Five Benefits of Communities for Online Video
Written by: Luke Davies
In my previous post, The Power of Communities for Online Video, I talked about harnessing the collective wisdom of online communities. I’d like to get into more detail about the benefits of letting your viewers attach comments to a corresponding video frame or segment so that people can actually watch programs “together” at different times.
1. Interactive+interested=ad revenue. – People who are in a “lean forward” position and interacting with content are much more receptive to advertising. This interest level increases when the advertising is contextual and relevant to both the content and the emotions and feelings of the viewer.
2. Optimized for search engines. Viewers’ comments and interactions provide the metadata that search engines crave. Video has enormous amounts of very rich data, but it’s really tough to describe it all in the title of a video. However, if you can capture viewers’ interactions inside the player, your audience becomes your SEO strategy. Imagine describing something with a million words, all thought up by thousands of viewers vs. using three to five words thought up by one person; which description evokes an image that’s more vivid and understandable?
3. Increased distribution and discoverability. Humans are interesting creatures. Rarely do we have genuinely unique tastes or preferences (we’d have a lot more artists, if we did). More often we gravitate toward people we think are smart or cool (or both), and what we like is then highly influenced by their preferences. This is why communities are an important discoverability mechanism. If viewers could see what was interesting to the rest of the audience, it would help them decide what to watch.
4. Advanced Targeting. By analyzing viewers’ interactions, content owners can quickly see how their programming makes the audience feel and which parts of the content really interests them. Distributors can then use this viewer information to serve more relevant ads.
5. Extended life of your video assets. Currently, online videos behave like rapidly depreciating assets. Premium content will start out with a lot of streams, and fairly quickly and consistently the streams will fade to almost nothing, typically within about 90 days. Documents and images, however, seem to have the exact opposite behavior, becoming more popular over time as more people view them. The difference is that there are existing techniques for adding links and tags to images and documents. Thus they get picked up and moved up the rankings of search engines. By enabling viewers to add the same level of context and metadata to videos, it’s logical to assume that the videos could appreciate over time as well. This would significantly increase the total number of streams of distributors’ video assets.
LeanIn is the world’s first solution that enables viewers to interact inside a video player. Our overlay technology allows viewers to comment, bookmark, share, and search, and it all happens inside thePlatform video player. You can read more about LeanIn’s integration with thePlatform on the LeanIn partner page.
For more information on LeanIn, please visit www.leanin.com.
Luke Davies is the President of LeanIn, Inc.
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