In writing a recent article for Alley Insider, Michael asked us if there are any stealth viral video campaigns floating around out there that he could force out of the closet. After consulting our database (which houses over 25,000 content creators) and clicking around, we think (but aren’t certain) that this video, which conspicuously features Stella Artois (owned by mega-conglomerate InBev), is a total shill (not that that’s a bad thing):
Today, we announced distribution and analytics integration for 5min.com, a “Life Videopedia” (think Wikipedia for videos) that features short (under “5min”) video solutions to practical questions of all types. What really sets 5min apart is its Smart Player (below), which allows viewers to watch a video in slow motion, frame by frame, zoomed in and out, as well as giving the video creator the option to make a storyboard that helps others better understand the demonstration. A favorite video from their site:
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.
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).
