Every March, the NCAA men's basketball championship leaves CBS Interactive swimming in video views. And while no other event can yet compete, the network is busy developing franchises with big video potential. Next week, during the E3 gaming conference, GameSpot plans to stream over 80 hours of video coverage. CBS Interactive's gaming news and information site is also promising more interactivity, with the addition of a roaming user-directed live cameraman. "Year after year, our video views for E3 continue to grow, so we're excited about its future," said Sarah Cain, vice president of communications for CBS Interactive. "Not every event can be [March Madness On Demand], but gaming holds a lot of potential." Cain said she wasn't able to disclose specific traffic numbers for GameSpot's previous E3 coverage. For this year's event, Best Buy has signed on as the show's title sponsor, joined by Klondike, Sony, Bethesda, Warner Bros and THQ. As the show's title sponsor, Best Buy will be featured on the live stage show each day of E3. Other video offerings will include live video of the Microsoft, EA, Ubisoft, Sony and Nintendo press conferences, as well as continuous coverage of game announcements, news and interviews live from the GameSpot stage. To ensure accessible show coverage, video will be streamed across the GameSpot Video Network, which includes YouTube and Ustream. Consumers will also be encouraged to embed live streaming footage directly onto Facebook, Twitter and personal blogs. In addition to GameSpot, CBS Interactive properties include CNET.com, CBS.com, CBSSports.com, CBSNews.com and TV.com. Earlier this year, the division also agreed to acquire Clicker Media, which owns clicker.com, a digital guide for video entertainment. In turn, CBS named Jim Lanzone, co-founder and chief executive officer of Clicker Media, as the new president of CBS Interactive -- replacing outgoing chief Neil Ashe.
Companies touting clickable video technologies -- which allow viewers to click on objects to obtain more information or make online purchases -- have had their starts and stops over the years. London-based wireWAX, which recently entered the field, has added the ability for advertisers or other users to tag moving objects dynamically and to insert buttons containing interactive forms, social media links, apps and more. wireWAX has also arrived in the U.S. via an unlikely partner -- 12-year-old search-centric Denver digital agency Location3 Media. As agency president Alex Porter told Online Media Daily, video represents only "a small percentage of our overall revenue now...but it's growing steadily." Location3's 60-person staff does include a video manager, Nathan Evans, who said he was checking out offerings from Brightcove, the agency's online video platform, when he first came across wireWAX. He then contacted wireWAX directly, leading to custom collaborations -- and to Location3's status as one of only three content and production partners cited on wireWAX's Web site, along with Wiseguy in London and Social TV in Greece/Cyprus. On the platform side, in addition to Brightcove, wireWAX has partnered with YouTube and VMix for plug-ins; it is currently in beta with an iPad app. Location3 Media has tested the technology on an agreeable "client," its own Local Search Traffic division. Location3 teamed with LightGroup, a digital production company, to make a video showing small business owners how to optimize local listings and develop successful search advertising. The video marks wireMAX's first integration with Brightcove Express, Brightcove's service for smaller companies -- and debuts new in-video functionality developed by Location3 and wireWAX, including SMS messaging, and the integration of maps with live search results. The video is also chock-full of tagged objects. For example, as the narrator gives tips on improving rank in search listings, viewers can search live results via a pop-up window to see where they rank currently in local map listings. The video runs four minutes, but Evans noted that with clickable technology, "usually you'll see viewer engagement even longer than the length of the video itself." Such increased viewer engagement is paramount in speeding up the shift of ad dollars from TV to online video," Porter said, adding that being in a Brightcove layer also allows Location3 to see "where viewers are engaged and what they're clicking on." To date, the clicking has mostly (71%) been in the video's "position, accuracy and content tags," according to Evans, because the video's narrator specifically instructs viewers to click in those locations. Other tags, so-called "Easter egg" tags such as "Get pickup lines via SMS," have received far fewer clicks, with the live search functionality proving most popular in this group. "Next time, we'll reference those more explicitly," Evans said, explaining that after decades of traditional TV watching, viewers still expect to "lean back and be passively entertained. We're fighting that viewer behavior....If you don't really condition viewers to click on the video, they won't know to do it." Now that Location3 has seen results from the wireWAX technology, Porter is moving to increase the agency's video revenues from current clients -- "four or five proposals are on the table now" -- as well as using wireWAX as a tool to attract new clients. For possible real-world consumer applications, Location3's clients, which currently include Boden, Red Robin, Batteries Plus, and FASTSIGNS, need only check out wireWax's latest global work -- a "fully shoppable" video produced by Ridley Scott Associates' Black Dog for online men's fashion retailer Oki-Ni.
Stop me if you've heard this one: content is king. The problem is, in case you haven't noticed, monarchies aren't exactly in vogue these days, and one could argue that social is the democracy and distribution/aggregation is the republic. Indeed, online, there's no lack of content, social, or audience. It's all there, and despite a robust first quarter in online advertising which saw $7.3 billion spent in the U.S. alone, the reality is that online advertising will gravitate toward a few at the top. Google did $8.575 billion in Q1 revenues globally. The market leaders have always dominated industries. In broadcast, NBC/ABC/CBS and FOX own their category. In cable, it's obviously more fragmented. Print is even more so due to the local aspect of publishing. But online, the theory suggests that the long tail would benefit from the so-called verticalization effect. In reality? Not so. Not at all. When Jann Wenner doubles down on the power of print and rails against the Internet, he's not as delusional as some professionals in online media would like to believe. Online, anyone and anything can be a "media company"; while that is great and wonderful on many levels, the harsh reality is that this simply means that many more will fail. What This Means for Niche Content Owners When I started our company, our video content editorial strategy was "a mile wide and a foot deep," in that we were producing hundreds of videos each year across a dozen or so categories instead of thousands of videos in a category or two. Everyone thought the strategy was doomed to fail. At the time, I argued that our core competency was storytelling in video format, and not a particular vertical. Niche producers, I was told, could "specialize" in a category and command triple-digit CPM rates. In hindsight, one could argue any strategy in video was doomed to fail. YouTube won the platform/sharing consumer space; 5Min sold (somewhat prematurely) in the aggregation/publisher space; and all consumer-facing startup content producers faced headwinds when they sought to build an "own-and-operated" audience and secure video advertising revenue. That last part has proven elusive due to the practical aspect of advertising sales. With social or aggregation/distribution, we've seen the dominance of the platforms. With content, it's clearly not that simple, with a stratification emerging over the past five years: - Broadcast: great quality and pricing power but relatively little volume; - Portals: Legacy brands with high reach adopting a super premium stance but being attacked by YouTube, who is adding a professional façade on top of the user-generated media and aggressively courting professional content owners and rolling out more advertising features and growing at a torrid pace in which a whopping 48 hours of media is uploaded to the site each minute; - Ad networks: lots of reach but no defensibility or differentiation, fighting with one another for publishers' real estate while they fend off the trading desks being set up by the big buyers and ad agencies. By the time content owners get to the front of the line, it's a matter of too little, too late. But that isn't even the main issue: - With broad producers, the mile wide but a foot deep strategy takes a while to scale, and by the time you scale enough, you have to worry about building the kind of sales force it requires to garner big ad dollars. - With niche producers, conventional wisdom suggests sky-high CPM rates would make small audiences lucrative enough. Of course, the reality is far different: the lack of scale and volume for niche producers has made it increasingly hard for many to stay in business. That's the advertising plan. Some will pray that their programming will get people to open their wallets and fork over money. Good luck with that. Start collecting the food stamps. Ultimately, to stay in the game, you need a plan to scale over time and a plan to stay in business by keeping costs down. If you can do both, then you stand a shot at survival.