A year or so back, when TubeMogul was still three dudes in a Berkeley basement looking for a direction to take their nascent online video metrics business, Brett (our CEO) attended a “Top YouTubers” meetup in San Francisco. In attendance were mostly UGC (user-generated content) folks, and after talking to people, Brett realized that many of these video producers were more artists than they were seasoned businesspeople, and probably lacked the revenue necessary for advanced online video metrics. With that in mind, Brett and the founders opted to make TubeMogul’s basic product free. Who organized this life-changing meetup? Cory Williams of SMP Films, a YouTube Partner who, as Michael over at Alley Insider points out using TubeMogul’s data, dominated the viewership rankings last week with his “Choose Your Path” video series.
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.
The glut (albeit a welcome one) of comedy videos online overshadows the relative shortage of gripping drama series. More than filling this void are our friends at It’s All In Your Hands, makers of the Emmy Award-winning hit, Satacracy 88. They are going to launch several new series soon, and just launched their latest episode of Satacracy to the world today via TubeMogul:
We pride ourselves in looking at aggregated viewership data and giving an independent perspective on what it’s telling us through our blogs and research. Since we sell the graph (and not the video player or the content), our only agenda is accuracy. Consider it our version of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil.” It’s worth noting that we don’t stitch in ads and our basic tools are free, while a lot of our users make money monetizing their videos.
