Video is becoming ubiquitous. Almost all websites include video these days and research says that more than 50% of internet traffic is due to video. However, it is important to understand if the videos are enhanced for the web?
In early days of online video (old youtube era) most of the videos was user generated contents (UGC). Slowly later a significant chunk of videos arrived on web that was mainly smaller clips of news, movie contents, or sales / marketing videos. In recent years, the web video is taking another major step – arrival of long form videos as well as premium contents. These videos spawn all categories from education, entertainment to corporate and even blogger videos.
- Hulu convinced premium movie and show producers that yes we can publish videos online and gain sufficient revenues with advertisement model. YouTube is also trying to gain foothold into enabling premium videos on their site with different business models.
- YouTube for Education also enabled most of the educational institutes across the world to have their lectures, events videos available online and build a great following.
- Almost every other corporate company is now having archived contents of their webinars (more), how-to videos online to share information about their offerings and educate their customers.
- Lastly there are wide range of bloggers and individuals using online video on their sites like online business tips blogger, non-profit education site, building 43, This Week In Startups
With myriad of online video publishing platforms available, publishing long-form and premium videos online hasn’t been much of hassle. [For those who want to select which publishing platform is right for them, check vidcompare] Nonetheless, if you are just starting to put your content online we would suggest start off with YouTube as it is free and is also the most popular video site.
Publishing on web doesn’t means making videos available online and trying to generate revenues with various business models. There is more to do and you need to be aware of following things –
- Users on web discover relevant videos through major search engines and various social media sites. So it is important to make sure each of your videos is “discoverable”.
- Users on web have very limited time and like to skim the content when they visit a page with your video. You have to make sure that they can “skim” your videos.
- Users on web like to bookmark and share relevant parts in the video with their friends. You have to enable users to “share” parts in the video that in turn will help increase your reach.
Adding chapters, tags to your video enables you to take into account all the three things mentioned above. Isn’t that great? It comes at an added cost but is very negligible if you compare this with the production cost per video. Publishing on web has its own benefits of low cost distribution and extended reach but only the one who optimizes his content appropriately wins. Adding chapters, tags to video is considered as an important step in optimizing and is the first step towards enhancing your video for the web.
Did you skim through the recent Obama speech at the House Republican retreat in Baltimore?
You can register to enhance your videos with onion.tv