Castfire

The Bamboo Project Blog: Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting On Your Blog

Many of the commenters in Chris’s thread are complaining that they don’t get comments on their blogs, something bloggers eternally discuss. It got me to thinking about how some people create an environment that invites conversation and some people don’t. Since a major reason to blog is for that give-and-take, obviously a lack of comments causes a problem.

Some of the reasons for a lack of comments go back to things like the 1% rule or the fact that you may be operating in a really tiny niche that doesn’t generate a lot of interest.  But after clicking through  to some of the blogs in Chris’s comments thread,  I began to see a pattern of behaviors that I think may be contributing to the lack of comments and therefore are extremely instructive. The result is:

Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting on Your Blog

Guilty as charged on this one. I think I can fall into all six categories!

What do you think? How many do I fall into?

Yesterday, iTunes published their Best of 2007 Podcast, ranked, we assume, by the number of subscribers to the feed. As iTunes is pretty stingy with their stats, one must assume they used that metric as there is no mention of editorial selection.

They broke the list into two categories, New This Year and Classics, with sub categories of audio and video. I agree completely with Chris Albrecht in his commentary at NewTeeVee:

It’s amusing to think of The Onion as “new” and Ask a Ninja as “classic,” but whatever, both make me laugh. And while it’s obvious that both of those podcasts carry an established audience, it’d be nice to know how Apple’s editorial choices match up with the popular choice, but the company’s pretty stingy with stats, listing only the top podcast of the day.

I am a details guy and was intrigued to do further analysis.

Classics: Video

*While Vintage Toon Cast is Indie, their content is public domain cartoon classics. A bit of a mix!

Production reflects Main Stream Media, "Professional" production (Revision 3, DECA, Next New Networks, etc), or Independent.  This is not to say that an Indie property is not professional, rather, it still maintains the 2 people and a camcorder upbringing!  Ads are reported as Online, Offline (downloadable media), Both or None. Hosting is my best guess (after some digging) as to what company, if any, is hosting/publishing the content (hey - we’re a publishing company and I’m interested).

My analysis of ads is only from the past couple of episodes and not over the past year. It does not take into account any of use of non video ads (banners, text, etc) or associated monetization (DVD sales, t-shirts, etc).

For hosting, there are sometimes multiple entries.  For instance, Cool Hunting Video is hosted by Brightcove for flash delivery (online) and on Amazon’s S3 for their downloadable media. I am not wizard enough to tell if there is an additional CMS or publishing system for the self hosted and left it as ‘Self’.

For the Classics, there is quite a spread between Indie, MSM and Pro productions, with Indie pulling a 50% share. 70% of the top ten are using advertising, in one way or another, to support the property. What is interesting in this breakdown, however, is that this is generated by iTunes and only capturing downloadable media and not online plays. Therefore, the monetization for this ranking drops to 50% for the properties.

New This Year: Video

Definitions from Classics apply to the New category.

What is interesting is the definite shift of Indie production to Pro/MSM for new properties. It dropped from 50% in the Classics to 10% in the New category. One conclusion can be that the "Classics" (I guess that is something over a year old!), were founded with a couple of people, a passion and a camcorder. 2007 is the year that production companies and MSM have gone after this segment.  It also makes sense that the newer properties are not monetized as well as the Classics as they are still building audiences and developing ad strategies.

Most important, and not reflected in the analysis above, content is still king. After seeing some of the episodes, I immediately subscribed and look forward to catching up with back episodes. There is a ton of funny, insightful and educational content in these 20 properties. Kudos to everyone involved.

Sampling this content makes me question my Comcast bill for cable that I pay every month!

Developer’s Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code

The Google Chart API is the bee’s knees.  What a great, simple tool for fast web development!  It is so incredibly simple and cool:

50k impressions a day is a limitation that could be challenging, but it is so tempting to incorporate.  My mind is going crazy with the possibilities!

A lot of time and effort go into both developing and using API’s.  Their strengths are documented throughout many products on the web. For me personally, Twitter and Flickr have been models of API’s that change the way I created applications. Looking at an API makes my imagination wander, my drive to tinker and create go wild.

However, API’s also require a certain level of aptitude. The user must understand the basics of programming, know what data to capture, what data to store, etc. In the end, an API may be used by millions but only understood by a small percentage of that.  There is, however, an API that we all know how to use: email.

[Side note: my fiancee pointed out to me the other day that I usually spell it "e-mail" with the hyphen. That's the way it was originally spelled.  She said I was showing my age!]

When we created our ftp functionality, we wanted to incorporate an easy method for publishers to be able to use the URL’s and embed statements in their websites without having to log back into Castfire. To accomplish this, after ftp’ing files to Castfire, two e-mails are sent:

1. Acknowledge the files have been uploaded and provide back the URL’s and embed statement for the new episode.  It also states that these files are not currently ready as they are being transcoded.
2. A final e-mail stating that the transcoding has finished and it is available for publishing.

The email is also "smart" because the directory structure of the publisher’s ftp site mirrors the hierarchy of their account. So a network login sees directories for each content producer and channel, as well as directories for each media type (intro, outro, promo).  Each content producer login sees a subset of the network. So a publisher can upload new episodes into the correct channel without having to log in to Castfire - including shows that have multiple content segments.

In addition, default settings, including filenames, metadata, and status can be set for each channel.  This is a huge time savings for the publisher as you can set it once and rarely have to revisit it.

We view these e-mails emails as the most basic API possible!  FTP and email have been around just about as long as the internet and are accessible to a great majority of web users. While it is possible to log in and publish shows through our CMS, it is many times faster and easier to ftp 10 new videos and get an email back when they are complete.

TV Week has a great article on the success of video properties, including a Castfire client, Ask a Ninja. We have been very fortunate to work with Ask a Ninja since March, 2007 - we are tremendous fans of the show.

Online Fame Easy; Ads Harder to Get - TVWeek - News

Near the top of the pile sit Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine, who have parlayed their "Ask a Ninja" Web program into about $100,000 a month in ad revenue and income from merchandising and licensing.

Andy Plesser from Beet.tv follows up with:

Seems that Federated Media is doing a good job in selling ads for the show.  And the tiny San Francisco start-up CastFire is doing an impressive job in publishing the video.

Thanks, Andy!  You are correct - FM is killing it! They have taken advantage of Castfire’s functionality to rotate ads through archives and downloadable media to maximize profits for their publishers. We continue to see growth in all properties which is being accelerated with our Bebo, Facebook and video search engine integration.

Congrats to Kent and Doug on their continued success with Ask a Ninja.

In November, Castfire began powering a video ad campaign with Federated Media and The IT Room that runs on some of the largest technology blogs and sites, including Digg, GigaOM, TechCrunch, Boing Boing, Mashable and more.  While video ad units are nothing new on websites, the campaign was integrated into the RSS feeds of almost all of the sites as well.  In addition, the campaign was comprised of 8 separate videos, of which all of them have been updated or changed throughout time.  The technical hurdles were quite large, but Castfire’s automation, player templating and analytics data warehouses have enable all of the demands.

If you are not familiar with some of the challenges of working with RSS feeds, there are two key areas that needed to be addressed immediately.  First off, the feeds are generally cached by online feedreaders, stripping javascript and other code from the xml.  This removes the ability for an ad server to directly interact with each impression.  Additionally, the many of the large feed readers do not allow for flash components to be used directly in the reader.

Custom players and tracking codes were generated for each of the sites - both the RSS unit and the 300×250 unit, with each of the 8 videos loaded for each.  Publishers were provided a single block of html to place into their RSS feed, for which Castfire is able to manage.  Castfire’s automation and player templates provides the ability for random videos to be played, or for Federated Media to update/change the creative at any time.

Castfire has also worked with many of the online feed readers to ensure that our video players are whitelisted and allowed to be displayed within the reader.  This is a key to this campaign’s success; without being able to view the player, it would be impossible to watch the video!

Scale is a big issue when looking at a campaign like this - RSS can be brutal and some of the sites have the largest RSS audiences out there!  At the time of this blog post, Feedburner reports TechCrunch’s subscribers at 624k.  For each post on all of the sites, a player is displayed, analytics collected, and a video may be played.  Tens of millions of impressions for this single campaign - not including any of the standard episodic content that is published.

The final piece of the puzzle is analytics to which our data warehousing efforts come shining through.  Castfire creates a separate data warehouse for each network.  With multiple fact tables, tons of dimensions, and incredible detail, reports breakdown sites, player impressions, video plays, click throughs, geo information and more.

While 98% of our customers are publishing branded, episodic content, the value of our audio/video platform becomes more apparent as the system is responsible for more and more uses. It is exciting to see our platform continue to grow and expand. </proud parents>