January 26 Skill Bill held a master class "Short videos on digital platforms. Trends and Opportunities". The experts of the master class were Vladimir Fomichenko-Zakutsky, Marketing and PR specialist at FILM.UA Group and a well-known blogger Semyon Kremenyuk.
Within the master class experts considered various platforms for placing short video, but most attention was paid to YouTube.
The first speaker was Vladimir Fomichenko-Zakutsky. He emphasized on a number of trends in user behavior, due to which short videos became a part of everyday life. According to YouTube up to 70% of users worldwide watch short videos on their mobile devices. In Ukraine, this figure is slightly lower, but number of views from mobile devices, including phones and tablets, is constantly growing.
Among the platforms that are often used for posting videos, we discussed the tools and features of YouTube, Vine, Instagram, Facebook, Coub and Twitter.
Since YouTube as a service was originally designed to work with video, and actively developed its platform, at the moment it can be called "the king of video hosting". This service provides the most comprehensive list of the various services, such as video processing, promotion, as well as mechanisms of income. However, a variety of services allows experienced users to transfer the traffic from one service to another, thereby increasing the number of subscribers on all resources.
As part of the master class were examined YouTube trends in 2015. Vladimir introduced the TOP 20 projects in the world by number of views per year. There are channels that have a large number of subscribers, but the popularity of their content is reducing, as well as viewing ratings compared to the new channels. In the world top we can see game reviews, channels devoted to children's toys, as well as music channels and cartoons.
Analyzing the TOP 20 channels in Ukraine, we see a much more varied list of channel themes. In addition to children's content and the computer games reviews, there are also bloggers that talk about their life in general, professional media channels - Studio "Kvartal 95" and TV channel "Ukraine".
Semyon Kremenyuk began his speech by emphasizing that the highest number of views in 2015 belongs to children's content. He connects this to the proliferation of tablets and phones and easy navigation. Even a small child quickly learns to find and play a video on YouTube. In addition the child never fast forward the video and can watch the same cartoon an infinite number of times. The cost of advertising in children's content is very small, but due to these repeats revenues add up to a nice sum.
Audience retention is a very important indicator for successful monetization on YouTube. A good indicator is 60% of the video timing. 80% is considered almost impossible. Sometimes, even in short video that last about three minutes, it is useful to show the most interesting at the beginning of the video
Unfortunately, Semyon sees no prospects for the establishment of Ukrainian-profitable channels on YouTube, as the audience of these channels will be no more than 10 thousand subscribers, which is an extremely small number. But maybe it will be interesting to a number of advertisers, and then the channel can secure other types of funding.
