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I saw a site promoting video products today and it had this ‘fact’:
The Industry is predicted to grow ten-fold in the next 5 years. By 2013, video will account for 2/3 of all global Internet traffic including mobile phones.
So I wonder where this prediction came from?
And even if it’s true, it doesn’t say, “2/3 of all internet marketing traffic will be video”. Yet that’s their premise in suggesting I buy their product.
As far as Internet Marketing (IM) goes, there’s been a massive increase in the number of video-only sales pages. Even video-only opt-in pages – I can’t know what I’m opting in for without watching the video. Well screw you, I’m not wasting 2/3 of my life watching videos when a few bullet points would tell me what I want to know and pique my interest enough to opt-in (or not).
You’d like to think these people have split-tested a video-only version against other pages – text only, text and video. I would bet my business they haven’t.
Video-only is a lazy way to do sales pages; yes, video is great for the psychological triggers that are harder to do in text. But I buy mostly on facts, not emotion. And yes, I know according to many, most people buy on emotive triggers, not ‘boring’ details – like facts. Well why not provide both, you lazy SOBs?
This is what I think happened:
Someone added video to a sales page and got good results. Then someone started selling the idea that video increased sales or opt-ins.
Next thing, someone’s doing opt-in and sales pages where virtually the only content is the video (e.g. most clickbank products now).
And crucially, many many other people thought “this is the trend, this is what I should be doing”. And it came to pass that video-only pages proliferated, no-one bothered to split test and sales depended on an emotionally laden, factually lacking video.
OK, I’m extrapolating a lot from my own feelings, my own loathing of video-only pages; I hate being forced to watch a video with a signal to fluff ratio of 5%. I didn’t set out to make this a promotional post at all but if it wasn’t for my trusy enounce video speed control (http://www.enounce.com/), I’d have gone mad by now. At least I can squander only 10 minutes of my life at a time rather than 20.
Am I the only one? What do you think? I’d love your comments…