Turning Engagement into Money : SplashCast Blog

Turning Engagement into Money

Posted on June 5, 2009
Posted by Tom Turnbull

From the user’s perspective, the idea behind SplashCast’s “Social TV” product is to make watching TV online more fun.

Let’s be honest, the big screen and couch are a match made in heaven.   We believe that getting masses of people to watch TV on a relatively small computer screen requires a fundamentally different user experience.  Playing video on a laptop as if it were an expensive TV isn’t very interesting (which is the current state of online video).  This is where SplashCast comes in.  We combine social features, such as video time chat (Chatter), games, and more to create a unique, more engaging experience.

Social TV answers the question “why should I watch TV online?”

We have learned a lot about how social TV features impact engagement with long-form TV content (22 and 42 minute episodes).  Viewers spend more time with video on a computer if there is something more to do than just watch.  Very specifically, we have seen our average session time increase by 50% to 14 minutes on average.  This is a good result, in and of itself.  See chart below.

SplashCast’s Engagement Performance

From a business perspective, our goal is to translate longer session times into better performing advertising campaigns.

Take for example a recent ad campaign for Right Guard.  The goal of the campaign was to drive users to a Right Guard micro-site within Facebook and MySpace, where their branded video content was presented.  From SplashCast’s perspective, the higher the click-through-rate (CTR) to the mirco-site, the higher our margins (we get paid by Right Guard on a click-to-microsite basis).

When we initially launched the campaign, the micro-site was promoted solely through a banner ad position at the top of our TV applications.  During this phase of the campaign, the CTR to the micro-site hovered around 1.5% on a per session basis.  This was a pretty good result, but didn’t it take full advantage of our very high session times.

We implemented a very simple change that made a very big difference.

Chris Paul ChatterBy adding in-line ads in the Chatter stream promoting the Right Guard video content, we saw the CTR increase by 2-3x, on a per session basis.  Specific CTRs increased to 4.5%.  The longer people engaged with the video and social content, the more opportunities Right Guard had to engage the viewer with creative, branded content.  Simple. The difference in the economics for the ad campaign campaign was enormous.  As we incorporate games, and other social features, there will be even more advertising performance upside.

We are finding ways to convert “engagement” into real money.

In summary, there are two related goals for Social TV: (1) increase engagement time; and (2) find ways to leverage engagement to drive advertising performance.

Comments

8 Responses to “Turning Engagement into Money”

  1. bernardo rodriguez on June 6th, 2009 6:25 am

    Congratulations on your SocialTV product. You are one of the very few experimenting with good ideas and execution on this space.

    You mentioned that your CTR per session increased. What about the CTR per impression of the ad ? (is easy to increase it per user session if you print more ads)

    Thanks

  2. Tom Turnbull on June 6th, 2009 7:54 am

    We would advise against simply printing new ads. Any new ad position must be carefully integrated.

  3. Randy Allen on June 18th, 2009 2:08 pm

    Tom,

    Please have your customer service dept respond to my inquiry.

  4. Randy Allen on June 20th, 2009 3:37 pm

    Tick tock, tick tock………

  5. marvin estipular on June 27th, 2009 7:35 am

    i cannot view you tube again sir…. the you tube stop functioning again sir… could you fix it plzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… we hope u gonna have action to this issue thank you very much

  6. Tom Turnbull on June 27th, 2009 8:07 am

    Marvin, we have discontinued our free service. We are focusing on our Social TV product. See:

    http://blog.splashcastmedia.com/2009/05/16/notice-to-splashcast-ugc-publishers/

  7. scott on July 17th, 2009 4:24 pm

    i can do this all night becues i cant sleep with out her in my life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i love you here my number 601-323-4568 Alicia Keys

  8. Pelez on July 20th, 2009 12:28 am

    Торренты - это гениально. Вы только задумайтесь, каким образом можно заставить миллионы людей предоставлять свое дисковое пространство и каналы, при этом совершенно бесплатно. Мне кажется, это один из крупнейших интернет-прорывов за последние годы

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    SplashCast is a leading provider of social marketing solutions that gives brands direct access to teens and young adults where they live: social networks.



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