Video Is The New Killer App: Search, Shopping, News and Products

By M.E. Marra 

Online video has received a lot of attention in Social Media — social search sites such as MySpace and YouTube (owned by Google) that offer groups, profiles, blogs, video posts and searchable databases through which these online communities locate like-minded members and communicate.  ComScore Networks monitored traffic for online videos at five major sites for one month, October to November 2006, and saw traffic bump up by 19%. And it’s not just music videos anymore: A 2006 Online Media Survey from Piper Jaffray found 51% of online video watchers are viewing news videos; while 26% and 41% watched TV shows or movie previews, respectively. Product & Shopping Search.  So much for the news, information and entertainment consumption of online video, noted above. Comparison shopping engines and product shopping sites were quick to adopt images and videos as “search keywords” to access their products. For example, fashion site Like.com offers celebrity look-alike handbags, hats and accessories, all searchable by photos and video clips of the famously fashionable.  Comparison shopping engines — which aggregate different brands and labels at one shopping site – often feature not only search-by-image capabilities to visitors; but some also offer interactive video features for “virtual try-on,” on-the-fly color changes, or matching up clothing separates into new ensembles. 

Video Mashups.  Now a collaboration among Yahoo! Video, Huffington Post political news site and online magazine Slate offers the tools, video clips and access to users who search, create and edit their own video newscasts. These user-created video mashups are set up to provide individualized Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate Videos. However, the video tools’ application to product marketing, search and e-Commerce is only a matter of time. Salon e-Magazine and Huffington Post web site worked with a long list of user-submitted debate questions for presidential candidates, which were asked and videotaped via TV personalities Charlie Rose and Bill Maher, as multiple Democratic Presidential Candidates answered at length. This front-end production of the video clip information base eliminated middle men typical of TV broadcast debates: No pundits, No moderators, No show producers, and No short time clocks or forced sound-byte answers. Enter Yahoo! Video, which stores the scannable video clips and offers Yahoo’s web-based video editing tool called “Jumpcut.” Site visitors select the questions and issues in which they are most interested; pull video clip answers; and digitally cut-n-paste together their own candidate debate tape, including editing out windbags, rambling and repetitive replies! 

Voila! Personalized debate video mashups. Sterling Market Intelligence analyst Greg Sterling noted that this new video widget from Yahoo! allows people to compare interviews and candidate positions “side-by-side on issues of concern. Sort of like online comparison shopping.”  Outside of informed citizenship and individually edited political debate, there are practical and commercial marketing applications for this video editing tool kit.  Eric Cho, in a recent Search Engine Marketing Hints, tried to prepare for the leap from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0 applications. Cho speculated that we finally accepted the “old” Web 2.0 innovations of human editors and the influence of social sites, over what he calls “traditional SEO, where we manipulate keywords, get links, submit to directories, etc.” Then comes the latest Killer App, video, which Cho calls the booming media avenue. Cho’s predictions: We’re watching TV; watching our families, friends and social groups; and communicating online, rather than over telephones (landline, cellular of VoIP). And we’re doing all of this via video fed through one single device.   “There will definitely be a big evolution with video search and Video SEO and PPC in the coming years,” says Eric Cho. Blame it on the next killer app: video.