GOOD Vibes was born in 2018 to bring human values back into today’s workplace.
Today, our background in journalism and corporate communications and our passion for fair, inclusive, creative, and productive workplaces allow us to produce some of the most innovative content discussing the transformation of organizational culture.
In a world fighting for the consumer’s attention, GOOD Vibes explicitly avoids many of the ‘clickbait’ style tactics designed to attract views.
GOOD Vibes is not just another content to be consumed… if people feel ‘baited’, it sets them up to fail. We keep our videos short, vibrant, and focused on our goal. But because it’s a moving target, we have to constantly evolve in order to stay credible and “on-mission”.
As the sole editors and producers of the content, we need to understand the relationship that users have with GOOD Vibes while watching our videos. Analytics is the most objective, least intrusive way of understanding this relationship. Nothing replaces conversations with users, but with thousands or tens of thousands of audience members, you can’t talk to everyone.
So, our team of enlightened editors, video-production gurus, and I, as the CTO, set off to build a digital ecosystem to support our product’s distribution and analysis. Initially, our team wanted to know:
- How much of the video do people watch on average, and in total? Do we lose viewers at certain moments in the video?
- How many people watch the whole video? (or at least 92% of it, which is where our outro starts playing).
- What happens to our videos once we distribute them? E.g., Do people share? Re-watch?
Our proof of concept was built on a different video platform, and extracting useful analytics proved to be a Sisyphean task. From a technical perspective, I quickly realized we needed to switch to a platform that had a robust, complete, and reliable access to analytics and data via API (at the time, I was exporting multiple CSV files and crunching numbers in a complicated and error-prone Google Sheet). We would also require the ability to filter queries by each of our end-users / clients, to compare results filtered by episode, and aggregate or split results by language.
With the flip of a switch we were also able to identify the most common drop-off points in a video and across videos, as well as compare how people’s engagement vary between desktop and mobile, and between languages. Our own app’s dashboard, now seamlessly integrated with Kaltura’s analytics API, allows our customers and our team to keep a close eye on user engagement.
These data points are all of the utmost importance to any content creator, which we can now explore and draw important conclusions that lead to significant product improvements. This would not have been possible without Kaltura.
Kaltura’s Video Platform as a Service has also dramatically improved our production process and allowed us to easily integrate video workflows and functionalities into our business. With other platforms, for example, we couldn’t automatically update existing links and pages to feature the latest version of the video. Now, we can replace the video file for any given entry via the API or Kaltura’s Management Console. Thus, the links we send today are coupled with an evolving and living bank of videos. It simplifies our workflow and content management process.
Our core business is delivering excellent video content to our subscribers, so switching our video hosting and content management provider was frankly, terrifying. Like most scary things in life, however, it was a necessary step for us to grow, and we’re so glad we did it. We can easily see both Kaltura’s world-class platform and support team being long-term strategic partners in the success of our business.
“You cannot improve what you cannot measure” is a trendy management saying among those who obviously have never tried parenting, meditation, or dancing. Yet, while we at GOOD Vibes don’t exclusively base our decisions on data, we are happy to have it.
Daniel Mulroy is GOOD Vibes’ CTO, and a french-American technology passionate. Gabriel Cadet is a rookie journalist from Paris working at Good Vibes, he’s a cheerful guy, and a cinema enthusiast.
