We launched a new design for our TVLoop communities on Facebook tonight. The new TVLoop focuses on the most recent episode of each show to get users to create engaging and relevant content. The result should be the creation of a ton of current content that even recent converts to a show can enjoy. At the same time, this event-centric design offers a variety of new sponsorship opportunities designed to get advertisers in front of users in a more meaningful way. See below to see how the new design has been applied to Addicted to Lost:
We also added some great new features to help get TVLoop into the new and improved Facebook stream on a regular basis. For instance, when a user rates and episode or votes in a poll, they’ll be encouraged to publish those items to their stream. Those types of features are great for viral growth while also offering some nice sponsorship opportunities for advertisers.
The big story in online video today is obviously the Hulu-Disney partnership that has been rumored for the past month. When the deal nets out, all three media companies involved - Disney, Fox, and NBC - will each own 27% of Hulu.
While I haven’t seen any specific dates on when the Disney content will be added to Hulu, I have to agree with TechCrunch that the company that should be most worried about this deal is Google/YouTube. While Hulu is unlikely to ever catch YouTube because of all of the user-generated content YouTube streams, Hulu has much more monetization potential by carrying programming from three of the top four broadcasters.
Another big question that is unlikely to have an answer in the near future is whether or not CBS will now be feeling the heat to do a Hulu deal of it’s own. The network has always maintained that it would always be willing to talk about content distribution, it really had no interest in joining the other networks on Hulu. This strategy seemed to be further strengthened by the relaunch of TV.com a few months ago. PaidContent theorizes that there could end up being some sort of arrangement where Hulu agrees to have it’s content streamed on TV.com if CBS adds it’s programming to Hulu. That could be an interesting deal, but one that is unlikely to come to fruition at any time in the near future.
From a Watercooler perspective, our biggest question is how to treat the programming we currently get from ABC. We’re one of the few third parties that are able to launch the ABC player directly from our communities, but the Hulu flash player is a much better user experience (sorry ABC). ABC requires the download of the Move Networks player which can be a hassle for some users. So from that perspective it would definitely be in our best interest to migrate to Hulu for 100% of ABC content.
TV By the Numbers had previously reported that the creator of Scrubs, Bill Lawrence, was definitely calling it quits after the current season, its first on ABC, finishes. But now The Hollywood Reporter is saying that there may have been a change of heart…at least on the part of ABC and the Lawrence. Zach Braff and other stars of the comedy, which is in its 8th season, may not be as excited to return for another encore.
So should JD, Turk and the gang come back for another season? The almost 800,000 fans of the show across the TVLoop network think so. After a quick poll, that yielded over 500 responses within minutes of sending the invitation to vote, it looks like a whopping 85% are definitely on board with the plans. So among the die-hard Scrubs fans, ABC gets a solid thumbs up.
With over 15 million registered members and almost 2 million monthly active users, TVLoop is a haven for TV fans of all kinds. That’s a big reason why our communities are interesting to networks and content owners - we have a captive audience, many of which are the exact viewers they want to attract.
As I’ve reported previously, some of the most popular TVLoop communities are those for Gossip Girl, One Tree Hill, and other shows from the CW. So when TheWB.com inquired about helping to promote their new web series Rockville CA, we jumped at the chance knowing that our users would eat this content up.
The core focus of the campaign was to build awareness of Rockville CA among the target demographic. The web series is completely new and for the most part, unknown to most consumers. To drive awareness, we wanted to go far beyond simple banner ads as we all know that’s not the right way to reach consumers in a social environment. In fact, everyone should take a minute to read a recent article at Adotas by Watercooler CEO, Kevin Chou on that very subject.
Since engagement is a key path to awareness, we elected to include a few key tactics in the campaign:
Roadblock - to get in front of returning users
Sponsored trivia using video - to expose users to Rockville CA videos in the form of content (see screenshot below)
While the roadblock was moderately successful and no doubt increased general awareness of the web series, the sponsored video trivia questions - promoted across similar applications including Gossip Girl, Smallville, and Twilight - proved to be an invaluable tool for engaging users. During a 10 day campaign sponsored trivia yielded tens of thousands of unique trivia takers and trivia questions answered - exposing those a significant number of TVLoop users to Rockville CA, likely for the first time.
While I don’t have feedback directly from TheWB.com, we’re happy with these results given the quick turnaround time and the short run time of the campaign. In addition to driving engagement within the app, we were also successful in taking a video that had only a few views and driving well over 7,000. The net result is that our first foray into sponsored video trivia was very successful. It’s a great way to promote engaging content to users, while also satisfying core objectives of the advertiser. We’re looking forward to many more similar campaigns.
