Co-Workers and clients ask me why I stopped using MSN Messenger, like it’s a surprise to them that I don’t willingly sign into an application that spends most of it’s time trying to download videos/advertisements to distract me?
To me the more advertisements I see on a service the more I see that service as coming to an end, with one final attempt to monetize the fleeting popularity of the service at it’s peak of it’s traffic volume.
So clearly then Facebook is signalling that now is the time to monetize and cash out, with executives promising video advertisement opportunities in 2013.
To quote the original article on AdAge:
“By April at the latest, it(FB) will offer video advertisers the chance to target video ads to large numbers of Facebook users in their news feeds on both the desktop version of Facebook as well as on Facebook apps on mobile phones and tablets.”
There’s also some advanced speculation that the goal will be to keep the video adverts capped at 15 seconds, which would help minimize the amount of data transfer that is wasted on content you never wanted to see in the first place.
Additionally, if advertisers have to compete in 15 seconds or less, this could produce ‘light’ video spots that are then re-used on other sites around the web, hopefully just replacing existing clips that are 30 seconds.
To the advertisers out there (some of which are our clients) this means that if you were in the planning/edit stages of a video promotion for your site, and social media was one of your target audiences, then you would do well to plan on a 15 second version of your clip in advance.
Speaking of Video Advertising
What would happen if YouTube paid a handful of the most popular YouTube video creators together to make a ‘popular mashup’?
I think this is what would happen (this is NOT the cheap re-mix you may be expecting):
Nice work YouTube! Clearly, at 28million (and counting) hits since it was released on Monday, people can’t get too much of a good thing, which is shocking considering how overplayed some of those videos are, especially the Gangnam Style remixes.
The end of the clip has some references to the video sources, some of which were fresh links for this old dog. 😉