JEREMY WALKER: Welcome to YouTube Developers Live.
We have special guests Vidyard here today, all the way from
Waterloo, Canada.
We actually have Cody and Tyler.
Say hi, guys.
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Hey, I'm Tyler.
CODY WRIGHT: I'm Cody.
JEREMY WALKER: And they were nice enough to join us.
So if you haven't heard of Vidyard, it's actually a video
player for marketers.
And rather than talk through it too much, I thought we'd
just dive into the history and then we'll go
right into a demo.
So why don't you guys tell us a little bit about the history
of Vidyard, how it came about and the product itself, and
then we'll go into a nice demo?
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Sure.
So Vidyard actually started out as a company that was
producing minute-long
explainer-type videos for companies.
And we would give these videos to our clients.
And then they'd ask us, so what do we do with the video
now that we have it?
And so from that we grew into making a platform that
[INAUDIBLE]
the answer for what to do with you video afterwards.
And that means giving them the tools to analyze how their
video is doing, how much people are watching it.
As well as integrated into all sorts of other platforms that
share the video analytics with them.
JEREMY WALKER: OK, great.
That's kind of funny.
So you're making the video marketing stuff first, and
then they were like well, what do we do with it?
So you built a player tool for them?
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Exactly.
JEREMY WALKER: Awesome.
Great.
Well, let's jump into the demo.
I had a couple questions because I know some people
aren't quite sure what that means to have a video player
for marketers.
But it's pretty clear once you see the demo.
So why don't we jump into that?
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Sure.
So I'll just take over the screen.
So here's just the main dashboard of our platform with
a very simple analytics view here, different things for
your account wide.
So if I hop inside of a specific player here, in here
you'll have all sorts of tools for creating stuff like a call
to action at the end of your video.
So it's got a simple builder where you can set up a form so
that you can capture people's emails.
JEREMY WALKER: I saw this on your demo.
It's a pretty nice feature.
Basically it comes out the side and asks for information.
It's not too intrusive.
It was kind of a nice feature.
I can see how marketers would really love that.
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Yeah, exactly.
So we're all about giving marketers these sorts of tools
to do what they need to do.
As well as from that, there's an A/B split testing area for
your slash screens.
And here you can see the one that we have set up on our
homepage right now, which is using these two thumbnails.
Are then we give the analytics for each of those three
thumbnails.
And you can see that the one is at almost 10%
clickthrough rate.
Meanwhile, the other two are more on 7-1/2%.
So right now we have a clear winner of which one's the best
out of those three.
JEREMY WALKER: Yeah, this is a really neat feature I liked in
your product.
So a thumbnail really does impact clickthrough rate.
So like they said, what they did is they basically take a
bunch, let you set up a bunch, and you even let them set up
their percentage for when it shows up, right?
Like, 10% here, 20% on this one, so then you can get an
idea of the clickthrough rate, right?
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Oh, yeah.
You can fully distribute it however you want.
So if you have one that you think won't do that well but
you want to try it anyway, you can give it a very small
percent so that it doesn't influence the overall traffic
all that much but you can still test how well it does.
JEREMY WALKER: Yeah.
And you guys were talking a little bit about
general best practices.
So I know from what you were saying, it really is different
depending on the scenario.
But at least for a general side you were saying something
about there's a difference between if it's not front and
center and it's off to the side.
Would you mind telling the audience a
little bit about that?
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: For sure.
So if you have a smaller player off to the side of a
page, then it makes much more sense to have a thumbnail
that's brighter and stands out more.
Because that way people will actually notice it off to the
side and then click it and watch it.
Versus if it's something big and center in the page
already, then you want something more engaging and
personable so that they're more curious as to what that
could be and that would lead them to actually watching it.
JEREMY WALKER: Yeah.
And you guys were a little surprised
with this one, right?
The guy on the beach ended up doing the best.
Did you think one of the other ones
would be a winner instead?
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Yeah.
I think we thought the one with the girl on the
sandcastle and the dog would be better, because that's more
things going on.
But I guess people like the guy on the beach.
JEREMY WALKER: So the important thing is general
practices we went over.
But if you're going to test it, even ones that you don't
think will win may end up doing really well.
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: It depends entirely on your audience and
what they like or don't like.
And that's the point of A/B split testing is
to figure that out.
JEREMY WALKER: Great.
Well, you guys do a lot of analytics as well to help
these marketers out, right?
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Yeah.
So we have a whole page dedicated to that Analytics
Center, which gives a very easy way to view all your
general views, devices and browsers, where your videos
are being embedded, geography.
As well as all of these graphs can then be further limited by
the actual player so we can get that home page, narrow it
down from there.
So it's all about just giving marketers all the information
and all the statistics they need to make the decisions
they need to make.
JEREMY WALKER: Great.
And one thing I like about you guys is you really want
marketers to get the most bang for their buck.
So you allow them to export to YouTube, and then you pull all
the analytics from there so that they can have their own
customized player on their own page.
But then they push that content out to YouTube to get
more views.
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Yeah, exactly.
Because YouTube is such an invaluable force of people.
So we are always going to fully support pushing your
video to YouTube.
So the general flow for that is upload to Vidyard.
Then we can do all sorts of our more advanced analytics,
but then push that video to your YouTube channels and
market it through there as well.
And then here in the Analytics Center, you can see how well
it's doing and compare it to how it's doing
on your home page.
JEREMY WALKER: Great.
Thanks for giving us that little taste of the product.
And obviously you can see a more detailed demo of things
on their site, vidyard.com.
Why don't we talk a little bit about the technical section?
So I wanted you to talk for the developers out there.
How did you implement this?
And what programming language did you use and why?
CODY WRIGHT: [INAUDIBLE]
Ruby, but as a Sinatra application instead.
And so we haven't mixed this up.
It'll interact with YouTube [INAUDIBLE] working in Ruby
and also working in Sinatra through the Google API client
[INAUDIBLE].
And we're running data through the D3 Data API, as well as
[INAUDIBLE].
JEREMY WALKER: OK, great.
You cut off there for a second.
I think you said you were using Ruby?
CODY WRIGHT: Yeah.
We're Ruby with some Rails, as well as a Sinatra
application as well.
And interfaced with the Google stuff through the Google API
client [INAUDIBLE].
JEREMY WALKER: Great.
And it sounds like you guys are already using the new
version 3.0 of the Data API?
CODY WRIGHT: Correct.
Yes, we are.
JEREMY WALKER: Great.
Thumbs up.
CODY WRIGHT: Yeah, we made a switch about four months.
Before we were using another RubyGem that did most of the
YouTube stuff for us.
We just decided to write our own stuff that does more
specific the type of thing you can do with YouTube.
And it's gone really well thus far.
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Especially the analytics.
Because D3 is much better at being able to break down by
geography and stuff like that.
JEREMY WALKER: Yeah, our new Analytics API is pretty
helpful, rather than the large zip file.
So was there anything that came that surprised you a
little bit when you were integrating
with the YouTube APIs?
CODY WRIGHT: The only thing that we've been a little bit
surprised by is the way the tokens work. and sometimes
getting tokens that expired.
But beyond that, the guides are really helpful and it's
worked out really well for us.
JEREMY WALKER: Great.
Well, any features you'd like to see in the product in the
near future?
CODY WRIGHT: The only thing that we've had a lot of
clients ask for and we haven't been able to do is uploading
and choosing custom thumbnails on YouTube through the API.
Now I know that's available to content providers, but you
can't do it for just general users.
And that's something we get asked for all the time.
JEREMY WALKER: Yeah, we do have the video thing.
We're opening that up more, so keep an eye on that.
But as you said, we do have one right now, we're just a
little bit limited for access.
Well, great.
Any other thing you'd tell a developer that's getting
started with the APIs?
CODY WRIGHT: No.
I think just looking through that YouTube API doc site is
really good.
And there's some good code examples on there, and it
seems to work really well.
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Definitely Stack Overflow's a very good
resource, and you guys are very active on it.
So any questions you have, just go to Stack
Overflow and ask.
JEREMY WALKER: Yeah, definitely.
We do have a keyword YouTube-API.
My team actually monitors that, so make sure
you check it out.
Great.
Well, I think that wraps up our show.
As always, we're always looking to hire if you're
interested in developer relations.
Check out developers.google.com/jobs.
We have some openings, so check it out.
And a big thanks to Vidyard for coming all the way
virtually from Waterloo, and jumping on to
hang out with us.
Again, check out Vidyard.com and their new video, the one
with the guy on the beach.
I actually watched it, it's pretty funny.
So check it out.
And thanks again guys for joining us.
And we'll see you next week.
TYLER CAMPAIGNE: Good.
Thanks for having us.
CODY WRIGHT: Thank you.
JEREMY WALKER: Thanks.