segments
Access based positioning - on the modes of accessing videos.

Specifically,

We can use "variety based positioning" to identify opportunities by understanding the video workflow:

Ingest of video
Encode/transcoding video
Creation of a video asset (metadata + content). The video asset can be categorized as UGC, semi-pro, professional.
Organizing videos and playlists via CMS
Inserting ads. There are different ad formats - in-stream, overlays and ad-rules - ad frequency, post/pre rolls, etc.
Content streaming
Player - player creation, skinning
Content syndication
Content aggregation.

For "customer segment based positioning", we should know:

Consumer - end-user consuming content on a publishing site
Content providers - consumers, semi-pro, professional
Publishers - video destination sites, aggregation sites, video in context sites.
Advertisers - small biz, medium sized businesses, and large.
Developers - they create publishing sites

And finally, "access based positioning":

Form factor for accessing video - mobile
Bandwidth constraints - on mobile or slower connection.

By keeping these three positioning models in mind, we can identify unique market opportunities and define a product offering.

I'd use the following table to articulate the problems that each area faces, example:

Strategic Positioning Areas Problems Faced
Ads - inserting, rules Measuring ad effectiveness
.........

Once key strategic areas and its problems are well identified, we can then articulate market sizing for each area and its value proposition. The product definition must focus on a set of benefits for a target segment. The feature set is a technical articulation of the benefits.

Video syndication and ads - on the content or player?

2008-12-13T18:08:00.000-08:00

This question has always intrigued me? In network TV land syndicating shows generally means - making prime time content available to run on other networks (e.g. syndicating Sienfeld).

How does this translate to online video world? Content providers make content available to different distribution channels. E.g. CBS audience network syndicates content to YouTube, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. However, they are generally averse to allow sharing or further syndication to others. Why is that? I believe its the fear of losing ad revenue. CBS does ad-rev share deals with YouTubes of the world, they want to ensure that wherever their content is being distributed, the monetization can be attributed back to CBS.

Here is another data point worth noting - almost 40% of YouTube's stream count are via "embeds" - i.e. shared linked outside of YouTube! In addition, if you pay close attention to ComScore video metrix, you'll note that video stream share is very fragmented - YouTube has the lion share (50%+) but the rest of the share is divided into 100 + players.

Syndication in the online world is very different from TV network land. There are hundreds of viable distribution channels. Content providers have to take advantage of all distribution channels to reap full potential of thier ad revenue.

My assertion is that barrier to universal syndication is the inability to attribute ad revenue back to the content provider. And this barrier is limited by our technical ability to associate ad with the video instead of the syndicated player.

Currently, most video ads are managed by an ad-plugin in the player talking to a video ad server (e.g. Doubleclick or an internal ad server in MSN, Yahoo!, etc). If they could be directly part of the video, the ad revenue could be directly associated with the stream instead of the player. This will incentivize the content providers for universal distribution.

Video Platform companies - is it a crowded field?

2008-11-08T06:50:00.000-08:00

Over the past few years, we have seen a proliferation in video platform companies - these are your traditional platform plays allowing other companies to create derivatives. As video has grown in popularity, every publisher wants to show video, however the expertise around creating a rich video experience is now getting more complex than simply displaying a player and its playlist.

Do we have too many companies addressing the similar needs with minimal differentiation? Is it too crowded?

Summary of the key players in the market today -

the Platform. Target segment: white label publishers, premium publisher. Value proposition: ingest video and manage metadata. Tie-up with ad networks and player vendors for an end to end offering. Owned by Comcast. Metrics (month): 65M streams and 10 M UUs.

Brightcove. Target segment: white label publisher, premium and mid market (torso) publishers. Value proposition: ability to customize player, great toolset for publisher, open APIs for customization, tie up with ad networks. Private with around $90M funding. Metrics(month) : 31M streams per month, 10M UUs. Customers: Showtime, WSJ, and AOL.

Move network. Target segment: white label publishers, premium and mid-market publishers. Value proposition: high end streaming needs - HD. Customers: ABC, Discovery, Fox, CW.

YouTube. Target segment: tail publishers. Value proposition: get your video on YouTube. Value proposition: access YouTube audience.

Ooyala. Very similar to Brightcove.

And there are new players in the market - Kaltura, Fliqz, Marcellus. As you'll note, there is not much of a differentiation between the players. Few of them are beginning to differentiate on price vs. value - a dangerous strategy leading to price wars.

What would be ideal is that they bring out a value proposition for their target customer semgent and focus on it. Too many of them are simply creating "me-too" products. I predict an industry shake-down in the next year or so, the five players listed above should make it out all right, the rest will face a very tough climate.

Internet TV will it be a true competitor to Cable

2008-10-26T19:41:00.001-07:00

Video over Internet is getting popular as seen by the time the younger demo are spending on YouTube's of the world. The time and unique users watching video on PC is ever increasing. We are even seeing an increase with mobile video viewing. However the form factors provided by TV and mobile have limitations, in the end the consumer would like some of this content to become available on TV.

I want to see my Hulu videos, YouTube favorites, and Netflix content on TV. Now, Roku is doing a good job with getting Netflix content on TV. However, the way to get the rest is via your PC. This may be an easy task for us media types but for the common consumer its a exercise in futility. We need a device to manage video over the internet and our other media scenarios such as DVDs, cable, etc.

One tenet that we must imbibe is that clutter in the living room is a non-starter. i.e. we need to reduce the number of devices not increase it. Women rule the living room design and they hate clutter. Well, we know what guys will do. To make this happen, I see a great opportunity in co-tailing on the Blu-ray players. Consumer have to purchase the percieved winner in the HD DVD world, its price point is coming down (below $200 is the tipping point for mass consumer adoption). If folks like Hulu, Netflix, YouTube tie in with Blu-ray device manufacturers, they have a perfect entry into the consumer's living room.

Of course, the other entry is via the gaming devices such as Xbox, Wii, and Playstation. Microsoft has already put its IPTV player in XBox, so we know where they are heading.

The other option is to have the Cable guys do it but given my work with Cable guys, I dont think they have the aptitude or will to make such a device.

Video Platform

2008-10-19T23:30:00.000-07:00

Online video is seeing phenomal growth, we all know that. There is a saying with ol' video hands and it goes - "video is only 6 months away from taking over the world" and we have been saying that for the past 10 years! But I do feel that we are reaching the tipping point for many reasons -

The growth of broadband speeds. Cable now offers 6Mbps as a the default speed.
Content companies are getting more open to sharing content online, see the growth of Hulu.
And above all, the audience is watching more hours online. Watch the teenage and 18-25 demo. These guys will change the viewing habits going forward.

So, video is now a ubiquitous element on all sites, on par with text and images. How are publishers going to incoporate ever growing needs for video. They can either use paid services such as Brightcove, Ooyala, and others. Or try open source options such as Pandastream.

I'm curious about experiences with Pandastream and other open source video platforms. If you've worked with them, drop me a line....

Video stream count - total streams or monetizable videos

2008-10-16T22:03:00.000-07:00

Wanted to share my thoughts on video stream measurement. Today we have companies like comScore give us a tally of total stream count for US. This puts sites such as YouTube way ahead of others (45% stream share). But we've all heard about monetization woes at YouTube, and that's a result of brands not being comfortable putting their ads against unknown and potentially illegal video. The number we should be tracking is "monetizable" videos, i.e. the % of videos that can be legibly monetized. Its not very easy to determine this percentage but keeping track of number of partner videos in a site is a start. Using this measure, the percentage of monetizable videos on YouTube drops dramatically. According to some reports it is between 3-5% of their total videos!

Will the economic slowdown impact internet and video ad spending

2008-10-13T13:01:00.000-07:00

Everyone is talking about - we are in a financial mess! So, will it severly impact internet ad spend, specifically video ads? I'm not so sure. I recently read an article on HBS talking about the fact that the drop may be much worse for traditional media vs. online world. The logic is quite simple - marketers will be pushed to reduce their media budgets, today the spend is around $70B on TV (network & broadcast), so as to keep the marketing impact the same with lower spend, they may move more monies into the online world. This may be especially true for online video market.
It remains to be seen if this is true but lets track this closely.

Need to start posting

2008-09-18T07:13:00.000-07:00

After a long hiatus, I need to get back to posting blog entries!
Its an exiting year for video and platforms that support it. The market is getting crowded but with enough space for all. But the main point is that video is finally seeing light of day - increased viewership, ad spend. The projections are

$500 M in 08 ad spend in video
$908M in 09 video ad spend
highest year over year growth for any ad spend medium in the internet
Finally, online video ad spend is moving out of the generic new media/internet line item to become its own or take portion of the TV ad budget!

Video share being so fragmented, its a good time for platform providers.

I really wish that comScore, Nielsen would start measuring monetizable videos vs. total stream usage. The latter puts YouTube way ahead of others (45% market share) but its % of monetizable video (ability to run video ads inline/instream) is much smaller.

Content Syndication - Distribute your content & make money

2007-08-01T08:22:00.001-07:00

Continuing on the topic of revenue generation for online video, let's spend some time on content syndication. This is perhaps a great way of generating revenue for content providers both for established and new entrants. But first, for some definitions.

What is content syndication? The ability for content owners to distribute their content on various channels and in the process make revenue off it. Comic strips are great examples, writers pen the strips and then they are distributed on various newspapers.

So, how is content syndication of help to content owners. Till date, the best way to distribute high quality video content is via TV (4 broadcast channels and around 100 odd cable), Cinema theaters, DVD. But with the advent of the web, the number of distribution channels are literally limitless. All we need is a way to bundle the content (e.g. video) in a form that is consumable on the web site. Examples-

You could do this via "ad units" on a web site - Google has started an initiative adsense for videos (apparently on sites such as AdVersus.com according to NY Times article).
Or the web site could "embed" the video and pay royalty fee to the owner. E.g. a local newspaper could "syndicate" national feed from CNN or NY Times for certain articles.

The content can be distributed via a video ad network which is responsilble for providing

Marketplace functionality
Ad placement in the video
Sharing of ad revenue with the content owner.

Companies such as Brightcove, Roo networks, and Maven networks are playing in this field.

Silverlight Media Player Plugin

2007-08-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

I've always been intrigued on why MSN doesn't use Windows Media Player plug-ins. Well the reason is obvious is not upto par with the ubiquitous offering from Adobe - Flash. Check out all video properties on MSN - they use Flash!. But methinks that's about to change in the next few months. Silverlight is out and being used, albeit in beta form, on some properties. Check out http://sliverlight.net/fox
It's seems to be a good offering, Flash like menus and controls, and using VC-1 codec. So we are going to see good HD previews.

Revenue & Advertisement Models in Online Video - Marketplace Survey

2007-07-19T08:57:00.000-07:00

The state of ads in online video is still in its infancy. The following forms are in use today:

Traditional banner ads. E.g. YouTube, Yahoo! video, Yahoo! music, etc.
Pre-roll, post-roll, and mid-roll ads: ads that are played before, after, and during the playback of online video. This is by far the most common use of ads in online video.

There are different version of these "roll" ads ranging from the tradiational pre-roll (as in Yahoo! News, MSN Video) wherein the user cannot fast forward the ad prior to watching her video.
The advertiser inserting post roll ads based on the video context. E.g. Revver - insert Verizon ad after Prince music video featuring Verizon phones.

Revenue sharing. Sites such as VuMe allow the user (i.e person who uploads the video) to share a percentage of revenue based on video's popularity. VuMe inserts ads in the video.
Sponsorship and made for web content. These are made for web channels, i.e. Webisodes. E.g. Somagirls.tv (gossip channel) which runs on GoFish and other sites, Kohl's has sponsored Somagirls channel as it targets the 18-25 W demo. Yahoo! video channels such as "Sundance" channel is sponsored by Lexus.
Contextual ads: Companies such as Scanscout and Adap.tv use technology to recognize words spoken in the audio tracks of clips. It then lets advertisers choose to have their ads appear at the moment in the videos when specific words are spoken. Another example is YuMe networks: similar to Scanscout, except the tagging of frames is done in India. These ads can appear during playback of the video.

We need to differentiate between UGC and non-UGC content. The former is more amenable to advertisement such as contextual ad, pre/post roll. Ads for UGC is best served by banner ads.

What's all the hype about?

2007-07-17T23:37:00.000-07:00

So, I decided to give a swirl at the latest video offerings from Veoh, Joost, and Babelgum.

Veoh sources videos from both syndicated sources and other web sites (e.g. YouTube, Yahoo! video, etc). Joost and Babelgum carry syndicated content only . Here are my initial comments:

It's still beta software! I'd a ton of trouble getting any content successfully from Joost. Babelgum doesn't work in Vista.
Voeh is by far the best in terms of streaming video. Also, Veoh has built in some good social networking features.
Joost seems to be bringing TV to the PC. Well, is that what we are looking for? Getting the same ol' TV channels on our PC. I'm all for UGC content and social networking features.

Joost

Veoh

Internet Video - a survey

2007-07-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

One area of great interest to me is internet video and various avenues to monetize it. I researched a couple of sites to get some very interesting data points on usage of internet video, here goes:

Internet video playback fall into three key categories - progressive download, streaming video, and P2P. Most of the video playback is in the first category - progressive download. Streaming video is used mainly to display live events. P2P is relatively new and is being pushed by companies such as Joost, Babelgum, Microsoft LiveStation.

Statistics on internet video usage
(from ComScore Data Jan 2007 & Accustream reports)

Total online video streams - 7.2 Billion streams / month. This includes user generated content (UGC) and entertainment & media sites.
Non-UGC content streaming was 24.92 billion streams in 2006. This constitutes around 1/3 of total streamed in a year. That is a 39% growth over the previous year.
Music video constitute around 35% of all entertainment & media streaming (non-UGC streams) in 2006.
News video constitute around 23% of all streams in 2006
Total audience size - 122 Million (70% of US internet households)
Average stream time - 2.6 minutes
Average viewing - 2 videos / day
Monthly viewing - 151 min / month
Daypart viewing schedule - highest from 5pm - 8pm on weekdays - 60% relatively higher than other day parts; 7pm - 11 pm on weekends - 30% relatively higher
YouTube - 65% market share. Yahoo! Video - 5%

Strategic Positioning Areas	Problems Faced
Ads - inserting, rules	Measuring ad effectiveness
.........