The 2013 Wistia Rap-Up

It’s been a big year here at Wistia, with an office move, plenty of new faces on the team, and lots of content and product updates. In the spirit of our previous recaps in 2011 and 2012, we figured we’d rap things up with a wrap. I mean, wrap things up with a rap.

You’ve uploaded 1 million videos to Wistia this year — 13 years worth of content! — and 36 hours of Wistia video were watched per minute over the course of 2013. We want to take this opportunity, in the spirit of the holidays, to send our most sincere thanks to all of the people who’ve supported us over the years with your feedback, ideas, and sense of fun. It’s because of all of you that we can forget we’re “working” and enjoy what we’re doing all year long here at Wistia.

Our Favorite Moments of 2013, From Start to Finish

• We gave the Wistia app an old fashioned tune-up.
• The Learning Center was born.
• We updated our Turnstile email collector.
• Some favorite companies talked to us about video testimonials.
• We went on a company ski trip.
• Wistia Labs launched with a hackathon built on Max’s Labs framework.
• We told you about the ring light.
• Closed captions were added to Wistia.
• Chris broke down our scripting process in the Learning Center.
• We played a lot of softball.
• Rand Fishkin from Moz paid the Learning Center a visit.
• We talked to Moz and Pardot about their longform video content.
• Lenny wrote his very own Non Sequitur Friday post.
• Phil and Will from Distilled taught us about advanced video SEO.
• We shared some videos we never published and why they never made it off the cutting room floor.
• We held a Bittersweet Bash to say bye to 50 Grove.
• We did the hustle and some people took our survey.
• We launched Customize, a new way to control your videos.
• We wrote about why we focus on our audience instead of the standard marketing funnel.
• Top Hat Tuesday, our weekly video tip series, launched with a video about mic placement.
• Joe worked on colorblind-accessible heatmaps.
• Chris taught us about getting loose for the camera.
• We [redesigned][29] the Wistia blog.
• Chris and Justin got creative with DSLR lenses.
• We moved to our new office, but not without a final ode to 50 Grove in the form of shareable play counts.
• We wrote about our approach to metrics for video: the things you can and can’t measure.
• We wrote about why being authentic on camera works and how to be more human with video.
• We added three new integrations to Turnstile and wrote about a few ways to use them.
• Scripting woes? We made a video about smoothing out your script with a table read.
• We talked to a bunch of our favorite professional video educators about teaching with video.
• Jeff explained the process behind our support videos.
• We announced WistiaFest, our May 2014 conference!

Happy holidays! We can’t wait to see what you all do with video in 2014.