Add to this the diminishing numbers of eyeballs for television compared to that of online, and you may be thinking I’m about to point out the bleeding obvious.

But, I’m not really interested in the move from TV to online. Well I am, but, this conversation is already maturing and the data is all there for everyone to see.

I’m more interested in how TV could be used to seed an online experience- a push pull approach that’s more effective and makes much more economic sense.

Returning back to my short pseudo scientific study of the Kevin Bacon YouTube phenomenon [YouTube has since removed that video], where Graham Norton’s TV program increased the number of views for that particular Kevin Bacon video by 600+ overnight – and then WOM increased it by another 30,00 views over the following week – it was clear that the diffusion of the information through online and offline WOM plaid the bigger role in spreading the video. But, TV definitely plaid its part in getting the ball rolling.

More importantly this was not an expensive TV ad, but a mention on a TV program which was targeted at an audience that was more likely to find it funny and have friends who also shared their sense of humour.

If we translate this to TV advertising – let’s not spend all the marketing budget on the TV ad experience, which most people are not going to see it and out of those that do, few will act on it. Instead use TV as a cheap trigger to a more satisfying online experience. Kind of make TV not the main course which is a very expensive main course, but a targeted entrée – that’s cheaper to produce and aired on a cheaper slot which is more focussed to an audience that’s more likely to watch it and spread the message.

Spend the lion’s share of the budget on hte product and creating a useful engaging online experience which is more likely to spread and gain attention for a longer period.

Now five days later it has just under 30,000 views. We can assume that the first jump was mainly just from the TV show. Old school push media to kick-start the viral effect. Usually the impact of TV on online after a few hours is very limited. So the biggest growth must have come from the WOM effect – people recommending the video either in conversation in the pub or online through, IM, email and social networks

None of this is going to surprise any marketers connecting their online and offline strategies – for those that haven’t I think this provides a fairly compelling argument. While TV viewers may have a short attention span, if you use TV to drive an online exploration you can get more bang for your buck.

As the TV program ended there were 1800 views. Today there’s over 8000. Was expecting more from TV, but not bad

Similar to Adsense (contextual advertising) – A publisher can have videos from youTube embedded on their site with ads placed above and below the video.

The Publisher can chose to have content from a specific content provider, by content or let the system decide based on your on-page content.

The advertiser is charged for every click or impression and revenue is shared between Google, the content provider and the publisher.

Could mean content providers get a chance to monetize their content. Publishers get to make their sites more interesting and provide a better user experience. And Google finally get a change to make money from youTube.

But this could be a nightmare for brand and reputation managers. If I was to put up contextual Video Adsense next to my post about Mcdoanlds providing free Wifi– are my visitors likely to see the video of Louis Ogborn strip searched at a mcdonald’s in Kentucky – currently ranking 1 in YouTube for Mcdonalds?

Guess we are going to have to wait and see how this pans out.

There’s a lot of useful information about the evolution of video search engines, from first generation early engines, where meta data and proximity of text close to the video file was all that was used, to more advance engines like Blinkx which analysers the actual spoken words in the video.

Submitting sitemaps in XML and RSS as well as creating and submitting multiple formats was something I hadn’t thought about. There’s also some discussion on Spam tagging and some of the ways Blinkx is dealing with this growing problem.

The content is fairly thin, but useful nevertheless. And as it’s a Wiki, there’s every likelihood that this could grow into a very useful resource on the subject.

They plan to develop an online video platform for publishing ‘their’ network content, and cash in on the popularity of their material on YouTube.

If I’ve got this right – The media companies that is responsible for producing 5-10% of the most popular videos on YouTube, plan to create a rival, by publishing that content on their own site. So, the other 90% of video content on YouTube has nothing to do with its success. The report doesn’t say anything about sharing or contributing either.

Coverage: Reuters