The easiest way to start monetizing videos today is to opt-in to existing revenue sharing programs on the various video sharing sites. This is probably the least profitable of the myriad of monetization options out there, but best for the vast majority of people who don’t have a large enough audience to support their own advertising. Casual users just posting videos for fun have nothing to lose by checking the opt-in boxes on these sites.
Video sharing sites with revenue-sharing include:
MetaCafe Producer Rewards Program
$5 per 1,000 views; payments start when a video hits 20,000 views within a six month period, with the caveat that its rating cannot average below 3.0.
Tag-Based. Users pick which of their meta-tags to sponsor, and ads are peppered in the player along with comments.
Tags are sponsored in two ways: advertisers can buy keywords at auction, or relevant Amazon product links will appear.
Viddler will split the affiliate revenue if someone clicks through to buy a product on Amazon; in the case of ads, they will split the cost-per-click fee they collect (they are planning to switch to cost-per-thousand, or CPM, later).
The original site to offer revenue sharing (hence their namesake)
50/50 Split of advertising revenue to those who add “revtag” to their videos. Works whether video is downloaded, embedded or viewed on Revver.com
YouTube
By application/invite only; terms vary. YouTube does not disclose specifics, but we hear it’s in the 75% range. YouTube paid out $1 million in 2007, although it’s fair to infer that Universal Music Group is getting a much larger piece of that than Mondo Media cartoons. More here.
Today, we released a study clarifying what counts as a “view” across video sharing sites. This study was initially published last June to great fanfare, so we re-executed it under current conditions, this time testing 14 sites to see if views are counted for refreshes, watching more than half a video, watching a video to completion and watching embedded videos. To our surprise, what was once a disparate dissonance across sites is now close to standardizing. All but three video sites we tested log “views” once the player starts, no matter how much of a video is viewed. YouTube and Yahoo!, which formerly had stricter, IP address-based constraints, lessened their standards, now counting everything once a video starts playing. Blip and MetaCafe are lone holdouts to an IP address-based standard.
Since I blogged about William F. Buckley last week our blog is slanting right, which needs to be addressed (TubeMogul was founded in Berkeley, after all, where intolerance is not tolerated). Enter International Fund for Animal Welfare, a nonprofit dating back 30 years that is embracing new media and distributing videos via TubeMogul. No matter how you feel about animal rights, some of these videos are truly humbling and worth checking out, if only to fully countenance reality.
Fans unofficially posting American Idol clips on YouTube and other sites are giving us an informal laboratory to predict the winner of American Idol based on online video views. Using TubeMogul’s Buzz Tracking tool, which allows us to track videos that contain a specific keyword in the title or tags, we are tracking aggregate numbers for videos featuring “David Archuleta” and “David Cook.”
The winner? Archuleta, seemingly the the judges’ favorite, leads in overall views, with 36,357,856 compared to David Cook’s 26,629,791 as of May 18th. Part of Archuleta’s dominance is due to videos that pre-date American Idol (i.e. above), from his brief 15 minutes of fame as a child contestant on Star Search. While Archuleta looks poised to win with a 10 million-view lead, the numbers also reveal some momentum for Cook, who grew 29% in cumulative views compared to Archuleta’s 24% from May 2nd to May 18th. But will it be enough?
UPDATE: It was enough, and perhaps the rates of growth in views provided a premonition of this. That said, we should still eat crow for picking Archuleta.
The Supreme Court has struggled for centuries to define the boundaries of free speech, from the Alien and Sedition Acts on down the line to Justice Stewart’s rigorous definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” So why do we expect video sharing sites such as YouTube to be any different when enforcing their “Terms of Service” with regards to obscene material? Sensing opportunity, countless video creators have built their success on straddling the line (pardon the expression) of porn, courting that teenage boy masturbating crowd. Some do it more artfully than others, but it is getting more and more prevalent on some video sharing sites.
Enter Lisa Nova, a TubeMogul user and true creative who is tired of seeing quality user-generated content get buried by quasi-porn or music videos. She is now allowing vloggers to use differently-themed shots featuring her cleavage (”Collab Characters,” including a sexy Rambo and school girl) as thumbnails to boost their views. Bravo. It certainly worked for themightythor1212 (below).
Many independent filmmakers utilize TubeMogul as a tool to deploy their movie trailers, behind-the-scenes filmmaker vlogs, shorts and even feature films, often increasing their viewership and learning more about their audience in the process. Shotgun Stories is an acclaimed film I recently discovered when a user unofficially deployed the film’s trailer via TubeMogul. Interestingly, this trailer is everywhere, posted and re-posted by many passionate fans, attesting to the viral nature of both online video and independent film. Described by Roger Ebert as “a great discovery,” the movie is currently wrapping up a limited theater tour of the U.S. and is also available on DVD.
Film-oriented readers might also be interested in our partnership with IndieGoGo, an online social marketplace that connects filmmakers and fans to make independent film happen.
Colin Devroe, Technology Evangelist of Viddler interviewed our CEO, Brett Wilson, to discuss our new tiering system and posted it on his blog (you should check out the pic of Brett in India he dug up on Flickr - fantastic).
He goes into great depth (thanks, Colin!) so I won’t recap the post, but I do want to highlight something for our users. When you distribute your content widely, one of the key aspects is that you are able to engage with multiple communities. If you do it right, you might find an incredible fan base in the least expected places. So don’t just put up your videos, ENGAGE THE COMMUNITY! Put your personality in your profile (for God’s sake, put up a profile!), respond to comments, and surf a bit and comment on the videos you like. The effort will pay off, and who knows, you just might be entertained along the way.
In Colin’s words:
My reasons for doing this interview with Brett are many-fold. First, I wanted to show why Viddler’s partnership with TubeMogul was an easy decision. How innovative and proactive the TubeMogul is. When we added support for TubeMogul to Viddler many people were happy about it (as they’d been asking for it for months beforehand). However, there were some that were disappointed because of the influx of videos that were coming to Viddler, who were not part of the community on Viddler. Uploading through TubeMogul is definitely not a warm, community-like experience. It used to be that you were a Viddler member, you interacted with other Viddler members, and Viddler members were the people viewing, commenting, and favoriting your videos. Now we’re seeing people that upload video to Viddler that never fill out their profiles. This has caused a small amount of community displeasure, but it is a problem we’re going to work on solving - and with the TubeMogul team at the healm, I know that we’re both up for that challenge.
As a small suggestion to video content producers: Interact with the communities that you share your videos with. It will go a long way towards building a large, interactive audience.
