Text is not Dead

If we continue with Courtney’s earlier notion, which we discussed in class, that browsing the internet is akin to window shopping, then video is a website’s window display. Corey Lopardi makes the very interesting point that video on websites is far more powerful than any other kind of advertising because it’s interactive.

Unlike commercials on television, which are a passive form of advertising, viewers see web videos because they choose to watch them. This makes them more receptive to your message. By clicking on your video they’re giving you the permission to inform and entertain them. Video is a great way to explain important or complicated procedures in a simple visual manner that your customers can understand.

Though in thinking of a hyperlocal website, the idea of being able to “explain important or complicated” or even advertise as a whole may not necessarily be a priority… or is it. News is a product. Many people are selling it; some are giving it away, but one cannot escape the fact that it is a commodity. If people like the product they will return for more because they trust the brand. Being a person’s main source of news is as important for a company to have a loyal customer. So, I think it’s important to continually think of the readers of the news as consumers, consumers who we want to return.

One of the most important things for a company to first establish is traffic to the store, or in our case, the site. Video is not only entertaining, but also, it provides the site with a far higher likelihood of being picked up by a search agent. Let’s face it, if the site isn’t coming up on a Google search, it may as well not exist. Lopardi explains this effect of video:

Web videos also help to insure that your website will be seen by others. Most search engines now include web video in their evaluating of a websites value, which directly relates to the site’s search engine placement. Like photos, blogs, and text, web video now weighs in heavily when search engines decide how high in their placement to list a site. Videos can also be placed on hosting sites like YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and others to drive potential customers all over the world to your website.

A blog on Outerbox Design points out that having video on a site will sometimes “double the time a visitor spends on that page.” He explains how this will inevitable increase the site’s conversion rate. Now, the customer has become more than someone who browsed the window displays. He or she has come into the store and has been intrigued enough to look through the inventory.

One may ask how much video should a news site have, especially one that aims to be taken seriously. Journalism.org looked at three major, highly rated, news sites and studied their home pages for two hours. CNN had 29 video links, 20 were recorded and edited site videos, 2 were user generated, and 7 were live videos. MSNBC had 45, all of which were recorded and edited. And, Fox News had 31; 25 of them were recorded and edited, and 6 were live feeds. These numbers do not even take into consideration podcasts. This is not my way of saying, well, other sites are doing it too! But… they are. While these mammoth sites are not the direct competition of the hyperlocal ones, they do set a standard and become a model of what people want and expect when they search for news online.

Ever since people have gone to the internet for news, they have desired for it to be more entertaining. The internet was such an excitingly different platform from newsprint. The web content, the quality of the writing, the efficiency of the layout are all extremely important to the success of a site, but video gets them in the door and entices them to stay a little while.