Yahoo! News, the most popular news destination, is experiencing strong growth in the views of its videos. A spokesman told me that monthly viewership is way in the past six months. It has averaged from 150 to 200 million steams per month. I am told views in February were up 163 percent over last February. I assume the Presidential primaries have helped.
I sat down with Alan Warms, General Manager of Yahoo! News at the Beet.TV executive summit in Washington last week. Alan joined Yahoo! last year through the Buzztracker acquisition, which Kara Swisher first reported in September.
Alan believes that the key consumption is the placement of videos within stories, not in a video library or video "ghetto," as he puts it.
He says that despite the explosion of online news sources, the value of trusted brands is on the rise. And, he says that with the scale of its video operations, Yahoo! News is doing well on the monetization front for itself, its content partners and advertisers.
— Andy Plesser
Eating Beet Carpaccio at the Embassy of Finland!
Being neighbors with the Russians, the Finns love beets too. For our summit last week, the chef of the Embassy made all sorts of beet dishes. I wish I photographed them before they were butchered, but check out this presentation of beet (yes, that’s beet, not beef) carpaccio surrounding a giant mound of goat cheese. On the upper right side of the picture, you see home cured gravlox infused with beet juice. Incredible color. And, yum!
Embassy Event Drive Massive Video Streams at Beet.TV!
Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider reports on how my post on Walt Mossberg’s comments at the summit were widely bloggged and has driven extraordinary consumption of video streams on the purple channel.
