If you’ve got a few minutes, check out the first couple of verses of this nearly syllable-for-syllable adaptation of Don McLean’s epic “The Day the Music Died.” Some clever, euphonious devil has reworked it as a eulogy for the fat old days when media buys had all the subtlety of carpet-bombing runs and decisions were driven by martinis and nicotine instead of engagement and ROI.
Dorm Life cracks Hulu Top Ten!
As far as we know, this is the first time Dorm Life has cracked Hulu’s Top Ten. Must be the enormous promotional budget we put behind it…Not! It’s the audience – you guys are amazing. Thank you!
D7 shaped up to be quite the event. The lineup (as always) was fantastic, and the discussions have been thought-provoking.
The idea that most stood out to us came from Kara’s sit-down with NBC CEO Jeff Zucker. As Peter Kafka relates, the network chief said,
“[We] need better ads online. Hulu itself could become an ad agency, and that’s something we’ve talked about.”
People got excited at the prospect of seeing more ads like the cool “Alien” Super Bowl spots with Alec Baldwin that Crispin, Porter & Bogusky did for Hulu. We’re guessing Zucker wasn’t actually proposing to make Hulu into a creative agency. Much more likely he was talking about Hulu handling the media planning and buying functions that media agencies perform. Here’s why a move by Hulu in that direction would be a great development for the digital video industry.
As we noted previously, US video views surpassed US search queries in November of 2008, yet marketers are spending just $7 on digital video per every $100 spent on search. Digital video is under-monetized partly because the importance and metrics of engagement aren’t very well understood by the vast majority of media planners and buyers.
Hulu’s insight into viewers’ habits and tastes makes it a natural fit for advising brands’ media spending on digital video. Plus, Hulu has consistently delivered the highest rates from brands of any of the video distribution sites ASM deals with, showing that Hulu’s sales team actually knows how to make a compelling case for video content online. Okay, it’s not quite fair, since Hulu is serving up mostly video produced for TV, but that may be what advertisers need to part with their dollars – an agency that is making the transition from TV to interactive media right alongside them.
To put a finer point on what we hope Zucker was proposing, Hulu would make for a great digital media agency. We think Hulu’s expansion into this area would create more informed brands, and grow the digital video pie for everybody.
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Wikipedia has consistently ranked within the top-10 referrers for Dorm Life – something we never paid attention to, as we just assumed the traffic was comprised of Dorm Life fans who checked out the Wiki, then flowed into Dorm-Life.com.
However, I noticed last week that traffic from Wikipedia disproportionately comprised of New Visits – about 33% higher than the site average.
On closer inspection, visitors from Wikipedia seemed to highly engage with Dorm Life content, on several levels:
Linking your site and Wikipedia is a well worn play in the SEO handbook, but it didn’t occur to us that Wikipedia could constitute a material stream of leads. We are pleasantly surprised.
Have you noticed Wikipedia contributing to your pipeline of leads in a meaningful way? If so, do you have any tricks for expanding that pipeline?
This week, Bit.ly became the in-house URL compressor for Twitter, Marshall Kirkpatrick reports at ReadWriteWeb. We wrote a few weeks ago that we love Bit.ly for the rich tracking and analytics it provides – apparently, we’re not alone.
Kirkpatrick quotes James Governor: “The truth about Bit.ly is that it’s not a URL shortener, it’s a trend management and metrics platform.” Too right you are, Mr. Governor.
Around the time last wrote about Bit.ly – beginning of April – its links attracted 15 million clicks per week. Five weeks later, Bit.ly is seeing 50 million clicks per week. Becoming the incumbent URL compressor for Twitter is only going to accelerate that growth – a trend we’re looking forward to. As Bit.ly links – and attendant analytical capabilities – proliferate, how content is distributed throughout the ecosystem will become increasingly measurable and targetable, a prospect that makes our mouths water.
We only hope that the Libyan government (which owns the .ly country code Top-Level Domain) does not impede Bit.ly’s growth. Libyan regulations currently stipulate that,
Domain names must not contain obscene, scandalous, indecent, or contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality words, phrases nor abbreviations.
While the Bit.ly domain seems to adhere to the current regulations, we hope that the country’s regulators do not decide to extend these prohibitions to the links that bit.ly compresses.
We’ve come to enjoy The Approval Matrix, New York Magazine’s witty and multivariate monthly cheers-and-jeers item. So we were pumped to see a Dorm Life shout-out in this week’s Matrix:
NY Mag May 11 09
According to this matrix, Dorm Life is more highbrow than barbecues, and almost as brilliant as Ken Jennings in a Jeopardy face-off against a supercomputer. Nice.
On the subject of Dorm Life shout-outs, the show has been getting some great press since Semester 2 launched. Be sure to check it out at ASM in the Press. A big thank you to all the writers who have featured Dorm Life!!!
So, this was kind of rad to see: on Monday, Dorm Life was the #17 most popular of all the shows on Hulu. Not web shows. All shows.
Dorm Life at #17 of all Hulu shows
Kara Swisher of All Things D recently caught up with Tony Cohen of FremantleMedia, the group responsible for bringing American Idol to the US, and owner of dozens more global properties.
Hearing what titans of industry have to say about the future of traditional and digital media is always worth it – this is no exception, and we love what he has to say about the importance of engagement.
We at ASM were excited to hear that Bit.ly nailed down a $2mm Series A round last week. It’s our go-to URL compressor – yes, because it’s short and sweet, but more so because of the rich analytics and tracking it provides. Our president, Josh McHugh, recently gave a great example of why we’ve come to love bit.ly’s functionality. We used it to track – over time – the efficacy of a push to drive traffic to Dorm Life’s MySpace channel during our exclusive period with them:
On March 1, a day into the MySpace exclusive period, we noticed that traffic was barely trickling into the MySpace channel. So we sent out a tweet on the @dormlife channel, containing a link to the first episode of the season on MySpace.
We used Bit.ly to compress the link. An hour later, we could see that 20% of those who had received the tweet had clicked through to the video. 48 hours later, 90% had clicked through. 3 days after the tweet went out, clickthroughs on the link had all but died out, but the final result was that 94% of the Dorm Life fans who got the tweet clicked through.
Cheers to the folks who went long on these innovators.
Update: Joshua Schachter digs into this topic over on All Things D…
We were intrigued by AdAge’s piece on web video series (subscription required). According to data compiled by TubeMogul, the average top-50 web series lost 64% of its viewers from episode 1 to episode 2. What’s more, less than 2 in 10 first-episode viewers stuck around to watch episode 8 of the typical top-50 series.
This didn’t seem to mesh with what we knew about ASM’s original web series, Dorm Life. So we compiled our viewing stats, and this is what we found out:
While we would have loved it if 100% of the people that watched episode 1 of Dorm Life went on to watch episode 2, we realize the show isn’t for everybody. It’s the people that watched episode 2 that we’re interested in – those are the people who liked what they saw in episode 1 and wanted another helping. The fact that we were able to keep those who watched episode 2 coming back through episode 8 says something flattering about Dorm Life and our approach to social content, in our humble opinion. Put succinctly, getting people to pay attention to the show is just the first step; making sure the show pays attention to its viewers is the real key.
We’ll be interested to see if Dorm Life: Semester 2 plays out in a similar fashion. Right off the bat, the retention bar got jacked up pretty high when YouTube put Episode 201 on its front page. Not the stickiest of referral methods, but we’ll take the view count. The success of a Web series doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a challenge we’re happy to accept.
