DaspTV.com and the Increasing Importance of Videos

First, I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce a new site: DaspTV.com.

This site has been live for a little while and we’ve been driving a small amount of traffic to it. But its time to officially introduce this Video Resource site. We hope that this will be useful site to all, but especially for our customers. For this launch we feature videos created by one of our Technical Evangelists, Mark Wisecarver, as well as some videos from some of our Partners – DotNetInvoice and Sitefinity. We also include a video from Microsoft and a Marketing video from Google. This will be an evolving project so please send us your suggestions and let us know if this has been helpful (or not) and how we can improve upon this effort.

I also want to acknowledge that for dasptv.com, we are using Xigla’s Absolute Video Channel application. Xigla has been a great partner and they also use their Video Channel application for their own video resource site at xigla.tv, which is hosted at DiscountASP.NET.

So why are we launching this video site?

This project has three motivations. First and foremost, we want to provide useful video content to help make our customer’s web presence more successful in their site development and programming effort and also in their marketing effort.

Second, we want to help highlight our Business Partners and videos can help provide more insight into the value propositions of our Partner’s businesses, as well as provide instructional information on how to use a Partner’s service/product with our hosting service.

And finally, we wanted to start addressing the major impact that online video content is having in everyone’s lives today and how these trends are changing the way we must conduct our business to stay relevant in these new times. Let me elaborate a little more on this.

It is common knowledge that the Google search engine has the lion’s share of search activities on the internet and that Yahoo was considered in the second position for a long time. Last year in 2008, searches on YouTube surpassed Yahoo search, making YouTube search the second largest in search activity volume. Clearly, Internet users are very interested in video content.

Back in 2007, Google rolled out their Universal search and added even more navigational guides for increased vertical search capabilities. With Google’s Universal Search, they hit several vertical searches at once, and display those results blended with the natural horizontal search results.

Now, add to the mix the new Google SearchWiki feature introduced late 2008. A Google account holder can now search while being logged into Google and change the ranking order of search results and add notes to personalize their search results further. How this personalization data is being used and going to be used is up for debate but if there are changes that can be made to produce more relevant blended search results for all Google users, I’m sure Google will update their relevancy algorithms.

What does this all mean? Well, it means that it is increasingly important for businesses to take a more “global” approach to their marketing / branding. No longer is it just about focusing your resources on natural search engine optimization (SEO) as the blended Universal search is decreasing the effectiveness of SEO, and it is increasingly important to participate in other verticals to stay relevant today. So our DaspTV.com site is one effort of ours toward addressing this.

Takeshi Eto
VP Marketing and Business Development
DiscountASP.NET