Want to catch up with what happened in the digital world this week? Our weekly Cheat Sheet fills you in on everything you missed while you scrambled to meet deadlines and put out fires.
Read about Machinima’s partnership with Twitch, Google Helpouts, Instagram ad’s performance to date, YouTube’s new commenting system and Netflix’s partnership with Marvel.
1. Machinima partners with Twitch to reach more gamers
This week, Machinima announced its new partnership with Twitch, a streaming service for gamers. With Machinima’s success in distributing gaming content on YouTube and Twitch’s ability to focus on live events, both platforms bring the best of both worlds together. In addition, Twitch brings in more than 45 million unique visitors per month, while Machinima reaches 203 million viewers monthly. The merging of these two brands provides the opportunity to expand their reaches to massive audiences, as well as other platforms.
2. Google launches Helpouts to speak with experts
Google Helpouts, which was unveiled back in August, has finally rolled out its platform to provide users with the ability to speak with experts and pay them for their services over video chat. The cost of speaking with an expert on Google Helpouts can range from having to pay absolutely nothing to up to $20 per hour or more. The service has already partnered with brands such as Weight Watchers, Sephora and One Medical — with potential to leverage many more. With users being able to rate the experts they work with, it will be interesting to see whether or not Google Helpouts is a platform that consumers want to be engaged in.
3. Instagram ads showing big potential
Last week, we wrote about the launch of Instagram’s sponsored ads and several of the brands that have jumped on the new opportunity. A week following the launch of its ad platform, Instagram is seeing that more than 5% of ad impressions have led to likes on the ads. Michael Kors was one of the first brands to push sponsored ads, and the company found that its ads were seen by 6.15 million people and received more than 218,000 likes. While the ads feature is still fairly new, Instagram is taking a step in the right direction to start engaging its 150 million users with relevant branded content.
4. YouTube rolls out new commenting system
After about a month and a half of testing, YouTube is launching a new commenting system powered by Google+. The feature will launch on channel discussion tabs this week before rolling out to all videos within the next couple of months. The new system will rank comments by relevancy versus recency in hopes to keep quality conversations to the top of the list and push spam and hate messages to the bottom. The system will also push comments from popular YouTube personalities, as well as those in your Circles, higher on the list.
5. Netflix partners with Marvel for original series
Netflix has found much success in its original content series “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black.” The company is now teaming up with Disney’s Marvel to create 4 original superhero-themed shows, each focusing on a separate hero. Each of the shows will consist of 13 episodes and will be released over the next couple of years — the first episodes will be available on Netflix in 2015.
