If you build it, will they come? OpenExO was creating a community and an infrastructure for delivering insightful content and sophisticated certification courses to a global audience. But they needed a better way to distribute and monetize their videos and live events.
THE COMPANY
OpenExO is a global digital transformation community that unites future-forward companies and the best transformation agents in the world together. It has speakers, coaches, consultants, content creators, certification courses on a wide range of topics ranging from blockchain and cryptocurrency to global governance and healthcare to AI and sustainability. The company’s marketplace connects companies in need of effective digital transformation to a thriving ecosystem of coaches, consultants, and specialists. The community has more than 8200 members across 133 countries speaking more than 40 languages and has successfully delivered hundreds of engagements.
OPENEXO BY THE NUMBERS:
The Challenge
OpenExO needed a way to deliver content such as training, webinars, live events, and other material to an international user base. It leverages video to amplify the voices of OpenExO. But, it needed to be done in a way that was organized, user-friendly, and would keep their users engaged, while still being sustainable. And, ultimately, create a powerful global media network around transformation.
The Solution
Using the AnyClip Watch and video hubs as a decentralized way, thus matching the ecosystem’s structure, to manage and distribute content made it easy to create a scalable, organized structure to host OpenExO’s huge range of content and certification courses.
The Anyclip technology also allows the individual content creators to distribute their content both inside and outside the OpenExO ecosystem. For example, a ExO Creator can have their own custom hub, can embed video on their own site using an AnyClip player, and cross-promote their content with other creators. By using the AnyClip player, they can see how their content is performing everywhere in one centralized analytics dashboard.
Deep Search
“One of the things we promote really heavily that AnyClip provides us is the beautiful search capability,” says Kent Langley, Co-Founder and Chief Operation Officer of OpenExO. With so many topics covered, it’s a major benefit to their users to be able to easily search for keywords and topics and have that search return the relevant content from across the entire network of hubs and web properties.
Content Strategy
When looking for ideas for content that would resonate with their audience, the search again came in handy. AnyClip gives insight into usage data by content as well as more traditional statistics. By checking the stats on what tags were most popular, OpenExO could drive a successful content strategy. “We combine the Anyclip data with traditional data sources like Google Analytics and community generated content to get a feel for how to shape the strategy,” said Langley.
Monetization
With AnyClip, multiple avenues for monetization are available. It’s easy to add programmatic advertising with pre-roll and mid-roll ads. (When OpenExO does not have advertising, they can also backfill with their own content and promotions.) OpenExO can also charge for their courses. For example, a foundation course can be free, and then for a fee the learner can take the rest of the classes necessary for a certification. Kent says, “the search feature is very nice for students.”
X-Ray
The X-Ray overlay allows OpenExO to add a layer of interactivity to their content. With X-Ray, it’s easy to add up to three interaction points on top of a video. On a live event, for example, OpenExO might use one call-to-action to promote their next event, another to push people towards their certification programs, and the third to encourage people to join the community. In the future, they plan to also use some of these slots for advertising and sponsorship.
“It was very much AnyClip that allowed us a reasonable way and a scalable and professional way to provide these capabilities and make it searchable.” – Kent Langley
Why AnyClip?
AnyClip offered unparalleled automatic organization and search, to support building the organizational structure and branding that OpenExO envisioned.
One of the biggest factors that led to OpenExO choosing AnyClip was the control over monetization and revenue. “You can’t do that if you’re hosting all your videos on YouTube. This inverts the cut – we’re in charge and can provide a much better experience to our clients and community. As we start to see sponsorship dollars, programmatic dollars, event dollars, we can build a cooperative model with our creators that is way richer than what YouTube can offer them,” says Langley.
Results at a glance:
The Results
AnyClip offered unparalleled automatic organization and search, to support building the organizational structure and branding that OpenExO envisioned.
AnyClip has made it possible for OpenExO to position themselves for massive scaling. When OpenExO runs a full day event, it generates not only the half an hour of main stage content, but also hundreds of hours of side sessions and all of that can be online and searchable for everyone the day or show or very shortly thereafter.
But the content isn’t limited to just the full videos. Each session is then chopped up into potentially hundreds of clips, bite-sized content “which is what we get a lot more activity on.” A single event can generate from 300 to 1,000 hours of content.
“Anyclip makes session content as valuable as main stage content,” Langley says. That’s because the search and organizational capabilities of Watch make the VOD evergreen and appealing. “The AnyClip platform has a really great capability to ingest a lot of content quickly and index it and make it searchable. That’s pretty unique.”
AnyClip has allowed OpenExO to drive viewership to their owned sites. Their viewership on YouTube is now a fraction of their views on their own site. “We push AnyClip, and we syndicate and stream to the social channels.”
With AnyClip, OpenExO has set themselves up for success. “It was very much AnyClip that allowed us a reasonable way and a scalable and professional way to provide these capabilities and make it searchable.”
To learn more about OpenExO please visit their website at www.openexo.com or their multi-media publication about transformation and exponential technologies, ExO Insight, at insight.openexo.com.
