Over this past year, we’ve been building a partnership with the highly successful and innovative Seattle-based team, Common Craft. You have likely watched videos from their “In Plain English” series to better understand things like Twitter, RSS, or even how to Prepare an Emergency Kit.

Common Craft produces amazing content and has been able to grow a profitable business while most content producers are still struggling to make any money from online video.

Common Craft makes money by licensing their videos for corporate use. So far, this has meant that companies could pay to download videos that could be played back on a computer or used at a company presentation. But licensing videos for online use was challenging.

But now it’s easy! We’ve joined forces with Common Craft to power their new web license. This means that businesses will get a high quality Common Craft videos and an easy way to share them in one package. Web licensed videos come with a Wistia video sharing account.

Now, a bank to can add the “Saving Money in Plain English” video to their new accounts page to help better educate people opening a new account. The result is high quality on-demand educational content.

You can license Common Craft videos at their website. We’re also making all Common Craft videos available for license to all existing Wistia customers. Just go to “Account Settings” and select “Change Plans”, add a Common Craft video, and start educating your audience.

New customers will notice unlimited contacts immediately. Existing customers, you’ll notice this change in your account on your next billing cycle. In the meantime, feel free to go nuts inviting people beyond your current limits—no need to worry about overages.

Why would we do this?

Because you told us to! When we originally launched Wistia, it was only for private video sharing and designed for larger businesses. At the time, charging based on the number of users made good sense. It was a fair, predictable, and simple pricing model for our customers. But as our product and business has evolved, this element of our pricing has become increasingly outdated, and you’ve let us know it.

Let us know what you think of this change (or anything else you’ve got on your mind) in the comments!

The Value

YouTube can be a great resource for driving traffic and interest to your own site if used properly. Here are the ways we recommend businesses leverage YouTube.

Search

YouTube is the world’s largest video search engine. Optimizing your videos so that they can be discovered on YouTube is a great strategy to increase your visibility and help to spread your brand.

Viral Spread

YouTube has become the de-facto standard for video embeds and is supported by every social network, blog, and web interface out there. If you’re creating viral content that you want bloggers, tweeters, and facebookers to share, you should be getting your content onto YouTube.

Driving Traffic

YouTube can help drive brand-awareness, but the ultimate goal is to drive traffic to your website. Can a viewer buy your product on YouTube? Nope. You need to hook them and bring them back to your site.

The Costs

There is a cost for all this free video hosting. The root of this issue really comes down to a difference in priorities. Your priority is to use video to drive more business. YouTube’s priority is to maximize the visitors that stay on YouTube in order to drive ad revenue. You want to bring visitors to your site and YouTube wants to keep them on its site.

Content Rights

YouTube needs the ability to make money on every piece of content that enters their system. So be aware that when you upload to YouTube, you’re granting them license to do whatever they want with your content. Here it is in their terms of service.

“…by submitting User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions in connection with the YouTube Website and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the YouTube Website (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.”

Branding

Perhaps the most obvious drawback of using YouTube embeds on your website is all of your videos will now feature YouTube’s logo in the bottom right corner. Would you display an ad for your web hosting provider on every page in exchange for free hosting? Not likely.

Related Videos

Want to embed a YouTube video on to your company’s site? Great idea, except for one thing: you’ve now created a permanent link on your website right back to YouTube — not the best idea for your sales funnel. And more than that, at the end of your video, YouTube displays a list of “related videos”. Imagine your product demo finishes playing and YouTube pops up your competitor’s products!

Blocked Messages

YouTube is an entertainment destination. And just like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, it’s blocked by corporate networks around the world. If you’re selling to other businesses, you should be certain they can see your videos.

The Bottom Line

Treat free video hosting as free advertising for your company or product. Drive interested visitors back to your website like you would with any other marketing channel so that you can push those visitors through your funnel.

Marketing With Video

The people in the “Marketing With Video” camp are usually selling a product or service and using video to better explain that product or service. This typically takes the form of incorporating video into a direct marketing campaign like a newsletter or promotion. The simplest example of “Marketing WITH Video” is a company adding video to its website to summarize its product. Other examples of “Marketing With Video” include:

• Gathering actionable data on user engagement to help optimize a purchase funnel
• Incorporating video into e-mail marketing campaigns to understand which prospects are particularly interested
• Using recorded webinars as a source of lead generation.

Here’s an example of “Marketing With Video”. This video is designed to better inform a web visitor about some elements of a product once they’re on our site. It wouldn’t be nearly as useful if viewed on YouTube.

The common thread of “Marketing With Video” is that the video is designed to better market things to someone who is already engaging with your company because they’re on your website, signed up for your newsletter, downloaded a whitepaper, or perhaps registered with you at a trade show.

Marketing A Video

Businesses who think of Video Marketing as “Marketing A Video” are generally trying to build brand awareness for their company/products. This is done by giving viewers a taste of the brand or concept in a concise package that can travel anywhere and that is designed to be shared. Taken to its extreme a video will be so compelling that it will market itself and you have created the elusive viral video. For this reason, these types of videos are generally more about entertainment and less about explanation.

Once the video has been created, it is often pushed out to as many of the consumer video sharing sites as possible (YouTube, Vimeo, blip.tv, etc.). These videos are often accompanied by a social media campaign, reaching out to bloggers and posting on Twitter, to try and generate buzz (and views) for the company’s video. For companies in this camp, they can either manually manage the whole process of marketing their video, or they can use third party tools like TubeMogul. TubeMogul allows companies to push videos to several different video sharing sites simultaneously and track the views across all of those channels in a single dashboard.

Here’s a great example of a “Marketing A Video” campaign that turned out to be a viral success. I’m unsure exactly what it’s for, but I like it!

So, why does this matter?

These differentiations are important because understanding them can be the difference between solving your problems quickly and being lost in the mire of marketing-speak website after marketing-speak website. Do you find this differentiation important? How would you improve upon these definitions?

Let us know if you spot them in the wild!

The Shirts

The Ad

Now that we have a wealth of video tracking data at our fingertips, we thought we’d put the old “shorter is better” theory to the test.

The Initial Test

We worked with one of our customers who has been testing two variations of the same video. The red line in the graph above represents the engagement of their 30-second video. The blue line is the engagement graph for a 90-second video. It’s expected that these two videos would have different engagement graphs, but what’s odd is that the first 30 seconds of both videos are identical!

Even though viewers were exposed to the same exact content, the drop-off rate of the 90-second video was much higher. By the end of the 30-second video there were about double the number of viewers than at the same point in the 90-second video.

A Wider Look

Our initial test got us thinking. Does this hold true on a larger scale? We decided to look at completion percentages across the thousands of videos we host.

We were right! Shorter videos are more engaging than longer videos, but there are some other unexpected trends. The average 30-second video was viewed 85% of the way through, while the average 2-minute video was viewed on average 50% of the way through. That is a very fast viewership drop-off. But what’s surprising is that the average viewing percentage stays quite consistent for 2-minute videos to 10-minute videos. That means the time spent watching is increasing almost proportionally with the video length during this period. Take a look:

What does this mean?

The data is quite clear, shorter videos are more engaging than longer videos. For videos 2 minutes and under, you should strive to make your content as short and punchy as possible to guarantee the highest engagement. If your video is 30 seconds or under, it’s very likely that most people will watch it all the way through.

If your message is more complex, be comfortable taking the time to explain it, but understand that half of your audience won’t make it to the end of the video. With this in mind, you would be well served to front-load your video with the most important parts of your message.

Understanding the relationship between video length and viewer engagement can help you ensure that your audience is getting the most out of your videos.

The Early Finisher was excited enough to click play but lost interest almost immediately. Most of the time this means that they didn’t get what they were expecting, and expectations for the video are predominately set by the thumbnail. An easy fix is to change your still frame to something that provides a better explanation of what’s in the video. Another common issue that creates an early finisher is the “slow start”. Viewers expect instant gratification when watching video, especially when they’re watching commercial videos. Keeping a title screen up for even just 5 seconds can easily cause 20% of your audience to leave.

The Skipper, just like his Gilligan’s Island counterpart, is an under-appreciated player. This guy or gal skips throughout the video looking for an answer to a question or just for something that interests them. They’re trying to find something interesting and sometimes they will (like the example below). The skipper is far more common on long videos. We’ve found that the best solution is to break up your videos into logical bite-sized pieces. For example, instead of having one long demo reel, our friends at Lilipip (an animation studio) showcase a number of shorter videos in one playlist. Helping people find what they want quickly is the key to keeping a skipper happy.

The Sherlock is a deeply engaged and inquisitive viewer. They are clearly trying to get something out of your video. This also means that they are highly interested in what you are providing. There’s no fix for this because having a Sherlock is great! What you should do is focus on the areas the Sherlock is most interested in and decide if their interest is unique or an indication of larger interest. Do whatever you can to talk to your Sherlocks. We put the Olark chat widget onto our website (you can see it on the lower-right of this page) so that we can make sure that we engage with our most interested viewers.

I made the screencast of 4 Advantages in a couple of hours in an afternoon. I worked off of the post as a basis for the script, which meant that writing only took about 20 minutes! I recorded everything, pieced it together and what you see below is the finished screencast. I made the video with ScreenFlow 2.0, which is a nice update to the previous version.

Let me know what you think of the conversion to video. Would you rather read the post or watch the video? Which one made the concepts easier to understand? We’d love to know what you think!

Why are webinars valuable?

For the viewer, webinars provide a way to learn something new about a process, product, approach, or feature. In exchange the viewer is asked to give up their email and any other relevant contact information. For the host, webinars present a way to connect with a new audience. In return the host gets more leads, it’s a simple and overall valuable arrangement.

So why are webinars more valuable than previously thought?

They can be recorded. The first time the webinar is presented it creates value. But by simply recording your webinar it can continue to create value for months (and sometimes even years). Here are a couple of easy ways to get more from your recorded webinars.

• Feature it as a resource on your website
• Use it as the main event of an email campaign
• Have your sales team send it as follow up to prospects
• Provide access to those who couldn’t attend live

But how much value will my recorded webinar really add?

We’ll measure it. With webinars coming in at 30 and 90 minutes  in length, they are 15-50x longer than the average marketing video. NO ONE will watch 30 minutes (let alone 90) of something that isn’t interesting. This is a powerful point. By tracking those people that actually do watch your video you’ll learn which individuals are most interested in your topic (not a bad starting point for the sales team) and what interests people most in your webinar (so you can learn how to make your next webinar even better).

And here’s a teaser from a future post, a couple of the common ways we see people watching recorded webinars.

Just take a look at these 3 examples. It took me no time flat to whip up these beauties! Click here to see them in Wistia.

What can I do with this?

• Create web forms – Create a form right next to your video and let your prospects sign up for your mailing list, register for a webinar, or even buy your product.
• Co-brand your content - Doing reviews and approvals with a client? Feature your customer’s logo in the project and make them feel right at home.
• Link to other content - Link viewers back to your website or to other content within your Wistia account.

How do I use it?

1. Navigate to a project or a media in your account.
2. Click ‘Create Sidebar Element’ from the Actions menu.
3. Add a ‘Description’ element.
4. Then click the ‘Edit’ link at the bottom of your new description element.

You can toggle between advanced and simple editing modes and for those HTML nuts out there, you can even edit the source directly. The possibilities are endless.

We’re really looking forward to see how you guys use this.