Is MySpace's 'BFF' Buying Views?

Is MySpace’s ‘BFF’ Buying Views?

by Marc Hustvedt on September 17th, 2009

At the launch of the new season BFF, MySpace boasted about the success of season 1, saying that “we got over 6 million views” for the teen game show web series. We often report these numbers as the truth, given that there’s no real auditing of them and for better or worse they are technically accurate. But who’s kidding who?

Much to our chagrin, we noticed an auto-playing full episode of Jake Hurwitz-hosted BFF cranking away within the MySpace player tucked inside an ad unit on Jon Heder’s IMDB page yesterday. So naturally we clicked on it and were taken to episode 2 of the new season and saw an astonishing 595,404 “total views” listed above the video. Total number of comments (a good indicator of whether or not video views are organic)—9. Just 9 out of the nearly 600,000 people were moved enough to leave a comment.

If you take a closer look at the view counts on the second season so far it becomes even clearer that this show isn’t exactly pulling “millions” of fans. At best, these episodes seem to be averaging around 25,000 views. The show has just 817 subscribers listed on its MySpace video page.

BFF – Season 02 Episode 01 (8/24/09) – Total views: 515,711
BFF – Season 02 Episode 02 (8/27/09) – Total views: 595,404
BFF – Season 02 Episode 03 (8/31/09) – Total views: 52,158
BFF – Season 02 Episode 04 (9/03/09) – Total views: 24,717
BFF – Season 02 Episode 05 (9/04/09) – Total views: 24,405
BFF – Season 02 Episode 06 (9/10/09) – Total views: 15,550
BFF – Season 02 Episode 07 (9/14/09) – Total views: 12,798

It’s no wonder the advertising industry is still gun shy about backing original web series. In order to deliver on this campaign for lead sponsors Ortho Women’s Health & Urology and Proctor & Gamble’s Always brand, MySpace is forced to buy paid views through Doubleclick, presumably at a lower cost that what they are making from the sponsors.

To be sure, this view arbitrage game is getting more and more common in web video and MySpace certainly aren’t the only ones playing it. What it does unfortunately is devalue web series content into essentially rich media display ads, counted by impressions rather than actual viewer engagement. That sadly will be a race to the bottom as advertisers realize they can get a cheaper CPM elsewhere rather than funding original series.

We reached out to MySpace for comment on this and have not yet received a reply.

UPDATE: We heard back from MySpace’s Director of Corportate Communications, Tiffany Duersch: “We’re always looking at creative ways to introduce our content to new audiences. Making the original program available in this format directly hits those audiences who may be interested in BFF. We have done this previously. In some cases, the streams do count towards the overall views.”

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Comments

gstrompolos - September 17th, 2009 1:06 pm

While syndication isn’t a bad strategy, views should be user initiated. This is an impression. Big difference.

Jamie Wilkinson - September 17th, 2009 1:13 pm

This kills me. If viewcounts are the barometer of a web show’s success this is analogous to *buying* Nielsen boxes (which I’m sure also happens). Whenever I hear of advertising deals built around viewcount quotas I cringe.

In my Internet Famous class we even tried to measure how effective this is — we found spending $150 generated about 50k views on one of our videos… a video of us buying the views. http://internetfamo.us/class/h.....tube-views

Tim Street - September 17th, 2009 1:18 pm

TV has bought advertising to promote TV shows for years and they too auto – play and have no comments to show for all their “views.”

Rather than focus on “Races to the Bottom” I think we should spend our time focusing on Win Win case studies that have been home runs for both the content creator and the advertiser.

We are in an advertising market correction that is going to last for awhile but there are success stories out there, like “Will it Blend.” I think we need to find a few more of these winning branded entertainment / product placement stories and start talking about them.

It will do us more good than pointing out alleged short comings of corporate giants that could be misinterpreted by potential advertisers who are not yet familiar with the landscape and are just starting to test the waters in online video advertising.

Does anyone have a few more examples of “Win Win” deals?

Anthony DeLosa - September 17th, 2009 1:58 pm

Next thing you’re going to tell me is that people gimmick their computers to auto refresh and collect views! One of the problems in the economy was the false evaluation of stocks. One way to evaluate stocks is through fundamental analysis weighing such factors as price/earnings ratio, profit, debt, expenses etc etc. Now some corporate types cooked the numbers which lead investors to make decisions on false info. and eventually lose a lot of money. This is no different. We all know people love numbers. As an advertiser would you rather invest in someone who is established and has these great stellar numbers or someone who is up and coming? And when the people with the cooked numbers don’t come through do you try again with someone else or do you walk away?

We are trying to get advertisers to accept that things like brand recognition through engagement, association, emotional investment by the viewer etc is more powerful than just sheer eyeballs but that becomes increasingly difficult when you have people doing whatever it takes to tell them exactly what they want to hear.

+1 to tubefilter for talking about the elephant in the room.

VS - September 17th, 2009 2:16 pm

Is this any different from people who pay for the Featured or Spotlight Video slots on Youtube and get huge views and about a dozen comments?

Andrea Ball - September 17th, 2009 3:41 pm

I still love Jake, and Myspace has to cheat, they don’t have any users left.

Dal - September 17th, 2009 4:32 pm

I don’t know why this is a surprise..or is it? Maybe it’s just now being talked about. Nice article Marc.

Gennefer Snowfield - September 17th, 2009 4:51 pm

This is exactly the problem with the online video market right now, and ultimately undermines the ability for web series to make compelling pitches to brands, whose sole focus becomes views instead of getting in front of *relevant* audiences in meaningful ways. It creates a flawed standard whereby, if a web series doesn’t have X number of views, they are quickly dismissed. That is 100% the wrong metric for demonstrating the success — or viability — of a web series.

Content snacking and transient viewing is the nature of the web, so while 100K may have clicked a viral video link, it doesn’t directly translate into show/brand affinity or action. Even Carl’s Jr., who had millions of views on their Portobello Mushroom burger viral campaign, didn’t report any significant uptick in sales as a result.

In my conversations with brands, the biggest mindset shift I try to make is that it’s not about getting mass views, it’s about getting the *right* views. Views alone are meaningless if they don’t drive some intended action, so brands and content creators need to determine at the onset what success looks like (i.e. website visits, sales of a specific product, newsletter sign ups, coupon downloads etc.) and develop tactics that drive those specific behaviors. Then you can measure and evaluate against those tactics to assess results, and it typically only takes a fraction of the universe to show positive ROI.

Purchased views is tantamount to the days of using sweeps and giveaways to drive traffic. Sure, you got a ton of visitors and sign ups from people who wanted the prize, but as soon as the contest was over, none of those sweeps-generated users ever converted to customers. Why? Because they weren’t the right audience. And with the ability to reach and target users relevantly in a one-to-one environment like the web, you no longer need to cast a wide net in the hopes of getting a handful of qualified leads. You can create resonant messaging that reaches your desired audience directly, and invest the time and money into building substantive relationships with them that actually move the needle rather than wasting it on buying random, unqualified views that are nothing more than seat-fillers, merely creating the *illusion* of a packed house.

Gennefer
http://www.twitter.com/Gennefer

Dal W. - September 17th, 2009 5:51 pm

Great points Gennefer. It’s just like the days of ole when record labels would pay the stations to play the music. We are moving further and further into a niche system that will allow good content to help brands find their customer/tribe base.

modelmotion - September 17th, 2009 8:14 pm

Nice to see someone willing to take a good hard look at the numbers.

modelmotion - September 17th, 2009 8:38 pm

Also, it is true that you need the right views, however you also need a lot of them!!!!

The question now has become similar to the old situation of customer acquisition cost in the good old dot com days: how much is it going to cost a producer to acquire views if they are not able to do it organically or virally.

Clearly the latter two options are desirable but can only be achieved with content that resonates with users while still fulfilling some objective from the advertisers point of view. Otherwise you need a marketing budget to place your offering in front of the right audience in order to generate the scale of “quality” views that will make your offering atractive to advertisers.

milowent - September 18th, 2009 5:43 am

over at Anchor cove we’ve been chuckling at the distortion of viewcount statistics on web series for almost three years now. placing a video in a prominent place on autoplay to get massive viewcounts on a few eps is a common tactic. of course, the shows are also trying to draw in viewers when a show starts, so there’s a legitimate reason for these tactics as well. but after the show’s over, and they’re trying to explain that it was such a success, the desire to be creative with the numbers is impossible to resist.

its not like advertisers can’t figure this stuff out as well – they are asking tough questions behind closed doors, if they aren’t already ignoring web series.

when bebo and myspace were experimenting with promoting web series in ‘07-’08, they touted the numbers of series like Roommates (myspace) and KateModern (bebo) like crazy. But if these shows were so great, why didn’t they continue? Because most of the views were from prominent page autoplays.

Chase Norlin - September 18th, 2009 7:25 am

We do online video syndication for a living and quite familiar with what’s happening here (previously I helped run distribution for ValueClick). I’d like to make sure both sides of the argument are clearly understood, because there’s alot of wrong assumptions out there and misinformation:

Yes, click to play represents the ultimate form of video engagement (as user “intent” provides great value, much like web search). However, autoplay is not the horrible beast everyone thinks it is. Think about this: how do click-to-play video views get generated? Primarily from a thumbnail with a bit of metadata. So, that user intent is purely a function of a user being engaged by a thumbnail image, that’s quite amazing huh? Autoplay, while sometimes annoying, actually gives the user the ability to quickly sample the content and see if they want to keep watching. This is just like channel surfing your TV where you watch 5 seconds of a Discovery Channel show and decide you like it and stay on the channel. So, autoplay potentially represents an improved ability to better represent the contents of any given video to users.

I just spoke about this at the Goldman Sachs and Digiday Conferences in NY this week, and will be going back to ad:tech in November to provide even more detail.

If you’d like to hear more just email me – chase@pixsy.com.

Chase Norlin
CEO, Pixsy Corp.
chase@pixsy.com

Rob Cesternino - September 18th, 2009 11:25 am

Great job reporting on this, these kinds of articles are really interesting.

Gennefer Snowfield - September 19th, 2009 6:11 pm

@modelmotion – You actually don’t need millions upon millions of views to show positive ROI. This is a misnomer being perpetuated by networks to squeeze more money out of advertisers (and pay web series who don’t have meet a certain tier of viewing numbers less). Smaller, niche markets are often the most fruitful as the masses are fickle and latch on to whatever the latest buzz is without the long-term affinity and adoption of a more specialized following. That said, if you are going to partner with a brand to produce your web series, part of the funding must be used to reach those ‘right’ eyeballs through a highly targeted marketing campaign. That’s why I emphasized the importance of defining clear objectives at the onset; so, you can devise a strategy that will drive those actions and measure against them accordingly. When done right, the marriage of brands and web series is a highly effective one that can successfully benefit both parties — content creators get funding to produce their work, and brands can make a meaningful connection with their desired audience. As much as no one likes to admit it, that does make the series a marketing vehicle, and as such, tactics must be employed to support it. But I guarantee that a well laden strategy aimed at connecting with relevant viewers will be far more impactful than purchased views or a random sampling of users who happened to hit a page with auto-play.

Chase Norlin - September 19th, 2009 7:17 pm

Having a “marketing budget” to promote a project is old world hollywood thinking. Content owners, brands, and media companies need to know how the online ad/content distribution world works before wasting more money.

Lets use another example that I just gave at the Digiday conference in NY: think about how much it costs to release a new TV series and how the marketing budget is spent: money for billboards, billboards drive users to a website, the website promotes the tv series premiere time, and hopefully a certain percent of those actually tune in, and of those hopefully a good percent return to watch on an ongoing basis. Amazingly inefficient.

New model: release the tv series premier across a large group of sites so millions can sample, they get to actually watch the series, if they like it they can tune in on tv or the web. Money is spent on actually engaging the user with a new concept, instead of hoping the marketing drives users to the show. Efficency realized, the entire point of the internet.

chase norlin
ceo, pixsy
chase@pixsy.com