Last night, right after President Barack Obama’s first press conference, my spouse, Tom Vilot, instant messaged me in a burst of irritation: “How do I find video from the talk Obama just gave? I can’t find it on YouTube, and the site for PBS isn’t a lot of help.”
He wanted video, so he instinctively turned first to YouTube (the most popular video-sharing site) and to the Web site associated with the station he watched the press conference on (PBS). And when he didn’t find it there, he got frustrated.
I recommended that he check Whitehouse.gov, which as it turned out did not have the video online immediately after the event (although the site did stream it through its site, and did post a full text transcript immediately).
My first thought was to go to the Google News aggregator and search for Obama speech video. Near the top of the search results was this brand new post from Gothamist, which included a synopsis of the event and embedded video from msnbc.com. That, in turn, led me to msnbc.com’s video coverage, which was available online immediately after Obama’s press conference.
This made me think: I don’t believe my spouse’s instincts, or his immediate frustration, were unusual for a media consumer these days. I suspect his experience and reaction are indicative of where a large part of the news market is going.
Notice: It didn’t occur to him to go to a news org site other than PBS; there are so many news sites, so where do you start? In this case, when trying to make a fast choice among news brands, news consumers gamble that any given site will have the format of content they want. From their perspective, that’s a Coke vs. Pepsi kind of decision — and likely to waste their time.
Since video is such a powerful medium, and since YouTube is eminently popular and often the first place net users look for video, then perhaps it makes sense for more news organizations to post video of live events to their site immediately after an a live event.
By doing this — and by making their video embeddable — msnbc.com got immediate mileage out of amplifying blog posts like Gothamist’s. In an aggregator-driven environment where the newest stories are always displayed most prominently, it makes sense to get your content distributed as widely as possible so it pops up more often. Embeddable video makes that very easy and appealing.
But even more importantly, more news orgs could immediately cross-post their live event video to YouTube (with, of course, a link back to full coverage on their sites), where it will be more easily finadable to all the growing number of people who don’t have a strong attachment to any particular news brand. As my spouse’s experience indicates, it’s also crucial to quickly add key descriptors, tags, links and other metadata to your initial YouTube video. This makes it vastly easier to find fast via simple, intuitive searches.
Both parts of this video distribution strategy might entail some compromise on production or editing standards for the “right-away” initial video post, just to get it uploaded to your site and YouTube as quickly as possible. It doesn’t need to be complete, or polished. Of course, YouTube videos are not exactly known for general quality, so anything professional will have an inherent advantage. This might be a hard choice for professional news orgs — which often take great pride in their polished presentation — to make. But for the online audience, findability and immediacy are key.
Is right-away video worth setting up a system (including a YouTube channel) to distribute widely? I suspect so. Online news traffic capitalizes on spikes of sudden public interest. Msnbc.com played a short ad before the Obama press conference video — and it made good money from that, I’m sure. Making the video embeddable also likely drew traffic in from all over the Web. And thus, more news consumers have a chance to identify the msnbc.com brand with timely usefulness.
