Online Video's Popularity and Effectiveness are Still Growing

We've said it before but it continues to be true... Online video's popularity is not slowing down.  As the economy continues to tighten and people's budgets are getting smaller, certain luxuries (cable TV and movie theatre tickets, for example) are suddenly less affordable.  So, they're turning to free entertainment, such as, you guessed it, online video.

TNS Global, a market research company, reports that Americans now spend 30% of their leisure time online.  And they like watching Web videos.  In November 2008, 146 million viewers (77% of all Internet users) watched an average of 87 online videos each, totaling 12.7 billion Internet videos (a 33% increase over November 2007), according to comScore. 

eMarketer believes this number will only continue to grow.  They estimate that the percentage of Internet users, watching at least one Web video a month will climb to over 84% in 2009.

For business owners and marketers, this is great news; the more people watching online videos, the more people who see their ads.  Combined with the fact that Web video continues to be one of the best places to get the most for your advertising money (less expensive than traditional advertising, easily track-able), online video looks to be a safe bet in these turbulent times.  The Kelsey Group, a leading provider of strategic research in online advertising, found that 47% of people who view an online video go to the business Web site after watching the video.  Additionally, 19% of video viewers ask for more information about the product or service, 18% go to the business's physical location, and 17% make a purchase.

Online Video Ad Graph

To talk to us about how you can put together an affordable online video ad campaign to increase your sales, Contact us.

Video Search Engine Optimization:  A Primer

It is competitive out there.  Even when potential customers are actively searching for you and your products or services, it can be increasingly difficult for them to find you.  But there are ways to dramatically increase the "findability" and the "visibility" of your marketing message (especially when that message is an Internet video) using Video Search Engine Optimization.
 
Simply put Video SEO is the process of optimizing your Web video to be more easily indexed and displayed by search engines.  It contains two key phases.

The first phase involves optimizing the online video itself, by intelligently creating metadata (title, description, tags and thumbnails) that the search engines will look at and use to rank it.

The second phase concerns optimizing the context of the online video.  You can do this in a couple of ways.  First, by creating and submitting MRSS feeds and Google sitemaps to the search engines, which alerts them to the presence and location of your video content.  Secondly, by analyzing and optimizing the placement of the online video on your site, including surrounding your video with articles, images and other content that relates directly to the online video subject manner.  Both can dramatically affect the relevancy ranking search engines assign to your content.

These phases are especially effective when combined with "superdistribution," or distributing your online video to video portals, like YouTube and Metacafe. Superdistribution increases the video's visibility while Video SEO increases its findability, a potent combination that helps potential customers find you.

Let us help optimize your Web video!  Call 303.694.7300 or Contact us.

Thank you and remember VideoBloom is your source for reliable and innovative video solutions.
 
Bloom On!

The VideoBloom Team