eMarketer Search Spending

SEO has become increasingly sophisticated, moving beyond the traditional small consulting shops to robust technology platforms that can bring scale and automating to the process as well.

Liz Gannes has a nice piece in BusinessWeek on the trends as well.

On the other hand, the Bain study details quite the opposite in terms of professionally produced content, where CPM’s in their reference set were $43, and sellthrough was north of 90%.

However, publishers continue to struggle to generate strong growth in video consumption as detailed here:

Eric Franchi at MediaPost writes a good article on this topic detailing what publisher can do to drive consumption of media.  One of his specific recommendations regards using SEO approaches for video:

“Site configuration/sharing/SEO: Too many times, the video section of a site is relegated to a single tab in the navigation bar, with perhaps a link or two on the left or right hand side. Video shouldn’t be relegated to a single channel; it should be incorporated throughout the site experience wherever it makes sense. It might require a partial site redesign, but the economics could very well justify it. Video also should always be easy to share, email or add to RSS. Finally, search is still king even for video, so SEO teams need to focus on driving users to relevant pages as they are for all other types of content. There has never been a better time for branded publishers to take advantage of their assets — content, loyal audiences, and sales teams — and create more online video opportunities. The ball is in their court!”

The challenges with Video SEO are primarily that video files do not have a lot of text associated, as well as the fact that many sites “lock up” their video content inside of flash media players.  Yet at the same time search is emerging as the single biggest contributor of upstream referrals, with Hitwise showing a dramatic shift in video consumption from viral to search:

As with all of the successful online ad models that preceeded it, video advertising will take off once there is a critical mass of inventory available to advertisers.  Publishers need to embrace best practices around Video SEO and viral features as they relate to video.  This remains the biggest challenge in the market today.

If you look at YouTube’s numbers, one thing is clear: It completely dominates online video.

And Forbes estimates that YouTube will make $200 million in revenues this year, and $350 million next year.

Shonfeld contends that while this seems impressive, when we take into account eMarketer’s estimate that online video advertising will reach $1.35 billion this year, YouTube’s share of video advertising dollars comes out to only 15 percent (less than half of its share of videos watched).

What is the meaning behind this gap?

YouTube has built increasingly indisputable market dominance while under Google, where there has been little need to focus on maximizing revenues. The gap in YouTube’s share of videos watched and the site’s share of advertising revenue illustrates that growth in video ad dollars isn’t being driven by user generated content. And that is unlikely to change dramatically in the near future. Professional content—delivered to users interactively, with a focus on an engaging, “lean forward” user experience—will deliver the kind of high value impressions advertisers are used to buying offline. The real dollar value creation related to online video will come from professional content moving online in a way that meets consumer needs in terms of discovery, sharing, commenting and engagement.

MITX gave out awards in 14 categories which ranged from recognition of qualities such as “innovative business strategy” and “usability,” to acknowledgment in areas of strength for the New England technology economy, such as enterprise technology, data protection, and mobile and video software.

As a leader in next-generation Universal Search and video search engine optimization (video SEO), EveryZing, won in the “Content Management/Search” category.

EveryZing’s solution uses pedigreed speech-to-text technology to unlock the contents of multimedia audio and video files, enabling them to be searched the same way as text. This enhances the discoverability of the content by large search engines, and thus, drives the content’s video search engine optimization (video SEO). Through its technology, EveryZing is helping media companies and other infotainment sites to drive audience reach, site engagement and contextual monetization of their online audio and video content.

“This prestigious honor comes during an exciting period of growth here at EveryZing,” said Tom Wilde, CEO.

We have recently launched several new products, ezSEO, ezSEARCH and RAMP, helping to establish EveryZing as a complete solution provider for next-generation universal search and search engine optimization (SEO) technologies. Being named a MITX Award winner is an impressive recognition of our technological advancement and the online audio and video search capabilities we’re providing for our customers.

Is it really fair to ask the service providers to beat piracy on behalf of the content producers?

According to Bylund, the best way to “subjugate these rebels” is “with the tools of free enterprise.” Content owners are increasingly aware that they need to create their own new, controlled distribution channels online. To overcome piracy content producers need a superior business model that takes into consideration how consumers choose where to view online videos; they consider price, quality and convenience. While content owners can’t beat the YouTube “price” for content, their video sites should play up the quality of the videos they showcase—a distinct advantage over YouTube. As for convenience, the new distribution channels should aim to provide a complete consumer experience; if a site offers premium content with state-of-the-art browsing and search capabilities, odds are users will remain engaged.

That is once you get them to your site. If your clip shows up first as a YouTube video in a Google search result, you still risk loosing brand control and consumer attention. The user may finish viewing your clip then move on to more of your content—or perhaps skateboarding dog videos—within YouTube. In order to fully compete, content owners must factor in the “convenience” of search. Video SEO is the key to driving site traffic because it enhances the discoverability of video content across the major search engines, where many consumers navigate the Web. And when quality content is more discoverable, content owners can set the terms of content consumption through ad models and brand management on their own sites. This way, everybody wins—content owners, viewers, and advertisers alike. And YouTube? Well, it will always be my pick for skateboarding dog videos.

“Web video is asking to be discovered” according to the ClipBlast! survey, which reports that for online video, traditional search techniques fall behind “discovery” methods popular on the social Web.

In the survey ClipBlast! asked 1,000 online consumers how they get to video on the Internet. 530 expressed a preference while 470 did not. Among the 530 respondents who had a definite opinion, “discovery” is the primary mode by which they find video online (28 percent), followed closely by recommendations from friends (27 percent). About 22 percent rely on search engines and roughly 10 percent get video from people they know only online – through social networks and the like. Relatively smaller percentages receive video from unsolicited email and RSS feeds, to which they have subscribed (5 percent, respectively).

StumbleUpon is a site that lets users discover, vote on, and share new sites through the use of a toolbar. The number of “stumbled upon” links has climbed steadily in the last two years. In the first quarter of 2008, the number of stumbles reached 974 million, 160% more than Q1 2007’s 375 million. StumbleUpon recently reached its five billionth stumble.

Eric Shonfeld of TechCrunch explains that while many people think of StumbleUpon as a “socially powered discovery engine,” rather than a new kind of search engine, he sees the site as evidence that personal discovery and search are colliding. And StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp agrees:

Personalized search is just getting started. I think personalized crawling will start too. Crawlers now are trying to create the biggest map of the web, but implicit filtering and intelligent agents—that is where search and discovery will meet.

Nova Spivack, CEO and founder of Radar Networks, says that as we move from Web 2.0 (2000-2010) to Web 3.0 and beyond and the volume of data keeps climbing, the productivity of search will decline.

But with respect to video, these surveys and predictions may be off the mark because by and large video search isn’t very good yet. Given the paucity of robust, reliable video search online, it is hard to conclusively argue that because users aren’t searching for video in great volumes yet, they don’t want to discover videos via search.

Search and discovery will inevitably evolve as the volume of content increases online. With online video, there will necessarily be a strong connection between search and discovery; publishers will use automated discovery in an attempt to hold consumer attention, while users will want the control and specificity of search for navigating between and within online videos. The true evolution will be a user experience that allows the seamless transition between search and discovery—but until video search consistently provides the same level and quality of results as text-based search, users will continue to “prefer” discovering video because frankly, they don’t really have a choice.

• Informational searching involves looking for a specific fact or topic
• Navigational searching seeks to locate a specific web site
• Transactional searching looks for information related to buying a particular product or service

This research was the first published work of its kind done using actual searching data, with the aim of real-time classification. “Other results have classified comparatively much smaller sets of queries, usually manually,” said Jim Jansen, the professor in charge of the study.

This research aimed to classify queries automatically. Our findings have broad implications for search engines and e-commerce if they can classify the user intent of queries in real time.

The study explains that nearly 70 percent of searchers use search engines as their point of entry on the Web. As such, the major search engines receive millions of queries per day and in response to those queries, present billions of results per week. The researchers asked, “What task, need or goal are these people trying to address with their Web searching?” The answer seemed to be that people are looking for information and entertainment and the majority are searching by topic. But are they finding all types of content?

One of the big challenges for media companies right now is ensuring that their content is both discoverable and consumable across the Internet. Information typically resides within documents, which is why articles and other text-based content do so well in the search economy. Similarly, with videos the core information is inside of the clips; however the only text accessible to the search engines crawlers is in the video titles, which tend to be broadly descriptive rather than specific and informative.

When a user searches CNN.com for “rising gas prices” they want to find any articles and videos that mention the topic—not just the content with their search term in the title. The process to date has relied on editors creating manual text abstracts of videos in order to get them discovered, but this doesn’t scale. Imagine if every document on the web could only be found if someone wrote an abstract! Increasingly large enterprises, especially those in the entertainment business, will need to make sure that all of their audio and video content has a consistent and complete set of meta data to unlock and exploit the types of distribution, syndication, and advertising opportunities that are rapidly emerging on the Web.

The Penn State study and resulting paper “Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of Web queries” drive home the importance of SEO—for all content types—and illustrate that the majority of Internet users are searching for topic-specific, newsworthy “infotainment” content. Search engines rely on rich meta data for content discovery, presentation, contextualization, and targeting advertising.

Online video usage has grown tremendously over the past years and is a trend that will continue, with 107.7 million video viewers in 2006 and an estimated 150 million by 2010 (eMarketer, February 2007). This growth has created a unique opportunity for media companies and other infotainment sites to leverage their vast amount of online multimedia assets; content producers will only realize this opportunity when they successfully optimize all content forms and connect this content to the search engines and in turn, to consumers.

…in the case of news, image, and video results, search engine users click specialized content within general search results more than they do within vertical search results.

The study, conducted by Jupiter Research demonstrates the natural user preference towards universal search as well as the increasing importance of getting content onto the coveted first page of search results.

Only 17 percent of search engines user click a “news” result after conducting a news-specific search whereas 36 percent click “news” results within blended search results. With video, 17 percent of search engine users click “video” results within blended search results, compared to only 10 percent who click a “video” result after conducting a video-specific search. Among the various content types now showing up in blended search, “news” results were found to be the most clicked form of vertical content. And what about video; why are the numbers so low? The study noted:

Google—the largest search engine in terms of searches performed—does not offer a vertical specific search for videos on its main search page. Instead, video search is an additional click away…This is one of several probable reasons why video finishes a distant third behind images and news in terms of vertical search usage.

According to the iProspect study, it is paramount for marketers to optimize all of their digital content types so that they may be found within blended search results. The study emphasizes how important it has become for publishers to have all of their digital content turn up at the top of search engine results lists, both from a traffic-generating perspective as well as a branding perspective. Those organizations with a diverse portfolio of digital assets are best positioned to capitalize on the benefits provided by blended or universal search.

In order to successfully get these digital assets to the top of Google—and other search engines—Web publishers will need to optimize their content. One constant throughout the evolution of the Web has been the importance of text in driving search and navigation. The key to optimization across content types is the text associated with each article, image, sound bite or video clip. The ability to attribute these objects with text in the form of tags, categories and transcripts is critical to plugging this content into the top search results pages across the Web.

“Blended search allows marketers to capitalize on their digital assets without the need to affect a change in user behavior,” said Robert Murray, President, iProspect.

It essentially brings a variety of content types to users - where they are most comfortable and open to receiving it - and allows them to choose between the various result types…The bottom line is that companies that have optimized a variety of digital assets will have a distinct advantage. Those who lack such assets will essentially forfeit page real estate to their competitors.

Google believes these new destination search boxes will help make information more accessible to users as they allow searchers to conduct follow-up searches, drilling down into a specific site’s content without leaving google.com. Some find the change irksome, as searches conducted through the new search boxes mean more ad revenue for Google. As Google describes it:

Our goal is to provide the best user experience, and ads that are related to searches from competing providers are useful to consumers.

According to Google, they developed this feature to improve the user search experience—something all content producers and distributors should also take very seriously. Satisfied users stay on your site longer, consuming more content and in turn increasing your advertising revenue.

This “search within search” makes a strong case for the growing importance of good SEO practices and improved universal site search. Because the currency in the search economy is text, search engine-friendly Web pages must use text to increase the discoverability and placement of all content—including audio and video—across the major search engines. If your content is optimized so that users find specific, topically relevant pages in Google search results—and are not merely directed to your home page—odds are better that the searcher will click through to your content sooner.

But getting users to your site is only the beginning. Even IDC search analyst and Google critic Sue Feldman acknowledges that many small sites (and I would say many medium and large sites as well) have poor search capabilities—which may make users leave the site more quickly. If publishers improve their internal site search by surfacing results across multiple forms of content, they will keep users engaged; I will stay on the site longer if I can read an article, then move onto a related video clip or sound bite. For this kind of comprehensive, universal site search, publishers need to use the text currency as well. In this way they create a microcosm of the Internet’s search economy within their own site across their own content.

It may not feel fair, but it makes a whole lot of sense that Google would try to capitalize on this opportunity to both improve the user search experience online and increase their ad revenue. The best response from content producers would be to make sure their own content—text, audio, video, and image—is discoverable and consumable both through search engines and within their own sites. Google has already taken off with text content, but video is still a relatively new frontier. As such, online video offers a new opportunity for content owners to get ahead; with the right tools, content owners can take control of the optimization, distribution and consumption of their video content in a way they never could with text content. Control is essential for content owners because only by managing their brand, the context within which their content is consumed and the associated advertising can they capitalize on the growing revenue opportunities online.