Videos own their viral potential to the embed code that enables Web users to copy the video indefinitely all over the Web. Such a traveling object is an opportunity for marketers, for branding purposes, and also for traffic generation purposes.
Until today, no free video hosting services would let users put up a link to the destination of your choice. To exceptions to this:
– Youtube’s annotations, which lets you put a link to another Youtube video, another youtube channel, or another SERP.
– Viddler lets you insert a clickable logo. Problem is this logo is assigned to all the videos of your channel. It can sometimes be bothersome when you want to brand a certain one specific video but not all the others.
So those are just half-exceptions!
Recently, I heard of two different services that offers the link features for videos. The first one is BubblePLY. BubblePLY is a product of PLYmedia, which ‘delivers an enhanced viewing experience, increased engagement and new value chains for your video.’ Sounds good. I tested it. Or so I tried…
I found the editing working space of BubblePLY way to confusing. Auto scroll down buttons overlap each other, objects are hard to identify, and some functions didn’t even work (and maybe it was a coincidence, but my firefox slowed way down). In addition, when I finally finished my bubble, here is what happened:
FAIL is the word they were actually looking for. But try it for yourself, I might have been on the site on a bad server day.
The second service I had heard of is Linkedtube. Where BubblePLY supports all video hosting platforms, but doesn’t work, Linkedtube supports only Youtube, and works like a charm. First setting up the link is super easy, as linkers do not handle the design of the link:
Once the video is created, the video does not come directly from Youtube anymore, but it will go through Linkedtube’s servers to add the link info. The good thing about this is that the embed code inside the video has the link info attached to it. Marketers can now use videos as a traffic generation tool!
(Thanks to digitalinspiration for writing about Linkedtube)
Technorati Tags: bubbleply, linkedtube, video, links