On the list of top viewed YouTube videos of all time, Boyle’s top video is on position 22, Potts at 28, and Talbot at 35 (as of 13th May). These are the only show videos up in such heights – most other videos here are either music videos or legendary virals such as “The Evolution of Dance“, “Charlie bit my finger“, or the laughing Baby “Hahaha“.

Considering Paul Potts and Connie Talbot are a 2 year old success, it is quite amazing how many views they have attracted consistently, and more so recently, in the wake of Boyle: almost a fifth on Potts and Talbot views were in the last month. For comparison, see the following chart:

Approx development of views on Potts, Talbot and Boyle videos

All three videos have achieved around 50M views. Obviously, BGT is a huge success in social video and has enabled the show to become a world-wide story rather than limited to British borders. But has ITV been able to monetize on the success online?

In 2007, content owners hadn’t really come to grips yet with the value that YouTube presents. Thus, neither the Paul Potts video nor the Connie Talbot video are actually published by ITV. More importantly though, in 2007, YouTube was only starting to develop means to enable content publishers to share in ad revenue on their high performing content. YouTube actually had nothing to offer for these content owners. Nobody can blame ITV for not monetising the YouTube success in 2007.

Seeing all these successes, one would expect that ITV had made arrangements for revenue sharing with YouTube and possibly other sites well before this year’s show in preparation for a potential social video hit. Looking at YouTube, where the overwhelming majority of the success has been focused, it seems, however, that they missed the boat. According to The Times UK, the management at ITV insisted that they wanted special terms from Google for the Susan Boyle video because they saw the videos taking off.

Instead of opting for the YouTube tried-and-tested advertising methods, ITV went into discussions with them and wanted special pre-roll ad options, which YouTube wasn’t able or willing to offer. However, they achieved some special treatment after all, since it is not possible to embed any of the non-offical copies out of YouTube.

While ITV set up their own YouTube channel and show to publish official copies of the top BGT performances online, they could only watch as the user uploaded videos took off. Kudos have to go to ITV for acting generously and not taking down the copies – at least they can now get official numbers on the complete views on their content.

On 24th April, ITV finally published their own BGT channel and show on YouTube. This contains the official “Susan Boyle” video – almost two weeks after her TV appearance.

How will ITV now monetise the videos?

YouTube offers a revenue share model to publishers of high-performing content through a partnership program. This enables advertisers to place the following kinds of adverts next to the partner content:

• InVideo ads: These are little overlays that start at 10s into the video occupying the bottom 20% of the video player and containing Google ads. If a user clicks on it, the video is paused and a new tab opens with the clicked-through link.
• Companion ads: These are a 300x250px banner ads that appear on the watch page of a video of a partner in the prime position next to the video.

These ads can be targeted on user demographics, location, time-of-day and content genre. The content owners receive a 50% share on the CPM charged for these ads.

The ads can be placed on all copies of a piece of content, no matter whether it is published through the official channel of the content owner or through consumer copies. This is just as well for ITV, since the official video of Susan Boyle’s performance is only the 10th best performing Susan Boyle video on YouTube when ordered by view count (on 13th May). For relevance ordered queries, the official video ended up on top for a while, but is now down to position 7 – obviously YouTube’s ranking is based on freshness of a post as well as views.

Assuming the £20 CPM value that is quoted in The Times Online, the top performing video on YouTube alone could have made £1M in advertising revenue, half of which would have gone to ITV – certainly a number that hurts.

Indeed, this number should hurt YouTube as much as ITV, since YouTube only makes money from highly performing videos if the publisher becomes a partner and makes money, too. It should have been in YouTube’s interest to allow advertisements next to the prime performing content as quickly as possible. Maybe this shows a need for an additional revenue model for content owners that is not dependent on them setting up a channel or show with YouTube. YouTube should take this as an opportunity!

In the meantime, ITV is indeed making money on YouTube. Their own videos have seen an amazing number of views in the past weeks and the show keeps coming up with amazing talent. For Hollie Steel, the ITV channel indeed provides the video with the highest view count. More than 30M views have come to BGT content since the 24th April and all of this content bears advertising. This means the ITV channel should now have created approx £600K of ad income – a substantial number indeed.

YouTube is a large international site. Uploaded videos don’t easily rise above the general noise of the site.

If you are prepared to spend some money, there are ways in which videos can be lifted above the noise within YouTube. Particularly good candidates are the YouTube front page and search results pages, where a video will be exposed to many eyes and get a much better chance of being picked up and shared with friends, aka “going viral”.

YouTube Australia offers three different types of advertising on the front page: a masthead, an expandable video unit, and a video ad, each of which can be booked for a 24 hour period. The YouTube front page is localised, so your ads can be exposed to an Australian audience.

If you would like to target your audience further, you may want to consider advertising on search results pages. You can target age group, gender and interest areas of the searchers, thus reaching more valuable eyeballs.

An example of a campaign that has successfully used such an approach is posted on a recent AdAge article: advertsing pushed Geico’s “Numa Numa” video over 500K veiws on the first day, reaching more than 1.3M overall views by now.

There is a myth out there that a social video marketing campaign on YouTube – or more generally on social networks – can be done for free without spending any money on placement. The myth continues that merely publishing good content will automatically make it go viral. This simply is not true. Just because you don’t pay for the original placement, doesn’t mean your campaign can do without media buy expenditure.

There are strategies for exposing videos to more eyeballs – cheaper and more expensive ones. Advertising your social videos is one way – paying experts to execute a seeding strategy is another.

A new social video ad was uploaded on 25th March by Mini. It is about a couple of guys sitting in a car on the German Autobahn and watching two Minis do some crazy moves. At some point the moves become suspiciously unreal and the guys start commenting that they obviously got drawn into a viral video ad. The end consists of typical TV ad titles and the Mini logo.

This video absolutely hits a nerve. The stats that we have collected over the last 3 days are just amazing:

It hit 30,000 views within 3 days and continues to grow. By today it has taken 9 honours on YouTube.

What is it’s secret? Maybe it’s the honesty of the ad. It starts out like a dark viral, but at the minute that it is obviously not real any more, the comments make it funny and the effects are quite cool. There is no shame in confirming it as an ad in the end.

On Tuesday I attended a panel on “Effects Of Transparency: Cash For Comment And The Dark Marketing Debate” by David Lee and Julian Cole. They presented a comprehensive list of dark marketing campaigns, some of which were successful and others backfired. The take-away message was that it is in general a bad idea to keep the consumer in the dark and that transparency needs to become a requirement for marketing campaigns.

It was proposed that the best way to achieve transparency is through the development of a regulation for online marketing campaigns within one of Australia’s leading digital industry bodies AIMIA, AFA, or mfa.

I’d like to respectfully disagree. I don’t think we need a police force for online marketing. The Web is quite a self-regulating environment and all the poorly executed campaigns learnt very quickly that the truth comes out no matter if they want to. Do we really need a law to forbid us to leave the house without a coat in winter, because we could catch a cold?

Who are we trying to protect? Every poorly executed dark campaign has backfired either on the brand or the agency. Has it really had such a negative effect on society that we need to bring out legislation?

Even a call for an “industry code of practice” is too much IMHO. Do we even know what we are asking for and what we are restricting? Let’s not restrict our creativity before we have even explored the new medium and its possibilities in full.

Instead, what we need is education. Education on what works and what doesn’t. After all, the medium is still new and we are all still trying it out. We will get burnt for a bit before we understand the rules under which it works.

For example, there are some very good dark viral video campaigns that are very successful and have not created any negative reactions – not from consumers, not from the mainstream press, not from politics or society. Just check out the first and second example on my blog on “dark viral videos and witchery“.

What we need are “best practices” – examples and case studies of successful campaigns that people can replicate. This will not restrict creativity, but will give those that are uncertain about how to make best use of a new medium the tools to execute successfully. It does not restrict those that are more creative and open to experiments to find out how to make the most of the new medium.