See What’s Out There

There is a new comScore report about online video.

Some highlights:

” U.S. Internet users viewed more than 10 billion online videos during the month, representing a 3-percent gain versus January (despite February being two days shorter) and a 66-percent gain versus February 2007.”

“In February, Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property with nearly 3.6 billion videos viewed (35.4 percent share of all videos), gaining 1.1 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for 96 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites.”

“Nearly 135 million U.S. Internet users spent an average of 204 minutes per person viewing online video in February.”

And, if you are still not sure you MUST have a video strategy consider:

Other notable findings from February 2008 include:

* 72.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
* 80.4 million viewers watched 3.42 billion videos on YouTube.com (42.6 videos per viewer).
* 50.2 million viewers watched 539 million videos on MySpace.com (10.7 videos per viewer).
* The average online video duration was 2.7 minutes.
* The average online video viewer consumed 75 videos.

Link [comScore Press Release]

Hat Tip [Jeremy Liew]

One problem that nonprofits have had is the lack of traffic to their sites, or lack of focused traffic to their actionable pages — such as donations or volunteer opportunities.

Greg McHale, a technology start-up veteran and the founder of cMarket, a auction management service for nonprofits, has started good2gether to solve this problem. What he is doing simply put is creating a database of nonprofit content and then syndicating that database across the websites of local media, such as newspapers and radio stations. The content is fed into a page next to articles based on the context of the article. So, for example, an article about literacy in Chicago would show information on a Chicago nonprofit fighting illiteracy. A click would take the visitor to the good2gether page, where the nonprofit can also sell corporate sponsorships — I assume the price of which is split with good2gether.

It is an interesting model and given that it’s free for the nonprofits it’s a no brainer to give it shot. Here’s Greg talking about it in his own words:

Link [what is
good2gether]
Hat Tip [Deborah Elizabeth Finn]

WebsiteOptimization.com has some interesting information about how web pages have grown in size and complexity over the last few years. You can read the whole story here and below is a piece of the story about multimedia that interests us in particular. Of particular interest is how many videos are abandon and how broadband is still catching up to allow for a seamless viewing experience.

The Growth of Multimedia on the Web

The use of streaming media on the Web has increased by more than 100% each year (Li et al. 2005). From 2000 to 2005 the total volume of streaming media files stored on the Web grew by more than 600%. More than 87% of all streaming media is abandoned by users in the first 10 seconds, however, wasting up to 20% of server bandwidth (Guo et al. 2005). [I wonder if that’s still true.] While only 3% of server responses are for videos, they account for over 98.6% of the bytes transferred (Gill et al. 2007). In true Pareto fashion, about 10% of the most popular videos on YouTube account for nearly 80% of the views, making caching an appealing performance enhancement (Cha et al. 2007).

Overall, for videos longer than 30 seconds, about 13% of home and 40% of business users experience quality degradation with their streaming media, caused by re-buffering, stream switching, and video cancellation. For sessions longer than 300 seconds, the results are even worse. As broadband penetration has increased, videos have grown in size, bit rate, and duration (see Figure 5).

In 1997, 90% of videos were under 45 seconds in length (Acharya & Smith 1998). In 2005, the median video was about 120 seconds long (Li et al. 2005). By 2007, the median video was 192.6 seconds in duration (Gill et al. 2007). The median bit rate of web videos grew from 200Kbps in 2005 to 328Kbps on YouTube in 2007. So by late 2007, the median video weighed in at over 63MB in file size. On YouTube, the average video size is 10MB, with over 65,000 new videos added every day.

MoveOn has to be running what could be called the most successful video contest ever — if the measurement is participation.

Their Obama in 30 Seconds contest invited people to make a 30-second spot, positive only, to help elect Barack Obama. They got over 1,000 entries, which is great. But they are, as of this writing, rapidly approaching 4 million votes to the contest. Now, there are many YouTube videos with millions or views, but in this contest each person has to vote for each video in three categories, so this is a higher level of engagement.

The whole thing is set-up beautifully. They are using Amazon S3 to host the video in their own player. They made the embed code available as well as a permalink. They require votes (out of 5 stars) in three categories, Positive Message, Originality, Overall Impact. They serve up the videos in a random order to make sure every video will get lots of votes.

Now, if success is electing Obama we don’t know how effective it is yet. But it shows the video contest is here to stay and making high quality media is easier than ever.

The quality of the videos varies greatly. Here’s a nice one I saw, but then because of the random serving I couldn’t find it again on the MoveOn site, but found it on YouTube:

[Link to video]

Sometimes when we meet with organizations they wonder how important this whole Internet thing really is to their organizations. The folks at South Park continue to have their pulse on the national mood. What happens when the Internet goes down?

Hat Tip [Fred Wilson]
Link [South Park Studios]

Our senior writer, Susan Balaban worked for Foote, Cone & Belding/Chicago before coming to work for See3. During her tenure at FCB/Chicago she rose to Vice President/Creative Director, working on nearly every brand and client in the agency. She is most proud of her accomplishments for two of FCB’s pro-bono accounts, Earth Share and The United Way. Both received double-digit donation increases and local and international awards. Her work for Earth Share also garnered the Ad Council’s highest donated television media dollars, and was chosen as one of five print campaigns to run in the New York Times each year.

So it has been with great pleasure that we here at See3 have been able to help out Earth Share and the Ad Council extend their reach online around Earth Day. Over the past few days many green blogs that had never heard of Earth Share wrote about the campaign and their video Promise.

You can learn more about the Ad Council’s environmental work here.

Here’s a nice Earth Day treat from Lewis Black.

Hat Tip [EarthFirst]

What’s your message? It might depend on your number–501(c)3 or 501(c)4 or 527.

Because this is an election year, many of our projects have a political bent. But how much of one? Well, that depends on the type of nonprofit status a client holds. Most of our clients are 501(c)3s, but some are 501(c)4s or 527s. The degree to which they can speak out on political issues or campaigns is determined by their designation. Some of our clients, like the Sierra Club, have all three designations, in which case, their money has to be divided into different funds with c3, c4, or 527 designations, and used appropriately. (There are actually 28 different 501c designations! But we’re only going to talk about three here).

501(c)3s are defined by the IRS as charitable, religious, scientific or educational organizations and mostly consist of public or private foundations such as Red Cross or Habitat for Humanity. The money they use for media is generally to educate viewers about issues or an organization’s mission, with or without a call to action at the end, such as “join us” or “donate now”. Although they can heighten public awareness about certain issues, they aren’t allowed to show political affiliation or urge people to vote for or against a specific candidate. They can only use a small percentage of funds to lobby. They can issue a “Tell Congress you’re fed up” statement, as it is not specific to any candidate, or release a non-partisan report on a politically charged issue such as global warming, but they must stop short of advocating for or against a particular candidate.

What we hear often is that many (c)3s don’t go as far as they can because they worry that if they violate the restrictions, they will lose their nonprofit status.

c4 funds are different. 501(c)4 organizations are described in the IRS code as non-profits that promote social welfare; but unlike a (c)3, a 501(c)4 organization can lobby for specific policy change. Examples of prominent c4s include NARAL Pro Choice America and Moveon.org Civic Action. Here is an example of the difference: A 501(c)3 can tell you how important it is that you use your right to vote, but a c4 can ask you to sign a petition to Congress about a specific piece of legislation. However, c4 money cannot be used in election campaigns on behalf of or against any candidates.

A 527 group (or 527 funds) can influence the nomination, election, appointment or defeat of candidates for public office. 527 money can be used on behalf of or against candidates; for instance, Political Action Committees (PACs) are 527s. Here is where it gets confusing if it isn’t already. A 527 is NOT allowed to coordinate with a specific election campaign. Rather, it must be an “interest group” who is advocating on issues or mobilizing voters. Not surprisingly, sometimes 527s get into trouble for pushing the limits. For example, in the 2004 election cycle, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a famous 527 that was eventually accused of coordinating with George Bush’s campaign in its anti-John Kerry ads during the presidential campaign.

Are you confused yet? Well, let me tell you, it can be hairy trying to work out messaging for these various organizations or funds in the video and social media marketing campaigns we undertake on their behalf. But we really enjoy the challenge and are happy to be doing a lot of work this cycle around the critical elections this fall.

One of the issues people have with Second Life is that it’s not so easy to use. You find yourself naked and alone and you have to figure out how to simply move around.

Mitch Kapor and our friends over at Kapor Enterprises have developed a new hands free interface for Second Life. Using a web camera that tracks your movements, you can basically lean and move as if you were on a Segway and move around Second Life. Have a look here at Handsfree3d.

When you hire a video vendor, your contract should state that you own the material the vendor is creating. “Work for hire” is the legal term. And you should specify that you will own the copyright and that your vendor will transfer the ownership to you of anything created in the project.

What happens if you don’t do that? Well… If you are Wal-Mart, you get really screwed.

Check this out, from the Kansas City Star:

Wal-Mart’s internal meetings are on display in three decades worth of videos made by a Kansas production company scrambling to stay in business after Wal-Mart stopped using the firm.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. dropped longtime contractor Flagler Productions in 2006. In response to losing its biggest customer, the small company has opened its archive, for a fee, to researchers who include plaintiffs’ lawyers and union critics seeking clips of unguarded moments at the world’s largest retailer.

Those moments never meant for public display include a scene of male managers parading in drag at an executive meeting, a clip used by union-backed critics at Wal-Mart Watch for a recent advertisement castigating the retailer’s attitude toward female employees.

“The videos provide insight into the company’s real corporate culture when they’re not in the public eye,” Wal-Mart Watch spokeswoman Stacie Lock Temple said Tuesday.

Much of the interest in the candid videos is coming from plaintiff lawyers pursuing cases against Wal-Mart.

“The rarity is that it exists at all,” said Brad Seligman, lead attorney in a massive class-action lawsuit that alleges Wal-Mart discriminated systemically against female employees.

“Once in a while you come upon documents that are helpful in a case,” the Berkeley, Calif.-based lawyer added. “What’s amazing about this is that this company has a video record going back many years showing senior management in at times fairly candid situations.”
…
“Needless to say, we did not pay Flagler Productions to tape internal meetings with this aftermarket in mind,” Wal-Mart spokeswoman Daphne Moore said.

She declined to comment on any legal steps the company might be considering.

Flagler says Wal-Mart has no legal power over the videos because the two sides did not sign a contract when founder Mike Flagler was hired in the 1970s to produce Wal-Mart meetings and management conferences.

Hat Tip [Daily Kos]