Beep!!! Don’t believe everything you hear!

In this edition of the Friday Podcast, I compare various channels like text, audio and video and you’ll see that there’s still life in the other channels.

Click on the “More” tab to access the notes.

Video is the buzzword, and according to some pundits you might even think that current traffic wave is just video, video, video.

Text: easiest to create, easy to distribute, lowest barrier of entry,
skim and go through it quickly, unlike audio or video.
enormous depth of information.
low bandwidth.
downside:
has lowest perceived value.

Audio/podcast: perfect for multitasking.
listen to audio while driving, working out, in bed, while cleaning the desk.
unless person is sitting down to listen to podcast, not suited to presenting complex information.
probably most compact.
A single CD contains about 10 hours of MP3 audio.
An MP3 player or cell phone with MP3 function could contain hundreds of hours of audio.
downside:
very high noise-to-signal ratio. everyone and his mother can produce an audio.
very linear medium. need to follow through with it, step by step. not really easy to jump around.

Video:
key advantages:
-branding: physical face
-great for complex info: a 5 min video could present info from 20 pages of text easily and pictures, combined with audio create an easy to understand medium.
downside:
bandwidth intensive.
requires pretty speedy internet connection.
concept of personal TV broadcast station – getting abused.

–
Bottomline: each medium has its pros and cons.
Video is great and 2007 might be the year of video, metacafe, revver, magnify, bubble ply,
I don’t buy argument that video is everything.
That’s as silly as saying that Internet news is going to put newspapers and magazines out of business.

Maximize your effectiveness, need to understand the strengths and shortcomings of each medium and match it to your marketing campaign appropriately.

Take the SERPs for Internet Marketer Rachel Rofe:

Her video clip shot during the recent JV Alert seminar is a blurb for The Next Internet Milionaire. Yet it comes in as result 4, a little below her MySpace profile, personal blog and LinkedIn profile.

It certainly looks impressive.

Another search for Internet Marketer Anik Singal, shows a clip from Affiliate Summit 2006 East coming in as result 8 out of 69,300.

This result ranks above his ezinearticles profile page. Pretty amazing.

And expanding the “+ Watch video” tab, opens an embedded player:

So you need not even leave the SERPs to view the video.

Pretty impressive.

Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz also notes that revshare video site MetaCafe’s clips are appearing in Google Video’s results.

If traffic is going to be consolidated at Google’s web properties, would traffic be involuntarily “stuck” at Google or one of its subsites?

More importantly, is this going to be a “good” thing?

Another interesting development has been my discovery of an additional search tab:

For a brief moment, I was able to pull up an additional table with additional options.

I wasn’t able to replicate this result, but it certainly shows that there are more comprehensive search options in store.

Will video be the next step in Google’s content indexing strategy after text-based information?

All the signs seem to indicate so.

Kelvin Hui’s Ambatch.com provided an opportunity for users to embed links to video content services, in exchange for 100% of the adsense revenue. The original video portal is no longer available, although several new sub-portals have been launched.

I’d tried that for a time, although it seemed like the majority of the users were based in Asia and the bulk of users were on the Chinese language interface. English content posters seemed to be in the minority.

Enter MetaCafe, a video content hosting and publishing platform which rewards users for posting original content.

To date, some of the content publishers have done very well:

Lest you think the accrued figure as impossible to achieve, look at the listed videos when I visited recently:

The “Blondie Unlocks Car” video clip has earned $1,851 over a period of 3 days and will continue to accrue earnings.

Need further encouragement?

How about:

How to Shower – Men and Women accrued an impressive 207,000 views (approximately equal to $1,000 in payment) over a 24 hour period.

With a single video having that revenue potential, do lightbulbs go off for video’s money making potential?

Given the viral nature of video, viewers forwarding the link to friends continue to help the content owner rack up more video views.

Content owners are rewarded at the rate of $5 per 1,000 views when the viewers give positive feedback.

The videos have to be original and you must have the rights to it. Though it may seem daunting to some, it does keep the barrier of entry high for your competition and provide you with a “long tail” revenue stream.

In the case of some videos which have hit millions of views, the revenue potential could be quite substantial.

Has video, and more importantly, a monetization model for video, come of age?

We won’t know with certainty now, but MetaCafe looks set to give everyone else a run for their money.