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A Private Label YouTube Shows The Power Of Data Monetization

This article is more than 9 years old.

JW Player, an NYC-based startup that provides an alternative video ecosystem for content creators, has an enviable advantage: data from hundreds of billions of sessions in which people watched videos on a wide range of devices all over the world. Today, JW Player announced the first version of its “Trends in OnLine Video” report, an analysis of what it has discovered from sifting through all of this data.

While this first version of the report has many interesting findings, and no doubt future versions will tell us more, to me the biggest takeaway is that JW Player provides a clear example of how to monetize a data asset. By following JW Player’s lead, companies both large and small can get all sorts of tactical advantages from both internal and external data, and ultimately create new products and services.

What the JW Player Trend Report Says

This first version of the report provides a baseline for a variety of aspects of how video is played. It provides answers to such questions as:

  • Where is video watched? (Desktop 77%, Phone 18%, Tablet 6%)
  • What are the most popular browsers? (Top five: Google Chrome on Windows 40%, Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows 15%, Firefox on Windows 13%, Apple Safari on IOS 10%, Google Chrome on Android 6%)
  • What are the most popular video advertising servers? (Facebook’s LiveRail 37%, Google 13%, SpotXChange 12%)

The data is based on 7.8 billion views in August 2014 and shows JW Player’s global reach, 80 percent of the impressions coming from outside the United States. The size of JW Player’s traffic is dwarfed by YouTube, which had 4 billion views a day in 2012, and likely many times more than that now.

But the point of JW Player is not that it as big as YouTube but that it offers content creators a better economic model. JW Player’s white paper, “The Future of Online Video: Multi-Channel Video Strategy”, explains how content creators can convert YouTube traffic to traffic on private sites to increase their revenue. While it would be hard to argue that JW Player is a YouTube killer, it does seem to offer content creators a way to control their own destiny and be more creative with respect to monetizing their content.

Asset Surveillance and Big Video Data

JW Player’s Trends report should be the beginning of a much richer exploration of its trove of data. Russell Walker, Clinical Associate Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, pointed out several principles of data monetization at a recent session (Strategies for Monetizing Big Data) at the Teradata Partners conference. Walker’s idea of asset surveillance, for example, could be used by JW Player to monitor the quality of networks in various countries, or how tastes for content differ across the globe.

A company called ThousandEyes deploys sensors all over the Internet to determine the quality and health of the public internet. JW Player’s video browsers are also a form of a sensor that can be used in many ways, including monitoring the quality of the internet. In future versions of this report, I hope that some of these uses come to the surface. The principles in this article by Teradata’s Chris Twogood provide a guide (See “5 Essential Steps Toward Monetizing Your Data”).

My hope is that JW Player’s big video data can shine a light on many things outside of the world of video.

How to Monetize Your Own Data

Part of JW Player’s product offering is an advanced analytics dashboard that its customers can used to track how their content is viewed. This is a straight up form of data monetization, where data collected from the user of the video player is the foundation of a valuable service in the JW Player ecosystem. The trends reports is the beginning of an effort to provide network level information to content creators.

JW Player creates the analytics and reports for its content creators using a state of the art data supply chain based on Hadoop and a variety of other interesting techniques that I will cover in a later article.

But the engineering required to create a massive supply chain for big data video should not be considered a barrier. Companies of any size can create monetize data by creating their own data supply chains using technology that is powerful and much easier to use than Hadoop.

For example, Connotate is a content harvesting product that is used by major information providers to gather data from public sources. Using Connotate, information providers create thousands of agents that collect content from court records, secretary of state sites, universities, research organizations, and many other types of web sites, both public and private. This product is simple enough to be used by a small- or medium-sized organization to do the same thing. If the data you seek is flowing out of a server or a device in the form of a stream of data, Splunk can capture and transform it in the same way. These are just two of many products that provide an affordable gateway to data outside your organization (See Do You Suffer from the Data Not Invented Here Syndrome? for more ideas about the value of external data.)

Once you have a flow of data going, then a SaaS-based BI platform like GoodData can provide a way to perform the analysis and reporting needed to make the data useful as a product or to support an internal service. A report CITO Research created for GoodData (A Guide to Data Monetization) explains the end-to-end process.

JW Player wasn’t put off by the fact that YouTube is so much larger and has so much more data. The company realized that its data has value and has turned it into a product that provides value in a variety of ways and may eventually be monetized in new ways. All of us, should take a lesson from that insight. We don’t have to have a data supply chain that spans the globe to get into the act of data monetization, just one that provides us and our customers with answers we are not getting now.

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Dan Woods is on a mission to help people find the technology they need to succeed. Users of technology should visit CITO Research, a publication where early adopters find technology that matters. Vendors should visit Evolved Media for advice about how to find the right buyers. See list of Dan's clients on this page.