Surprise: MSN Has Built the Video Site of the Future
There are big changes underway over at MSN Video, some of which represent a real look forward for the industry. It's hard to believe, and it isn't pretty, but this is a site you've got to check out. The site's design, full screen player and advertising model are big.
Time on Site
The big news at MSN Video is that the site has embraced a "Time on Site" traffic metric that's sure to represent the future of advertising. Neilsen announced this summer that they are replacing page views with time on site as the primary web traffic metric. It's widely acknowledged that AJAX and online video are making pageviews less and less relevant all the time. While other sites (like YouTube and MySpace) keep pumping out the pageviews and trying to figure out how to best run ads - this new MSN Video site has hit on a formula that will likely represent the video portal of the future: AJAX powered video playlists, including recommended videos, that do not require new pageloads and are monetized by time-based advertising. You could spend hours watching a playlist of videos from a variety of sources on MSN Video without ever loading a new page.
There's a really nice multi-video full-screen player, too. Viewers can even edit their playlists from inside the full-screen view. As an interesting aside, reader Mike Kowalchik notes in comments here that the video is all in Adobe's Flash, not Microsoft's new SilverLight format.
How the Ads Work
Visitors to MSN Video now see a pre-roll ad before their playlist of videos and then are shown another ad at most once every 3 minutes, regardless of the number of videos they have watched. It's much better than standard pre-rolls and sure to be more effective than post-roll ads.
The fact that the pre-rolls are unskippable needs to change, and 3 minutes still seems awfully frequent for ads - but the point is that this is advertising no longer tied to pageviews. You can't currently embed live players off-site, the site's aesthetics are MSN-ugly, and MSN itself is supposed to be a deprecated brand in favor of Live.com . Regardless of all that, check out the new MSN Video. It represents the future of these increasingly important types of sites.
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Regardless of all that, check out the new MSN Video. It represents the future of these increasingly important types of sites.
The link should point to video.msn.com and not vide.msn.com
For a second, I thought MSN named their video site vide, :P
Posted by: Kanwal | September 26, 2007 10:39 AM
Thanks, Kanwal, you're a champ - and nice to know you read all the way to the end :)
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | September 26, 2007 10:50 AM
I noticed there was an 'Upload video' link. Any idea if MSN plans to share some of the ad revenue with film makers? This feature may help move MSN video up in the ranks.
Whats your opinion?
Posted by: Derek Anderson | September 26, 2007 10:55 AM
Marshall - I am still not sure why MSN Video deserves to receive that kind of credit. True - the ad model is forward looking but ads every three minutes? And most of what I just checked out is all repurposed content from NBC and MSNBC.
I think I know why no embedding is permitted. I am sure there is concern is about keeping tight control over its content.
But with no embedding, pre-roll ads and a lack of original media makes me still ask: why is this the video site of the future?
What this really looks like is a broadcast model in Internet clothing.
Posted by: alex williams | September 26, 2007 10:57 AM
@Derek, that's a good idea but I don't know. That could be good, though YouTube has arguably done just fine without revenue sharing.
@Alex - touche good buddy! There's lots of sources here, I see History Channel, VideoJug and several others just on the front page. It does have a broadcasty feel to it, but I don't think the broadcast model is going to vanish in the future. Look at the ratio of content uploaders on YouTube to viewers. Interactivity and personalization are good, but I think MSN Video is what it's going to look like for a lot of people. I also presume they'll be changing that ad frequency to 5 or 7 minutes in time. It'll effectively feel like a post-roll after any single video you watch all the way through.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | September 26, 2007 11:19 AM
Well finally they decided to do video. Why don't they do something before everyone else. Considering their budgets, I was hoping this was done around the same time that YouTube was showing a rise. Well I hope that their Ad team will handle this well, so far I have not had any fun using their ad system and that was for basic text ads...
Posted by: Nature Wallpaper | September 26, 2007 11:43 AM
I quite like the site. It has a very nice overall feel and the ad model is def. something different. However, the site seems to load quite slow for me. Ive very much looking forward to seeing more content on the site and how it progresses.
Posted by: Crenk | September 26, 2007 11:53 AM
I find it especially interesting that they're using Flash and not SilverLight for their videos. As an MS property, you would think that MS's "flash killer" would be mandated for a site like this in an eat-your-own-dogfood kind of way. I also think Silverlight (the video parts) just came out of beta, if I'm not mistaken.
Silverlight has no penetration, but it does have some really interesting benefits like HD streaming.
Posted by: Mike Kowalchik | September 26, 2007 12:17 PM
@Crenk - you're right, site load time is wacky slow.
@Mike - You are officially one smart cookie for noticing that! I didn't even think about SilverLight but it does make you wonder. You'd think that an MSN property would be a great place to push SilverLight, in fact. So much of the video here is from outside the Microsoft universe though that there's no way SilverLight versions are available to bring in. Quite a case study of the whole situation, in fact!
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | September 26, 2007 12:21 PM
My first thought was to check if it was using Flash or SilverLight and I too was surprised to see Flash. Maybe they will wait a bit before switching over to SL.
All in all, I like the site. I think they have something good there and I must admit, I think the design of the site is quite inviting. The Ajax on the site seems a little sluggish to me.
Posted by: bryan | September 26, 2007 12:36 PM
no embed = failure.
the video winner is an aggregator who syndicates out so that others can create niche communities. attach ads to videos and share revenue all around.
msft, though, is trying to control distribution. that's unfortunate for everyone.
Posted by: kid mercury | September 26, 2007 1:22 PM
A "real look forward for the industry".... All I got was a "Your browser or operating system is not supported" message. That isn't forward thinking to me.
Posted by: flexdaddy | September 26, 2007 1:44 PM
I thought everything was "Live" nowadays not "MSN". I'm confused so I'm off to Google.
Posted by: OmegaSupreme | September 26, 2007 2:12 PM
Hi Marshall
This "time on site" is not a new metric but it is a sign of the ad future. Some of us have been talking about implicit Attention metadata for two years as the ad model of the future. i.e contextual, demographic, geographic, attentional
Alex Iskold who writes for RWW has written about Attention MetaData in the past and how capturing this information will result in the next generation ad model.
Chris Saad, Chris Messina, myself and many others are working on APML as a means to capture attention metadata as a standard format.
I am guessing - knowing Microsoft - that they have simply implemented a proprietary attention model simply based on time and not on explicit metadata i.e user generated tags, rating etc.
The fact MSN have done this is forward thinking and not something we have come to expect from MSN. It is the start of a change from pageviews to timeviews.
Posted by: Sam Sethi | September 26, 2007 2:47 PM
Outstanding,
I knew it was only a matter of time before Microsoft regained their respectful seat as leader in the category.
Rock on my friends at MSN.
Posted by: Lipo Blog Network | September 26, 2007 3:04 PM
As a Microsoft employee speaking only for myself, I would like to clarify that MSN is not a "deprecated" brand, but represents the content-side of our online services. Windows Live is our services side (search, onecare, stuff like that.)
Posted by: Aaron Huslage | September 26, 2007 4:07 PM
Thanks Aaron for the clarification. I will stop teasing MSN in that way. Congrats to the team on a good video product launch.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick | September 26, 2007 4:16 PM
So I currently have 3 Firefox windows open with a total of 32 tabs between them, which is fairly indicative of my general behavior. I guess that puts me in the "What's the point of paying for all this RAM if I'm not going to use it?" camp.
One of those tabs is a YouTube page, one of the clips from the Family Guy Star Wars episode that I watched yesterday afternoon while eating lunch at my desk.
Am I correct to assume that if that even though the tab has been in the background the entire time, my "Time on Site" would be 28 hours? And if so, this is more useful than page views how?
Posted by: ryanMF | September 26, 2007 4:30 PM
Well, it's about time MSN...
Posted by: rhardo | September 26, 2007 11:31 PM
I've already commented on this -- see Guardian Trackback above -- but I'm somewhat amazed by the idea that Microsoft has only just started doing video. It launched the MSNBC news channel in 1996, so MSN has been doing broadcast-style online video for more than a decade.
Microsoft has also been doing user-uploaded videos, YouTube style, for more than a year via Soapbox, which is where the current site started. It wouldn't have been possible to use Silverlight at the time, even if the MSN guys knew about it ... which in any big company, is far from guaranteed ;-)
In any case, I think the "we wuz first" meme is just the first refuge for the terminally stupid. IBM was horribly late to the PC business (1981 cf 1975), Apple was horribly late with the iPod (late 2001 cf 1998), and Google was even slower to do Web-based mail (2004 cf 1996). If we're going to sneer at people for not being first then we've got a heck of a lot of good stuff to sneer at.
Posted by: Jack | September 27, 2007 4:19 AM
Marshall - also worth noting that the MSN video site is not built on Silverlight. Now that would be the video site of the future (at least should be for MSFT)! This upgragde was underway before Silverlight was ready for prime-time - but hopefully we will see Silverlight MSN Video implementation shortly - which would make it cross-browser (and allow for taking the video to other destinations)as one of your readers commented.
Posted by: G | September 27, 2007 4:25 AM
Every 3 minutes? Forget it.
Posted by: Bob Denny | September 28, 2007 8:27 PM
Hi all!
In my opinion, the most interesting thing in this (very good) article is the new way webmetrics is taking : from page views to "time on site". This is the key point of how online videos are changing our conception of metrics.
That's a fact that viewing a video is completely different from reading a page from a web site. User interactions are not the same, logical behaviours are also completely different. To sum up, watching online videos is "time and money consuming" for the both sides, user and content provider. In one hand, you spend more time on the content, being focused on just one element during several minutes, without interacting with other elements. In the other hand, as a video content provider, you have to gain more and more money to face up to the cost of bandwidth, but without the possibility to increase drastically your page views. Think of the one million dollar Youtube is paying each month for bandwidth.
There is a problem for the video content providers in the futur : page views, or "traditional statistics", are not enough accurate to be efficient to improve their business models. How can you sell online advertisements with a "page views" business model as your content is based on time?
That's why, in my opinion, "time on site" is the futur of webmetrics. And in this way, Microsoft and is video site is appearing to be in line with the futur standards.
Today, the webmetrics industry is not yet fully ready to change its mind because all the actual internet business model is based on the revenu sharing driven by page views and all the things related to page views : page rank, referencing, adwords, banners, search engines, advertisement... Think of Google with its products (who said Google is the problem?!! ;) )...
Moreover, there are few products which are especially designed for "time on site" and online video analytics, :
- Comscore or Nielsen NetRatings, but they are using samples
- Some big webanalytics players are proposing solutions to measure online video content, but their solutions are often based on server log analysis, with a very limited range of metrics.
- Streametrics (the company I represent, streametrics.tv), which is a third party video analytics solution that allows you to measure, online and in real-time, the viewers behavior in interaction with video content according to the time they spent on site. It is using a web technology for catching all the data (video audience rates, total times, average times,...)
According to me (and some key players in this industry), in about 6/9 months, new business models will be founded, taking into account of time spent by users, a large variety of new non intrusive video ads with a different revenu sharing for each of them, and ready for the two major video technologies : Flash and Silverlight.
All the actors of the industry must be ready : content providers, video and web analytics compagnies, advertisers, etc etc... Or they will miss the opportunities.
P.S. Excuse me for my english, this is not my natural language. I hope I was comprehensible for all of you.
Posted by: E. Scotto | October 2, 2007 8:30 PM