Archive for September, 2007

Since good examples of web projects from main stream media are rare, I’d like to point special attention to Dagbladet from Norway and their Dagbladet TV. They are miles ahead of their Swedish friends, specially with video.

Here are some examples of their excellence:

• They have video as a complement to their text articles (example)
• They link to outside sites from their articles (example)
• Their videos are NOT played inside a separate video player (see video site)
  
• Their player is social: statistics, comments, ratings.
• They tag their videos
• They allow and encourage embedding (I can’t get it to work here for some reason!)
• They have different sharing functions: Share to e-mail, to mobile (only text), to Facebook and a permalink (my favorite)
• They present related videos
• They have a page for most viewed, best rated, most commented etc. (Don’t go there, you’ll end watching a whole lot of videos!)
• They have adapted the advertising format. A short preroll and a long postroll (it doesn’t show up too often though)

Well, just go there and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. And for all the competitors, look and learn!

Here’s the most viewed video on the site:

If you know any other sites from main stream media doing it this right, please leave a comment.

This report from Jacob Nielsen, who is a web design and usability expert, presents here some interesting findings from an eye-tracking study. The study shows that users rarely look at advertising on websites.

- Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad, Nielsen writes.

Below are some heat maps from the eye-tracking study.

Nielsen mentions that they haven’t researched these effects with embedded ads in online video and that it is possible that those ads will be looked at more often. I defenetly think that ads in online video will show much better results in a test like this. I also see this weakness of traditional banner advertising as a great opportunity for online video.

Sportal is showing the way!

Sportal.se is the third site in Sweden to use the MMS online video measuring standards! The site came up on the list just this week but can’t show proper statistics yet. This is a big surprise to me since the incentives to follow the standard has been low, specially for smaller sites. I thought for a long time that no one would dare to go public with their numbers because of the dominance of Aftonbladet and SVT.

I don’t know how effective this move will be for the video advertising offer of Sportal, but it will defenetly work as an invitation for other smaller sites to join the standard. I’ve also heard about a bigger site that soon will join the standard. So, maybe we’ll have an equivalent list to the KIA-index, but for online video sooner than expected.

Background

In april 2007, Media Measurements in Scandinavia (MMS), Ecentric/Resoner, SVT and Aftonbladet developed a new standard for measuring online video traffic. Until now, there has only been two sites on the list, SVT and Aftonbladet. Read more here.