Case Study – Article to Video by Ezoic and Its Impact  

Ezoic has been helping its publisher to monetize their websites with no barriers. Allowing the publisher to host videos on their website and monetize them without having to face any prerequisites for monetizing can allow many publishers to generate substantial amounts of revenue if they can create video content relevant to their website.

Just when you think this could be an excellent opportunity to increase your revenue, Ezoic comes up with something even more attractive. The latest addition of a tool called Flickify turns your articles into videos with an AI narrator in less than a minute.

You can convert any post from your website to an article just by scanning your post, selecting a narrator’s voice, choosing your theme, and adding images or videos if you want – all these without needing an expensive production crew.

Ezoic claims that the purpose of hosting video & its monetization is to improve page SEO, increase ad revenue, and an opportunity to get your videos indexed & appeared on search engines. All of these mean more traffic and ad revenue to your site.

TEST – Ezoic’s Article To Video Conversion & Its Impact On SEO + Revenue

Based on the available tools on Ezoic, we wanted to combine the “article to video conversion” tool and video hosting to see what kind of result we could get for one of our websites.

We aimed to set up a test with 24 posts that have received the most traffic during the last 2 months and group them with similar post views where each group consists of two posts. One of the two posts will have a video created on Ezoic and have video monetization enabled.

The post without video will be a reference point for us to compare what kind of impact the video insertion has bought on the other page. The key areas we wanted to look at for each URL are:

1. Pageview count
2. Pageview duration 
3. Page RPM
4. Page Performance

We can analyze the “before and after” impact with these data for the set of URLs we gathered, and with that intent, we let the test run for 30 days. 

As discussed, we looked at 24 articles and created a video for 12 of them, while the other 12 were the “control group,” all on the same site. 

After a month, we tried to compare one on one and the average data for the URLs, and it’s pretty visible that we have a mixed output for our matrices. Here are our takeaways: 

1. We assumed with the addition of videos; the page views might increase for pages with video in them due to videos getting indexed and displayed on search engines. Although that was not the output we have in terms of page views – we understand that video visibility on search engines might require more time than 30 days. In addition, page views decreased slightly for the non-video pages, which let us believe it’s a sitewide drop in traffic than just on pages that recently had video inserted. We noticed a -14.63% decrease in pageviews for articles with video and -15.44% for articles without videos.
2. With the addition of video, we also assumed that it could increase the pageview duration. In this criteria, we found a mixed result, with some non-video pages continuing to have a similar pageview duration. In contrast, some pages with video had a higher page view duration than the previous month. This is not the case for all pages with videos, so it might be too soon to conclude anything at the moment.
3. Ezoic claimed one of their main priorities is maximizing ad revenue with video monetization. It holds true for our test, but it appears to be a site-wise RPM increase than just on the video pages. Articles without videos showed a 13.43% increase in RPM over the test period, whereas articles with videos had an 11.15% increase. It is safe to say within the 30 days time range, the videos were not the pillar for RPM increase.

Output:

Site Traffic Change:

Articles with Video: -14.63%

Articles without Video: -15.44%

RPM Change:

Articles with Video: +11.15%

Articles without Video: +13.43%

It is always way more fun when the case study reveals AMAZING results… this is not yet the case. 

So the current conclusion is that the video tool is an amazingly simple way to create decent-quality videos. However, it is not a magic bullet to drive increased SEO and earnings benefits. 

We will continue testing this tool, but the current results show that the fundamental approach of… do it if it adds value to your audience and doesn’t do it if it doesn’t hold with simple video creation. 

We will also update this case study in a few months since the timing of only 1 month is not long enough, as we can see, to provide us with sufficient output.