In March, this feature was only available to non-profit partners. YouTube wrote about one particular instance of a non-profit partner who raised more than $10,000 in one day after including the hyperlink on their video and after YouTube featured it on their front page.

Now the Call to Action is available to all YouTube advertisers in the US. Unfortunately, we cannot access it yet in Australia.

If you are not publishing videos in social networks online, you are missing an opportunity to extend the impact of your brand online.

The situation with video is comparable to the beginning of the Web. Then, only the big brands were quick to embrace the new medium and have a representation on it – mostly a simple Website that re-enforced the existence of the company and its brands online and provided information for the online community. Web presence matured over time as the medium became mainstream, and it spread out to smaller organisations and brands.

Now, 15 years later, we are at the beginning of another era: video has become a medium online. For many, YouTube has become their default entry into the Web and they spend most of their time online on YouTube. For the majority, YouTube is the dominant search engine and the second largest search engine after Google overall.

What do people find when they search for your brand on YouTube? Go and try it out – you may be surprised what your community is posting about you! Would a YouTube user find your message amongst all the other chitter-chatter? What impact will that have on your brand?

Some of the larger brands understand. There are some very good YouTube brand channels online. For example, check out the Nike Football channel. With 8,326 subscribers, it is the number one most subscribed sponsor channel of all time. It hosts 207 videos of diverse football highlights involving Nike. Or look at a new channel like the MINI channel which already has 41 videos after only having been created on the 1st January 2009.

In Australia, other than the political parties and bloggers, not many YouTube channels have been set up. Probably the best are Cricket Australia, XXXX, and Tooheys. Comparing just the two beer brands, it is easy to notice that Tooheys uses the channel just for re-publishing TVCs, while XXXX uses it to create brand engagement – a difference that is also reflected in the number of videos, subscribers, channel views, and friends.

Why are they spending money on social video?

Video has huge advantages over other content. Videos are able to provide a direct and rememberable explanation of what a brand stands for – much more so than text or pictures. Video is therefore twice as effective for conversion actions than text only. An Australian study showed that 57% of online users have watched online videos before making a purchase decision.

But not only does video help in the actual act of selling. Video also has an advantage when it comes to exposure to eyeballs on the Web. In Google universal search, video is 50 times more likely than other Web content to turn up on the first search result page. Yes, you read correctly: 50 times more likely – just think about all the SEO that you’d have to do with other content to have such an effect. On top of that, users are more likely to click on the video thumbnails on the Google result page than on any other results – the thumbnails are strong in directing eyeballs.

Now that we’ve seen the upsides of video, you will ask yourself what the kind of content may be that you should publish about your brand. What would be the purpose of publishing video to social networks? Video is a communication channel like any other. You can use it for any brand strategy that you may be preparing. You might consider creating videos to launch a new brand, to diversify an existing brand, to educate about products, or to start a conversation with your customers.

Here are some examples of what companies have used their YouTube channels for:

• Nikon Australia use theirs to provide tutorials and product demonstrations
• Qantas provides facts about the company and their TVCs
• Doritos Australia use it to run an ad competition
• AXE provide funny content
• Sun Microsystems publishes a vlog that includes interviews of executives

My recommendation is not just to upload the videos to YouTube, but also to pick some other social networks that focus more on your actual target audience, e.g. Dailymotion for a European focus or Break.com for a young males focus. Also make sure to consider your release strategy and video SEO to reach a maximum number of eyeballs for your content. And finally: don’t forget to measure your success over and over again – with metrics tools like Vquence’s VQmetrics service you can learn which content and strategy works for your audience and which doesn’t. It is such attention to numbers that Natalie Tran who publishes Australia’s most subscribed YouTube channel reckons has helped her make it such a success.

In my long years of working with video I have been encouraging everybody who publishes video to also provide textual representations of video, which includes subtitles/captions, but also includes metadata and hyperlinks that will enable video to become part of the content networks of the Web.

The key advantage for me is not accessibility, but it is to increase the value of the content. Content that knows more about itself and can expose that to machines is inherently more valuable than content that is just a dark collection of bits.

Added Value 1: automated translation

Once a time-aligned transcript such as a caption file is available, the video can expose this to a translation engine and provide itself in any language. This capability is now available for some videos on YouTube, e.g. the following winning Eurovision song of this year:

You have to click on the triangle icon on the video player bottom right while the video is playing, and then follow the red “CC” menu to go to “Translate” and turn on subtitles in a chosen language.

Even if Google’s automated translations are not 100% accurate, they still make the content accessible to a much larger audience than if they were not available. And all of this basically “for free” through the automated translation engine.

Added Value 2: increased user attention

Interestingly, recent research has shown that captions and subtitles don’t only make content more accessible to the hard-of-hearing, but also to well-hearing people. Where a video file has captions, 80 percent more people watch the entire video to its completion.

Achieving complete views is one of the most difficult challenges video publishers face, since people loose interest and attention fairly easily in our modern world of media over-stimulation. So, anything that can help people focus their attention longer is great news.

Just imagine the increase this can bring e.g. to the value of post-roll ads and to closing titles that contain the brands that sponsored the creation of the video.

Added Value 3: video SEO

Typically for a video the only text that is available and indexed by search engines are “title”, “description”, “tags”, and “categories”. These are fairly limited when you consider all the action and information that is inherent in a video.

Once a time-aligned transcript such as a caption file is available for a video, search engines are able to index that text together with the minimalist other text related to a video, thus making the video a whole lot more discoverable.

It is a shame that YouTube’s caption files are not yet indexed by Google, but do not fear: Google already has the technology and is using it on the Google video site:

We can only expect that it will be available on YouTube soon, so if you want to give your videos a huge SEO boost, think about uploading a caption file.

Further applications will certainly emerge to make better use of the annotated video content, such as automated summarisation, search that points us directly to offsets (see media fragment URIs), and automatically created mashups based on keywords.

If you want to do the captioning yourself, there are now some nice tools that work with YouTube. In Australia we also have captioning services that can do it for you, such as the Australian Captioning Centre and caption.it. Also check out Media Access Australia who have a large collection of resources and information about captioning in Australia.

On the list of top viewed YouTube videos of all time, Boyle’s top video is on position 22, Potts at 28, and Talbot at 35 (as of 13th May). These are the only show videos up in such heights – most other videos here are either music videos or legendary virals such as “The Evolution of Dance“, “Charlie bit my finger“, or the laughing Baby “Hahaha“.

Considering Paul Potts and Connie Talbot are a 2 year old success, it is quite amazing how many views they have attracted consistently, and more so recently, in the wake of Boyle: almost a fifth on Potts and Talbot views were in the last month. For comparison, see the following chart:

Approx development of views on Potts, Talbot and Boyle videos

All three videos have achieved around 50M views. Obviously, BGT is a huge success in social video and has enabled the show to become a world-wide story rather than limited to British borders. But has ITV been able to monetize on the success online?

In 2007, content owners hadn’t really come to grips yet with the value that YouTube presents. Thus, neither the Paul Potts video nor the Connie Talbot video are actually published by ITV. More importantly though, in 2007, YouTube was only starting to develop means to enable content publishers to share in ad revenue on their high performing content. YouTube actually had nothing to offer for these content owners. Nobody can blame ITV for not monetising the YouTube success in 2007.

Seeing all these successes, one would expect that ITV had made arrangements for revenue sharing with YouTube and possibly other sites well before this year’s show in preparation for a potential social video hit. Looking at YouTube, where the overwhelming majority of the success has been focused, it seems, however, that they missed the boat. According to The Times UK, the management at ITV insisted that they wanted special terms from Google for the Susan Boyle video because they saw the videos taking off.

Instead of opting for the YouTube tried-and-tested advertising methods, ITV went into discussions with them and wanted special pre-roll ad options, which YouTube wasn’t able or willing to offer. However, they achieved some special treatment after all, since it is not possible to embed any of the non-offical copies out of YouTube.

While ITV set up their own YouTube channel and show to publish official copies of the top BGT performances online, they could only watch as the user uploaded videos took off. Kudos have to go to ITV for acting generously and not taking down the copies – at least they can now get official numbers on the complete views on their content.

On 24th April, ITV finally published their own BGT channel and show on YouTube. This contains the official “Susan Boyle” video – almost two weeks after her TV appearance.

How will ITV now monetise the videos?

YouTube offers a revenue share model to publishers of high-performing content through a partnership program. This enables advertisers to place the following kinds of adverts next to the partner content:

• InVideo ads: These are little overlays that start at 10s into the video occupying the bottom 20% of the video player and containing Google ads. If a user clicks on it, the video is paused and a new tab opens with the clicked-through link.
• Companion ads: These are a 300x250px banner ads that appear on the watch page of a video of a partner in the prime position next to the video.

These ads can be targeted on user demographics, location, time-of-day and content genre. The content owners receive a 50% share on the CPM charged for these ads.

The ads can be placed on all copies of a piece of content, no matter whether it is published through the official channel of the content owner or through consumer copies. This is just as well for ITV, since the official video of Susan Boyle’s performance is only the 10th best performing Susan Boyle video on YouTube when ordered by view count (on 13th May). For relevance ordered queries, the official video ended up on top for a while, but is now down to position 7 – obviously YouTube’s ranking is based on freshness of a post as well as views.

Assuming the £20 CPM value that is quoted in The Times Online, the top performing video on YouTube alone could have made £1M in advertising revenue, half of which would have gone to ITV – certainly a number that hurts.

Indeed, this number should hurt YouTube as much as ITV, since YouTube only makes money from highly performing videos if the publisher becomes a partner and makes money, too. It should have been in YouTube’s interest to allow advertisements next to the prime performing content as quickly as possible. Maybe this shows a need for an additional revenue model for content owners that is not dependent on them setting up a channel or show with YouTube. YouTube should take this as an opportunity!

In the meantime, ITV is indeed making money on YouTube. Their own videos have seen an amazing number of views in the past weeks and the show keeps coming up with amazing talent. For Hollie Steel, the ITV channel indeed provides the video with the highest view count. More than 30M views have come to BGT content since the 24th April and all of this content bears advertising. This means the ITV channel should now have created approx £600K of ad income – a substantial number indeed.

Well, it has turned into something special in a different way: Tim Burrowes who writes the “mUmBRELLA” blog about the Australian media and marketing industry allowed us to publish it as a Guest Post there.

Check out the article on the Susan Boyle phenomenon at Mumbrella. It is called “What Paul Potts and Susan Boyle teach us about the changing face of social media” and compares the world from 2 years ago with Paul Potts’ success on “Britain’s Got Talent” to the current Susan Boyle success and what has changed since then. There are some nice stats there.

Because of it’s beauty, let me add here the almost perfect statistics of the Susan Boyle top performing video on YouTube:

Statistics Susan Boyle video

Many thanks go to Tim and also Ian Lyons from Amnesia Razorfish who introduced me to Tim.