I’m live blogging the Affilicon Israel 2009 conference session on Video Sharing and Ranking. Arik Czerniak, Entrepreneur, former CEO of Metacafe is the speaker for this session. He tweets at @arikcz.

If you upload your videos using TubeMogul to all different sites, to syndicate the videos, then you will double your views.

Here are some very interesting statistics:

Video audience attention span:

• after 20 secs, 20% leave
• after 1 min, 50% leave
• over 2 min (75% leave), and
• only 9.5% stay for a video over 5 minutes.

Make it SHORT and DRAMATIC. Implications for advertising? Do it within first 15 seconds.
Life span of a video: 35% of views made it first 4 days. 50% of views in first 14 days.75% if views in first 44 days. Most of the views are in the first two months.

Takeaway: Viral videos are a RARITY. They rarely snowball to gain more and more. “Evergreen” video (generate same number of views continuously)  are just as rare.

How do make the video viral? No “magic bullet.”

What constitutes an “actual view?” As soon as it loads.

Ingredients:

• Make awesome content
• Choose a right thumbnail: the small picture to be displayed
• SEO the tags and metadata: don’t be stingy when adding tags and metadata
• Promote it like crazy

Content:

• Make it short
• Inject interesting “passable” content: humor, celebrities, animals, cute kids, and sex

Promote:

• Let it bubble to the top
• Web 2.o: submit to sharing  sites
• You can utilize guerrilla marketing tactics
• You can “buy” views (he didn’t explain this very well)
• Use a through-broker to go viral

Landing pages: with video works better than without. Rich media improves click through rates (flash).

Optimize videos by analyzing traffic sources. Look at where people drop off the video and test the video with revisions to see if people will drop off less  than previously.

Case Study: etoro

How did they get 2.9 million views on their video: Forex Tracking Online? There is no sound on the video. The speaker thinks that they used an affiliate to market the video. Here is the first:

Then they made a funny video, that included humor and sex.

Spent 20K They used KetaKeta to market it and got 160K vies. High cost, but high branding impact and B2B. Hard to track the ROI.

Summary:

• It’s really hard to make a viral video. If you want to, follow the tips above.
• Video marketing is still brand oriented
• Video does improve landing page conversions for a product
• Still in the exploration stage.