The new comscore data shows what we all could say, that the king of online video is YouTube.
What I find curios is the fact that they claim that on average each YouTube user watched a whopping 50.4 videos on April.
Maybe I’m completely wrong here, but this sound to me like a way too big of a number. My feeling is that this number just shows that YouTube player still falls to black hat tactics of uplifting the number of views of some videos.
I would love to see the number of how many videos were viewed on average per unique user. My guess is that the number will be very different…
If you think I’m wrong here and have other data to show it, please leave it in the comments.
I have to agree with Michael Arrington. The new move by Microsoft, Cach Back, seems like a desperate move, but it could also turn out to be a game changing one.
Until we will see more brand advertising money goes into digital, search will still be the king. And Microsoft is in big trouble in this field. Google is the de facto ruler of web search and because of that also of the search advertising money.
In recent years Microsoft worked hard on developing better search algorithms and products, but even when they were successful (I’m saying for a long time that some of the Live properties are much better than the Google competitors) it wasn’t enough to push users to do the switch.
It’s a psychological issue. Too many people are fixed on the notion that Google is the web. That Google results are the only result.
So how cachback can change this?
By giving money to the users.
What brilliant here is that Microsoft finally realized that they actually don’t have to completely convert people to Live from Google. All they need is just the last ad click.
We have written about this in this blog a couple of times - the current way advertisers are measuring ROI is very wrong. But it is the way used these days and it can play into Microsoft hands.
Currently when advertisers are trying to attribute a purchase to a campaign, they look at what ad (or referrer) the user clicked on to get to the site in the session in which the purchase was made. They basically attribute the all purchase just to this ad or campaign. This means, that it doesn’t matter if you used Google to do all your price comparison, if you used Google to search for the product for a week. If in the end you will go to Live, do a search (when you already know exactly what you want)an buy the product, Microsoft will get the all glory.
And this situation is exactly what could happen. Users will use Google to do the hard research as they trust it more than Live, but in the end will go to Live and make the purchase in order to get the cachback discount.
Simple but brilliant.
And of course Microsoft is hoping that if you will use Live for this for enough time, you will start to use it also for other searches and maybe in the end even convert totally from Google.
Ironically, Atlas that is now part of Microsoft is one of the leaders in trying to push a new attribution and measurement model (that I think is much more accurate) that called “Go beyond the last ad click”.
So will this work? Will Microsoft will win the last search battle? Hard to say, but it is probably their best move so far.
Nice article from Ad Week about advertising in social networks, and how the model there is going toward building experiences instead of just display ads.
This fits well with what I wrote last week on the same subject.
The big question of course is how you measure the success of such campaigns, and how you compare one to another. This opens up again the discussion about engagement metric which I won’t dive in right here, but feel free to read other posts in this blog which discussed this issue 
This week I turned my back to Apple and went to buy a Microsoft Zune. The all process got me thinking about the importance of brands. iPods and iTunes importance for Apple is much more than the direct revenue stream.
People that the iPod has an important role in their life got to use iTunes. If you want to really enjoy iTunes you need to run it on Mac OS. In order to run Mac OS you need to buy a Mac. If you already have a Mac, good chances you will also buy some other Apple hardware like external hard drives, Apple TV, etc…
Same was true for Microsoft for years. If you use Windows, good chances you will use MS Office. If you use MS Office, you will probably use Office Live or Share Point Server in your office, and the loop continues.
It’s not just about the fact that it is easier to use other services or hardware from the same company, it’s also that we start to trust this company to give us a full experience around our digital life. We trust them to have the best service for us.
This is exactly why we see such a big war today in the social networks battlefield. Google, Facebook and MySpace are fighting for their brand and all of us trust.
So how does this will affect the future of advertising?
Maybe the way to monetize social networks is not to try and target ads that will take the user out to the advertiser site. Maybe the answer is to incorporate the advertiser content, interactions and brand into the already trusted and familiar environment of the social network (Anyone said widgets?).
If an advertiser can extend it’s messages and even build a “mini site” or experience into a trusted environment like iTunes, Facebook or your device, it can encourage users to interact with it much more. This could also be extended to other environments. WIll you be more likely to buy things from within iTunes, using the same one click mechanism you trust? Will you be more likely to register to a coke awards program from within your MySpace home page?
And yes, I think that this is another good example why brands should look for sites that has high engagement metric from its users. The reason is that those high engaging users are more likely to also interact with his brand and services.
Read/Write web came out with a story today that try to show that Yahoo Buzz got bigger than Digg.
The data that the article is based on is new Comscore data that shows that Yahoo Buzz did passed Digg in the number of uniques.
If you consider just the traffic numbers, indeed it seems that Digg are in big troubles. But a quick look at Yahoo Buzz and Digg home pages will show you a very different picture.
On the Yahoo Buzz home page, the most voted story has 118 votes. Most other stories has less than 30. At the same time, Just by taking a quick look you can see that most stories on Digg home page have more than 300 diggs (votes).
It even get worse for Yahoo Buzz if you go to the tech section where most stories have just about 2 - 30 votes. Even if you look at all stories from the last 24 hours and not just recent hours, the picture stays the same.
So yes, Yahoo Buzz is leveraging the Yahoo home page to build a big reach. But sometimes it’s not about quantity - it’s about quality. Digg users are much more loyal to the Digg brand. Their engagement in the site is much higher. Yahoo Buzz users are more likly to skip to the next hot site, as they are less emotionally invested than the Digg users. There is much more chance that they will stay loyal to the site on the long run. I will even argue that their value to advertisers can be higher (put demographics aside as I don’t know Digg data) as their digital participation is higher.
This is a great example why by looking just on page views and uniques we can get a very disturbed picture of reality. This is exactly why attention and engagement metrics are so important to the future of the web.
We are living in an age when all media types starts to blend with each other. You can watch TV programs on your computer and you can access the web from your TV. Blogs are changing the newspapers business and let’s not even start with mobile.
During all of this, it starts to be confusing when you try to understand how you need to build your content and on what media it should run.
Last week I heard a great new way to look at this world.
Instead of trying to figure out the differences between TV and the web and who blends with who, all we need to understand is how the consumer is going to consume our content and messages.
Going with this, we can say that there are three ways you consume media:
- Leaning back - For example when you sit on the living room couch or your bed and watch the TV
- Leaning forward - For example when you sit on your desk chair and use your computer
- On the move - When you use your mobile device like the iPhone
If you think on the world like that, you will know how to design your content for the best user experience and easily adapt it to the changing landscape of the media devices.
