Flash-Based Online Joost: How’s It Going?

Joost was once the media darling of the digital industry, especially on the ad side. But the arrival of Hulu changed that. The reason? Hulu required no download, whereas Joost had a fairly heavy download requirement. Part of the reason for that was the ability to offer a higher quality viewing experience, but there were other factors as well.

Many consumers are reticent to download things to their PCs, with the result that the interested universe in Joost IN THAT FORM turned out to be much smaller than the number of people willing to visit and watch things at Hulu.

Joost’s download did bring with it some cool features like real time chat as you watched a vid, and the ability to download programs and view them later, when not online. But overall, the market spoke, and spoke Hulu.

In mid September Joost launched a browser based offering requiring no download, and since that time, I have often wondered how it was doing. Well, here’s the Quantcast screen:



Clearly Joost remains committed to their social media layers – which may offer a compelling reason for people to choose one venue over another. Whoever the eventual winner, it's nice to see Joost getting some big boosts in daily visits as a result of moving away from the download model.

I also like it that all the video sites are not cookie cutter copies of one another.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

TV Week: Hulu Watchers Prefer One Long Ad To Four Short Ones

From here.

When given the choice of ad to watch before an online program, a whopping 88% of Hulu viewers are opting to view a two-minute advertisement in exchange for no ads during the rest of the show.

That’s in lieu of watching the normal Hulu commercial load of about four 30-second ads in a 22-minute program, according to data from Hulu shared with TelevisionWeek.

Good News for Yahoo! Now Number Two in Video Plays!

As America's self appointed number one Yahoo booster, I was delighted to read this post on Tech Crunch, which indicated that in Aug/Sep 2008, Yahoo rose to the number
two position in video plays, ahead of Fox, Hulu, MSN, and Nick.



Yes yes, they still pale in comparison to YouTube plays, but if you think about video in the context of a money flow -- that a monetizable vid sends money to the shower, and that a nonmonetizable one is actually an expense to the provider, then the numbers look a lot different. TC's piece says that only about 4% of YT vids are monetizable, whereas Yahoo and Fox and Hulu and MSN have a much higher proportion of professional, prescreened vids that advertisers are delighted to run before or on top of. So Yahoo and YT may be a lot closer in revenue than it looks.

And of course it helps to have an election and a Wall Street meltdown for a property with a politics, news, and finance page view leadership.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.

Happy Belated Anniversary to HULU! 10/28/2007

It's hard to believe it has only been a year. Now that twinkle sound before every vid is a daily staple for me.

Hulu Bigger Than YouTube?

Have you seen Live Rail's State of the [Online Video] Industry report? A piece in ReadWriteWeb alerted me to it, and the findings are pretty fascinating. You can download the whole report here.

But here are some of the highlights (text from the report):

Online Video Advertising Spend To Grow >55% Next Year
- US Online video advertising spending expected to hit $962m in 2009
- Confusing array of technology and ad-unit standards constraining current
growth rates
- Video ad spending still represents just 2.36% of all online advertising
- Average In-Stream CPMs reach $15.8
- In-Stream (pre/mid/post roll) still representing 88% of all video ads
- 20.95% of internet video streams being monetized
- Video Publishers generating an effective monetization rate of $4.05 per
thousand streams

And check out dis little tidbit:

THE RISE AND RISE OF HULU

Despite still being substantially smaller than YouTube, with 88 million videos served
compared to YouTube’s 4.2 billion, analysts are now beginning to suggest that Hulu
will be the more successful business, thanks to its ability to sell advertising across 100% of its inventory, compared to just 3% for YouTube.

This is thanks to its policy of only serving high-quality original content, and securing licensing deals from content owners, rather than allowing users to upload the content themselves. This has removed the risk of copyright infringing content, or content of questionable quality; risk factors that most advertisers are anxious to avoid being associated with.

According to one estimate, Hulu could enjoy $90 million in revenue in its first year.
YouTube’s estimated worldwide revenue total for 2008 is $200 million this year, but is estimated to be approximately half that domestically. Given that Hulu caters almost exclusively to a US audience, both YouTube and Hulu could see roughly the same
revenues in the U.S. this year.

Quality matters.

Lots more juicy bots of real orange in this report. Go get it people!

Talk Market: Ron Popeils in Training

Some say there are signs of trouble over at eBay -- that people are tiring of the whole auction thang. Certainly, their many moves to push the buy it now buying solution seem to indicate that eBay is hedging its bets.

But I wonder if the problem is the format of eBay. Pixely jpegs may not cut it in a world of Hulu and Vuze. I find myself auctioning less (I was never a seller, always a buyer) perhaps because of these issues but also because I was burned by a seller. It has taken years to get my issue resolved through Paypal. I know that the distributed nature makes things tough to enforce, but I still feel a little leery.

But that is not the subject of this post. Rather, I want to talk about Talk Market, the UGC infomercial market currently in beta. This site is very intriguing. Here's an example of how a UGC standup presenter enriches a sale:

I love this little vid because the host really tells us about the origin of her collection and its inspiration. This may not be a great venue to sell used iPods, but that's never what I went ot eBay for anyway. I went for unique items, and for these having a little story to go with the photography is really quite pleasant and seductive.

Financially, the way this works is that you upload a video and Talk Market hosts and seves your content for free. If the item sells, you pay a 5% commission -- a HELUVA lot less than a consignment shop.

I'll admit that part of the appeal of this model for me is seeing the sell. I love a good pitch. I love to watch a sales person take you from consideration to sell to upsell. I think this model is also great because it holds the potential for sellers to become microcelebs -- trusted voices that have items that reflect who they are.

So surf on over and check it out. It's a really interesting format, and a great selling environment.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.