February 2009 Archives
Vator.TV interview: VoloMedia's Brian Steel on navigating the entrepreneurial waters and advertising trends in downloadable media
February 26, 2009 1:21 PM
Bambi Francisco of Vator.TV interviews VoloMedia's CEO Brian Steel about navigating the entrepreneurial waters, advertising trends in downloadable media, and what makes podcasts appealing to brand advertisers. The influence of mobile devices and portable content is having a profound effect on media consumption and advertising models. VoloMedia is effectively solving challenges around metrics and monetization of downloadable video and audio, such as podcasts.
Interview Highlights and Questions Explored:
- Startup CEOs = head cook and bottle washer
- It's estimated that over 10 billion podcast were downloaded in 2008.
- VoloMedia is aggregating and selling advertising inventory.
- What trends are shaping the industry, and what is the average CPM for downloadable media?
- Unaided brand awareness is 68% for podcasts compared to 21% for online and 10% for television. As the proliferation of devices continues exponentially and podcast audience growth accelerates, how can advertisers take advantage of this explosive trend and leverage VoloMedia's podcast network?
The age of the portable media and time-shifted consumption is upon us. We hope you'll find this interview, along with our podcast Insights Into The Business of Podcasting, helpful in honing your online media strategies.
-Mirjana
Part I - Lesson for entrepreneurs
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Take Flight #7
February 20, 2009 3:10 PMSince 1933, Newsweek has been a purveyor of hard news, fascinating human interest stories, and thoughtful opinion pieces. This year, the newsmagazine has added to that list: videos of pop culture-inspired political comedy.
Shortly after Inauguration, Newsweek launched 'The District', a series inside of the Newsweek Video (iTunes link) podcast. The show is a weekly lighthearted look at President Obama's first 100 days in office, in the style of MTV's hit quasi-reality show, The City. Narrated by spot-on Obama impersonator Iman Crosson, the show pieces together news clips to follow the President, his inner circle, and the drama that unfolds within.
The first episode:
-Reed
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VoloMedia Takes Campaign Reporting to the Next Level
February 13, 2009 8:10 AMVoloMedia is proud to announce that we've upgraded, nay, completely revamped our reporting platform. While VoloMedia has always offered best-in-class data with our reports, we've taken it to the next level with how our customers can interact with that data. This powerful new system will enable our customers to drill down deeply into the data, run correlations between their content, campaigns, requests vs. actual completed downloads and much more. As a plus, if they are on the road, they can also do it all from their iPhones!
We're very excited about this launch and have a lot of plans for the near future to build on top of it.
Stay tuned...
- George
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Podcasting Myth #1 - It's Audio
February 3, 2009 2:17 PMYes, podcasting started as audio with shows such as Adam Curry's "Daily Source Code" ramblings and a whole host of amateurs publishing podcast stories of their lives (remember those recordings of people looking for parking spaces!). Those were the days when an iPod meant audio only. Well, podcasting has come a long way since then - not only is it more video, it is also more professional and includes some of the best online content available, ranging from shows specifically made-for-podcast to repurposed broadcast TV and radio content.
Video podcasting has been growing much faster than audio although audio is still highly popular (See PRI, IndieFeed and NPR; and by the way, NPRs recent 'mix your own podcast' feature is very cool). Over 10 billion podcasts were downloaded in 2008, and a lot of that growth was fueled by professional content, and by the advent of video in iTunes. And that segues (kind of) to a related misconception that podcasting is simply a type of media file format.
Wikipedia's definition of podcasting illustrates that in addition to serving as a wrapper for video and audio files, it is more importantly a very powerful distribution mechanism for content, and a great way for consumers to enjoy and subscribe to programming.
RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is the most widely used of the syndication protocols for podcasting (also see Atom) and offers many benefits. For publishers, it's a superior way to define and package their media (RSS includes a metadata framework) while creating an automatic syndication strategy to allow content to follow the users, whether they are getting updates on a website or subscribing through iTunes (or other aggregators such as TVersity) and then playing on a portable device. For users, the benefits include subscription (i.e. receiving automated updates to your favorite shows), taking content to-go, viewing on-demand, viewing off-line - basically giving full control over the consumption experience as the content is downloaded. Think TiVo for the web.
But, let's come back to the audio-only myth. A great way to quickly dispel this notion is to simply visit the iTunes Podcasting library. And not too long ago, the iTunes podcasting team added video and audio as top level categories. Check out the video section. A lot of great content for free, including titles from MSNBC, Comedy Central, VH1, The Onion, Oprah, HBO, Revision3, G4, Disney, Slate, NextNewNetworks, Current TV and many, many others. And don't forget to check out the audio section for more titles from publishers such as LearnOutLoud, HowStuffWorks, CBS, Personal Life Media, QuickAndDirty, and on and on.
So, it's time to dispel the historical myth and embrace the full meaning, which includes video. The podcasting resurgence is upon us, and this time, we'll make sure to give it its proper due!
Jeff
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Downloadable Media Ad Standards Define Industry Units and Organize Audience Reporting
February 2, 2009 4:07 PMThe Association for Downloadable Media (ADM), an organization whose purpose is to help define advertising and audience measurement standards for episodic downloadable media, today announced a list of members to adopt the first ADM Standards and Guidelines.
These guidelines and standards were defined through the collaborative effort of ADM's representative committees and an open comment period in which the entire online community was invited to provide feedback and input.
ADM standards and guidelines provide a common language to proliferate the monetization of downloadable and portable media while achieving high levels of confidence around the metrics for content producers and advertisers alike.
Ad units that have been standardized include pre, mid and post roll insertions, product placement within shows, and host-endorsements among the twenty-five creative options outlined in the standards document.
VoloMedia is one of the founding members of ADM, and one of the 27 companies to support the Ad Unit Standards and Audience Measurement Guidelines of the ADM for Podcasts and Vidcasts. The full press release is posted here.
- Mirjana
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