The Great Video Cash-In: Offering Monetization Musings to the Budding Content Provider
Did you know that more than 3,500 years of new video footage (according to Trends magazine) is created every single year? Now, that’s a lot of video!
Clearly, people make videos for all sorts of reasons, but I want to focus on videos created for one of two reasons: fame and/or fortune. In a society with that much content, it may seem unlikely that one could attain either fame or fortune. However, there are ways to attain both.
If the goal is fame, the video should appear on a popular video website and as many as possible (usually via syndication). This increases the total reach and raises the likelihood that the video would obtain the critical mass to spread virally (e.g. Lonelygirl15, Numa Numa or Star Wars Kid).
If the goal is fortune, there are a couple of different ways to attempt to reach it, but none of them are very good, unless you are incredibly clever and talented, like Lonelygirl15’s creators. A video creator could sell his video to consumers directly (very hard unless you can cut a deal with iTunes).
Another option would be to sell directly to web publishers who are interested in exclusive rights. The third option is to attempt to get it sponsored by advertising. Obviously, if you are producing a single video that is not a high-end product (think network quality or better) you have very limited options when it comes to advertising support. As such, most video creators are left working with a video aggregator.
According to a recent Business 2.0 magazine story, there are more than 170 YouTube knockoff sites (and that was more than five months ago), so there are quite a few choices. However, only a few of these companies will actually pay for content (e.g. Revver will offer a revenue share on the portion of advertising sales that comes from views the video generates).
But for the most part, the aggregators generally do nothing to help promote individual videos on their site, nor help in getting them syndicated widely. Getting it spread is up to the creator and is a one-website-at-a-time process. Also, most of these companies only stream videos; this eliminates the ability to spread a video via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks or BitTorrent, two very popular sources of user-generated videos.
Reader Comments.
No comments yet
Leave a Comment
Pages: 1 2 next page »
Article Sponsor
More Features
-
Loading ...
Features
- Automakers Need to Become Better Conversationalists July 2nd 2009
- Affiliates can win in the media buy game July 2nd 2009
- Crowd-Sourced Ads: A Measured Response June 28th 2009
- Is the government coming for you? June 28th 2009
- Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It June 25th 2009
Latest News
- Readers weigh in on ATT, ad networks and the iPhone July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — In our weekly poll, readers overwhelmingly said that [...] more »
- Hiring, promotions, location, partnerships and product news July 2nd 2009 ADOTAS — Internet Oldtimers Foundation, Jumptap, eXelate, Kampyle, The Digital [...] more »
- OPA large ad units unfurl across the web July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The Online Publishers Association said a group of [...] more »
- Email spam in June worst since 2007 July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — MessageLabs Intelligence released its numbers for June, and [...] more »
- Joost becomes YouTube roadkill, starts layoffs July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — Despite reworking its technology to work in a [...] more »
- Ad networks, not websites, choked on Michael Jackson news July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — The news of the pop star’s death saw [...] more »
- StrongMail doubling down on social media, buys PopularMedia July 1st 2009 ADOTAS — StrongMail has announced that it acquired PopularMedia, a [...] more »
Spotlight
Trust Me – I’m a Professional … SEOADOTAS — At WebMetro we typically provide SEO Action Plans as part of campaigns. As the name implies, an SEO [...] more...
Reader Favorites
Layoff Tracker
- AOL - 700
- Apple - 50
- Clear Channel - 2,800 total (1,000 currently)
- Google - 340
- IBM - more than 7,800
- Joost - about 90
- MySpace - in June, about 720
- World Avenue - 30 percent of workforce
- Yahoo - 2,220 total, about 700 currently
- Zango - closes, about 90, in addition to earlier layoffs
Classifieds
Recent Comments
- Josette Davids: Great article and an amazing time was had by all at this event. I'm an
- Mike Poserina: There is also a tragic flaw rumored in Bing's ad placement engine. When resolved,
- Andy: Erin, Never mind the commenters who can only see the negative side of things. I thank you
- pkohler: We've also noticed that ads frequently adversely affects the performance of a Web page. As
