LogMeIn issued a press release last week announcing a new video portal service and a webinar benchmarks report. I took a few extra days to cover the news in order to get some questions answered.
The first part of the announcement concerned a new offering labeled GoToStage. Launched for the time being as a beta release, GoToStage acts as a searchable repository for recorded presentation content. Companies can upload video presentations that can be accessed and viewed by the public. In addition to the master public repository, companies can create their own branded "channel pages" featuring their content.
Admittedly, this is not much different from YouTube or Vimeo, which have much greater built-in audiences. The differentiating features are that GoToWebinar users can transfer their webinar recordings to GoToStage with a single click, in an integrated interface. And GoToStage adds a viewer registration step to capture details about each person who accesses the recording.
While LogMeIn is promoting this as a way to repurpose webinar recordings made with its own GoToWebinar product, I confirmed that customers can upload any desired MP4 video file.
At the moment, use of GoToStage is free for GoToWebinar customers. The final monetization and pricing model will be announced when the service goes into full production mode in 2018. I got the same "wait and see" answer when I asked whether companies will be able to host pay-per-view recordings on the site. Currently there are no facilities for collecting payments from viewers.
Another feature still being worked out is reporting and analytics on viewing statistics. Right now, analytics come from the basic GoToWebinar recording view reports. The press release hinted at more advanced statistics as a feature on the product roadmap.
I also asked whether individual videos or company-branded channels can be password protected in an attempt to hide videos from the general public. Not at the present time, but it is being considered for future implementation.
GoToStage feels similar to a service that ON24 tested back in 2007. The Insight24 experiment vanished without a trace, so I wish greater success for LogMeIn's venture. The most direct competition I can think of at the present time is MediaPlatform's PrimeTime, which brands itself as "The Corporate YouTube."
The second part of the LogMeIn press release announced the publication of a webinar benchmarks report culled from more than 350,000 webinars conducted over the past year. Usage spanned the entire GoToWebinar global customer base, with the greatest usage seen in the US, UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia.
47% of the studied webinars were listed as involving training (16% employee training and 31% customer onboarding and training). The next greatest usage was 29% identified as marketing and demand generation.
15% of webinar registrations occurred 3-4 weeks before a webinar, but this is not tracked against any determination of when promotional blasts went out. My intuition is that you would find that the real insight is likely to be "Many webinar registrations occur whenever the first promotional email blast goes out, which is often 3-4 weeks before the webinar date." The more important finding is that 60% of registrations occurred in the week before the webinar, with a full 33% of registrations occurring on the webinar date! So make sure to re-promote your webinars just before you go live.
Of more practical use, LogMeIn found that more people registered for webinars on Tuesdays than any other day or the week, by a statistically significant margin. So send your email blasts on a Tuesday!
The statistic that was most surprising to me was this sentence:
"Webinars that are 60 minutes attract 2.1 X more registrants than webinars scheduled for only 30 minutes. And 90 minute webinars attract 2.2 X more registrations than 60 minute webinars."
The first part of the stat matches my intuition, but I am shocked to see that 90 minute webinars got twice as many registrants across the board as 60-minute webinars! I have to believe that closely correlates with the higher usage reported as coming from training applications. Training webinars often benefit from 90-minute durations, whereas a marketing or demand generation might not perform as well with a scheduled 90-minute duration.
For more details and the opportunity to ask questions about the reported stats, you can attend a webinar this Wednesday, November 8 at noon California time, 3pm New York time.
I am very happy to see LogMeIn continuing to expand both product functionality and availability of useful data for web conferencing users as part of their new stewardship of the GoTo family of web collaboration products. It speaks well for their dedication to keeping the product line strong and growing.
