Online videos are among the top ten internet marketing strategies for 2009, according to SEO. That, however, assumes the technology works.
The online video ad medium is still in early days and there is growing statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests that poor viewing experiences are more common than thought. Not surprisingly, videos that fail to load can be devastating to a marketing initiative, whether it is a viral campaign or part of an email marketing strategy.
Vevo's Launch
Last week's launch of Vevo is an example, according to Frost & Sullivan analyst Dan Rayburn. The site, backed by such impressive companies as Google, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, AT&T, Abu Dhabi Media and EMI Music, had a disappointing rollout as many of the videos couldn't load, he said.
"I had half a dozen emails in my inbox from people asking me who's doing the delivery of the videos for Vevo and why they won't play," he wrote in his blog. "While I know Vevo has only been up for less than 48 hours, that's no excuse for Google not to be able to have it working properly. How many times am I going to be given a message that says: 'We're sorry, there was an error processing your request' when I try to play a video? Even worse, most times I don't get a message at all. I just get a blank page when I click play or the video starts to buffer and gets stuck at 73% and goes no further."
Dismaying Study
Rayburn's frustration is echoed in a new study by video analytics company Tubemogul, which recently analyzed a sample of 192,268,561 streams from such top content delivery networks as Akamai, Edgecast and Limelight. The sample was primarily short-form content, although long-form TV content was included.
The results were dismaying, TubeMogul found. Rebuffers are commonplace, occurring in 6.84% of all streams. More to the point for marketers, when encountering a rebuffer, viewers click away 81.19% of the time rather than wait for the video to re-load. Also delays in start-time (the amount of time that passes between someone clicking "play" and a stream starting) were above one second for every network tested.
"As online video audiences continue to grow, CDN imperfections like these will be increasingly relevant to the publishers' bottom lines," the study concluded. "When you consider that one out of 25 streams experiences a rebuffer and most people click away when that happens, it's probably fair to conclude that far fewer ads are getting clicked or watched."
