Tag: video

YouTube for Kids logo

YouTube advertising – whose responsibility is it anyway?

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YouTube for Kids logoYouTube ads have been much debated in the past few weeks. First, there was Jamie Oliver’s company telling vloggers like Zoella and Alfie Deyes to be more circumspect in the placement of the ads that appear before, during or alongside their videos by putting agreements in place to stop junk food ads being associated with their content.

This strikes me as bizarre: Jamie Oliver’s Food Tube obviously has a good relationship with YouTube and the company can clearly set their own terms. You would assume YouTube’s star vloggers might be in a similarly strong position (although – and I am no expert – I would imagine a large, international company like Jamie Oliver’s probably has a bigger pool of staff to liaise with Google on such things, compared with the individual vloggers and their support teams.)

But even assuming Gleam’s roster of social talent could forge such agreements with YouTube, what about the many, many other content providers – a lot of whom create content aimed at children and young teens, which is the central point in the complaint against vloggers with their mostly teenage audiences – who can’t leverage such pressure? Why is it the responsibility of the individual, group or even company of creators to ensure the ads that are shown against content is appropriate for their audience? The Independent’s report said it was “clear that the adverts [shown on vloggers’ accounts] would not pass regulations for broadcast on television set up by the Advertising Standard Authority.” But surely, surely, it’s up to YouTube to work to ensure that the ads placed by other content providers are shown on the appropriate channels?

As The Independent does point out, currently Google’s AdSense system determines how and where videos are shown – it is not the choice of the channel owner to say where an ad might be placed. It would make sense, then, to put the pressure on YouTube to improve its AdSense filtering – that way, all channel owners (and parents) can be reassured as to the appropriateness of its ads, not just the channel’s breakout stars.

In recent months, YouTube has announced that an ad-free subscription model similar to Spotify is on its way and released its YouTube For Kids app in the US, so it does seem to be on their radar. But, with Google refuting the comments of US children’s groups objecting to the content on YouTube for Kids, plus last week’s release from YouTube reporting a significant increase in the amount of people engaging with ads via mobile devices, you have to wonder how much the actual content of approved ads is likely to change any time soon…

What do you think? As a YouTube channel owner with a focus on children’s content, I’d be interested to hear any comments.

Facebook vs YouTube: The Great Video Question

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Image from http://uk.businessinsider.com/facebook-video-v-youtube-market-share-data-2014-12

I’ve been very interested to see some of the reports on Facebook video recently – including this one in Time. Most of them seem to be based on Social Bakers’ October research that shows a 50% increase in brands sharing videos on Facebook between May and July 2014. The survey also stated that Facebook is trending to surpass YouTube by the end of the year, which according to Social Bakers and Business Insider, it now has.

I’m interested because this directly relates to the pages I manage.

Facebook is far and away the most relevant of our social platforms. Partly that’s because it’s longer established than any of the others, but essentially, it’s just where our core audience is. So photos, links, text posts – they all get great engagement.

I’ve never really viewed Facebook as a place for video, though. Or at least not till recently. YouTube is the place for video, I thought – that’s where people go to watch it, after all. And if we’re bothering to create video for YouTube, and curate that channel, why would we put it on Facebook directly when we engage that Facebook audience by linking out to YouTube? Doesn’t that just mean you’re splitting your audience? Creating content that competes?

On some level I still think these things, but I’ve been testing – and, well…

A few months ago, when Facebook brought out the auto-play element that I find so irritating (and has been blamed for sky high phone bills) I thought – well, this is good for pages. Auto play is universally annoying, but it does help view counts. With Facebook you’re also putting that auto-playing video directly into a person’s News Feed. With your YouTube subscribers on the other hand, you’re relying on them having signed-up to see your video alerts. In other words, Facebook gives you a captive audience. With YouTube, your viewers need to do the work. And that’s probably fine if you have a big YouTube presence, but it doesn’t help if you’re trying to grow your channel.

So, auto-play is irritating for people but valuable for pages. Plus, our Facebook audience is larger and more engaged than on any other channel. It seems a no-brainer: to get our videos seen we should be adding them to Facebook.

It took me a while to make the switch, though. I really wanted to convert that engaged Facebook audience to help build our YouTube channel. I still do. But it’s apparent that converting one to the other is not easy. And why should it be? If your audience is in one place, deliver the content to them in that one place. It makes sense.

And yet it was only when I noticed Facebook had made videos more prominent on my page that I started to realise I was missing a trick. We had video content languishing on YouTube with a few thousand views after several months. It wasn’t  getting seen, and Facebook was not helping us grow those view counts (it doesn’t help that YouTube’s view counts can seem to take ages to catch up with themselves, either.)

So after a few weeks, I started adding videos to our pages as well as YouTube. The results were amazing. One video that had had only 5,000+ views in 8 months on YouTube gained half as many again – 2,500+ – inside three hours on Facebook. Every single video I have added in the past few months has outperformed its YouTube counterpart within a matter of days.

So on one hand I’m wondering why I didn’t do it sooner. But the flip side is that it’s hard to know how valuable those views are. The insights YouTube provides on specific videos is clearly far superior, but given Facebook is apparently out to steal YouTube’s video creator crown, how long can it be till that changes?

Plus, just as I started adding videos, good old Facebook made another change – adding call-to-action buttons direct to organic videos. That means I can direct people straight off to other owned channels, even if I’m not paying to advertise the post. And with Facebook announcing more call-to-action buttons for pages today, it’s certainly looking like they’re doing more to help digital marketers and smaller brands than previously.

Of course YouTube is still important – and the key thing missing from all this is that YouTube makes money on its videos via advertising, and you can bet that Facebook will want to do the same soon. But the past few months of experimentation have been very worth it for me. Splitting our audience? Seems like most of them are on Facebook, anyway…

Vine vs Instagram

Vine & Instagram

Fight! (as Harry Hill would say)

As anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account will know, the past month has been all about the short-form video clip and the Epic Battle being waged by those two afore-mentioned behemoths of the social media landscape through their new or (relatively) newly acquired platforms, Vine (owned by Twitter) and Instagram (owned by Facebook).

I love the opportunity of short-form video. I’ve been using YouTube and Vimeo for years to build up brand content, but that takes editing software and time. Obviously it’s still hugely important but the opportunity of shorter clips for brands is obvious: no one needs to be told that the way we consume content online is increasingly visual, plus most of us have attention spans the length of a BuzzFeed list when it comes to viewing that content. And I mean a short BuzzFeed list.

So, short-form video, hooray.

But which to use?

Like a lot of people, I already had personal and work Instagram accounts before Vine came along. As soon as Vine sprang up on the app store (there’s a joke here about apples and vines but I won’t make it) I downloaded it and started experimenting. I was still working on perfecting my looped videos and minimising camera-shake when Instagram roared up the track with its own video release.

For the past few weeks, I’ve continued using both. As many, many others have pointed out, each has its pros and cons. I won’t list them all, don’t worry, but if you are interested there’s a handy article with infographic here on TechCrunch and here Mashable talk to some large brand-owners about why Instagram, with its existing 130 million-strong user base, has more immediate relevance to brands than Vine, which didn’t have the benefit of being launched on an existing platform.

Practicalities

These are all factors of course, but for me it’s the little practical things that make me lean more to one than the other, namely:

  • Length – Vine allows you 6 seconds, Instagram 15. Both serve a purpose to me, but the slightly longer format will be better for us in terms of creating decent clips. WINNER: INSTAGRAM.
  • Ability to edit – Instagram lets you delete previous frames so you can go back to a certain point and start again. This is really useful to me, and Vine doesn’t do it (yet.) WINNER: INSTAGRAM.
  • Embed on Twitter – Ever since Facebook acquired Instagram it’s annoyed me that when you post to Twitter the media content doesn’t automatically embed and you have to open it in the app. Obviously I know why this is, but it’s irritating – I post direct to Twitter from both Vine and Instagram far more than I do to Facebook. WINNER: VINE.
  • Camera shake – Instagram has image stabilisation. This is invaluable to me and my shaky hands. Vine doesn’t have it, so – WINNER: INSTAGRAM.
  • Save to camera roll – Now, apparently Instagram should allow you to save videos to camera roll but for me, it doesn’t. I’ve checked my settings and I can’t work it out, so maybe it’s something that isn’t available to all yet? Anyway, Vine does automatically save to camera roll. So in this case, for me – WINNER: VINE.

Verdict

Yes, overall I prefer Instagram – even before we factor in filters and the existing user base. But the two things that really make it the winner for me are the ability to edit and the camera stabilisation. I’m not planning on deleting my Vine account just yet though – with new features being added to both platforms seemingly every week, there’s still time for Vine to come out fighting.

Because there is one thing that annoys me equally about them both. It’s the fact that you can’t upload existing videos from your camera roll. Neither lets you do this and it’s such a missed opportunity for all that old video content. In particular I don’t understand why Instagram doesn’t – it allows this for photos.

Maybe this is Vine’s chance to pip them.

Ready..? Fight!

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