Make money with Second Screen

Make money with

Second Screen

The Second Screen

“Second screen, sometimes also referred to as ‘companion device’ (or ‘companion apps’), is a term that refers to an additional electronic device (E.g. tablet, smartphone) that allows a television audience to interact with the content they are consuming, such as TV shows, movies, music, …” wikipedia

Objective

Today, 2nd screen services are designed mostly to gain viewers, spreading the buzz around the show by generating engagement primarily via social media.

Tomorrow you will want to monetize your 2nd

Screen service in a scalable way.

Here we outline our experience and key findings.

The web

The free web is paid for mostly by Ads.

$32 billion were spent on Ads in 2012. The whole ad-supported internet ecosystem contributes $530 billion to the US economy.

The “ad” way

Use Advertising to monetize your Second Screen service.

The time is ripe.

Scale

For an ad-supported business you need scale:

1. Users

2. Impressions

3. Clicks

Users

A lot of people (>80%) use a second device while watching TV .

The users are there!

The loop

You probably have experienced this yourself.

While watching TV you might read your emails, check your Facebook and Twitter updates or scroll through the news for a few minutes to half an hour.

Then you get bored.

Before you know it you find yourself checking your inbox again, desperately waiting for something to arrive.

1.5 hours to fill

Here is the opportunity:

Although the user is “distracted” for half an hour or so, s/he is still watching TV.

The user holds the smartphone/tablet for the entire length of the show and is continually looking for something to do.

1.5 hours are waiting to be filled by you!

Impressions

1.5 hours is a lot of time.

But, a lot of time translates into a lot of potential impressions.

There is room for a strong business model

The math

let’s keep it simple:

100,000 Users

generating 1 impression/user/minute

for 1 hour

= 6 Million impressions/hour

= $60,000/hour if you sell ads at $10 CPM

Your target

Your numbers

Maybe you have more users.

Maybe your show will run longer than an hour.

Maybe you will not put Ads everywhere.

Multiply or divide accordingly.

You should still be able to get quite an impressive figure (per hour).

How to reach your goal

First set of challenges

1. Gain users

2. Entertain users long enough

3. Avoid spamming

4. Generate impressions

5. Generate clicks

Gaining Users

Gaining users to the service is fairly easy, just promote the 2nd screen service on TV (consistently).

Our experience shows that, on average, you can expect 1% of your audience to download your 2nd screen app for every time you (properly) promote it on TV.

Entertain users long enough

You need to use your second screen service and offer

something less boring than checking an empty inbox or a news feed for 1.5 hours!

You can do it!

Relax

Don’t forget the user is usually in a relaxed state

in front of the TV.

That said, the user is not totally passive.

You have the opportunity to provide an engaging alternative to Facebook and email updates.

The goal is to satisfy the user’s desire for content without overwhelming and properly guiding the user to generate clicks.

Generate impressions

You know you have the user’s attention if s/he is watching your show and has downloaded your app. You’re in the perfect position to…

Send the user something!

(it’s that easy)

Generate Clicks

Why is this important?

The more the user perceives clicking as a natural and relaxing part of the experience, the more s/he will engage with ads too!

Serve Ads

Shamelessly serve ads but blend them in the service and in the app user experience.

The idea is simple, but achieving satisfactory results requires a few extra steps.

Second set of challenges

1. Reach as many users as possible

2. Generate 1 impression/user/minute

3. Achieve strong CTR

Reaching users

To reach as many users as possible, you need to broadcast your 2nd screen signal on your:

Mobile / tablet app

HTML5 web app

Facebook wall

Twitter account

Web site

It’s not important where your users are,it only matters how many you can reach.

1 impression/user/minute

Generating such a rate is quite demanding especially because you don’t want to spam your users but…

It’s totally doable.

There are multiple ways to do this, but we’ll focus on the one we found most effective.

Less is more

When we push content within the 2nd Screen App, we typically link them to two sub contents.

All content should be bite-sized and easy to consume.

Delivering content every 3 minutes (20 pieces of content / hour + 40 pieces of sub-content) generates an average sustained rate of 1 impression/user/minute.

To note: Content is usually contextual with the show but this is not a strict requirement.

Sample User Experience

Content

Icon 1

Icon 2

Sub-Content 1

Impression 1 Impression 2

Impression 3

Back

Sub-Content 2

Back

Pushed in real time on the 2nd Screen

CTR

Achieving a strong click-through-rate (CTR) is possible provided that:

1. Users are trained to engage with content

2. Ads do not disrupt the user experience

3. Ads do not compete with content

Engaging with content

The User Experience suggested earlier has been designed and tested to lead users to click (touch) the second screen app often, with minimal distractions while keeping the user focused (mostly) on the show.

Our experience shows that you can achieve a 60% -80% CTR on the pushed content.

Blending Ads

Mobile (in-app) CTR is typically very low (< 1%).

The main reason being: Clicking an Ad completely disrupts the user experience.

Our suggestion is to implement Ads in the same format and flow in which you serve content. The user should be able to engage with Ads and go back to the content fluidly.

If the users trust you enough to not disrupt their organic experience and they feel that they are in control, they willnaturally engage with the ads.

Ad not competing with content

No app can exploit this better than a 2nd Screen app.

As anticipated, you have a lot of time to fill.

Pushing content with proper timing will help youleverage the relaxed-mood of the user to serve Ads that the user wants to interact with.

What you can achieve

Our experience shows that it’s possible to achieve an above average Ad CTR (>10%).

The catch?

You need content to serve.

The good news

Producing content to keep the user engaged is less complex/expensive than you might think.

More good news

There is a long tail.

Our tests demonstrate that, after a show is aired, the content produced for the 2nd Screen can accompany the on-demand version to generate as much CTR (revenue) as the live/first-airing.

References

We tested this approach on the 2nd screen service for a prime-time show.

The 2 hour show ran for 5 episodes with each generating an average of 2 million TV viewers.

The goal was to create a 2nd screen experience that would be 100% paid for by Ads.

The service yielded a 75% margin on the 2nd screen production costs.

Some of the technologies used are patent pending.

Going further

Beside what we presented here, there are additional elements you should consider:

Ad model (sponsorship, CPM, CPC, …)

Content and Services to serve

Production organization

Single screen experience (what if the viewers watch the video on the same device)

Inventory size

Thank you

Feel free to contact me for suggestions, comments or questions.

Giampiero Recco

X2TV, Beeweeb Group

g.recco@x2.tv