| Flipping Internet Video the Bird |
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| Written by D. Eric Franks | |||
| Friday, 19 June 2009 08:51 | |||
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In the last 18 months (= one Moore unit), online video has gone from "interesting" to "necessary" for many viewers (informal videopia.org poll shows 22.7% of readers have replace TV with Internet entirely), but for content providers, it is still a massive, gaping revenue toilet. Think about what your Internet video viewing habits were like a year and a half ago. You probably watched laughing babies or cute kittens occasionally when your friends e-mailed you a clip or two. The quality was pretty bad, but it was watchable. Fastforward to today and the Internet is by far and away often the most convenient way to watch many programs: Why stay up until 11:35 to see The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien when you can just watch it with your morning coffee the next day? Better still, you can skip through to the bits you like and get the whole show over in far less than 90 minutes. Or, even better better still, you can use Hulu to jump to the exact moment when William Shatner flips off Conan O'Brien:
Even with all of this, no one is making any money. Did you see an ad when you played the Shatner clip? I saw a 3-second Hulu-branding spot. Sure, branding is important, but it doesn't pay short-term bills. Conventional wisdom and the media still obsess over broadcast television, shouting about how Conan's ratings are down and how the show is bombing. Did NBC make a huge error? Well, no, but measuring the success of a program based on an antiquated broadcast ratings system sure does. Still, someone's gotta pay for all of this stuff, and (to summarize a lot of recent analysis), while YouTube is booming in popularity, it's bombing, financially... Some folks are even suggesting that YouTube is doomed. The argument is pretty sound: YouTube has operating costs of $711 million, but is only generating $240 million in ad revenue. Even if Google could afford to lose $471,000,000.00 a year, the question is, why would they want to? Amateurs ranting about how there has to be a bajillion dollars to be made on the Internet Video Revolution are living in a fantasy land devoid of fundamental mathematics and economics if they think a tweak here or there to YouTube's ad revenue model will somehow magically generate an additional half-billion dollars next year - just so YouTube can freakin' BREAK EVEN.
There's no question video is important. There's no question online video will make money on its own someday. But for now and for most people and businesses, "video for the sake of video" is a money-burning proposition. Instead, the real revolution is the same as it ever was: Internet video is a tool - and an effective one - to sell something else (like a service or, say, completely hypothetically, a book). References:
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Flipping Internet Video the Bird
Jun 19 2009 17:06:53 This thread discusses the Content article: Flipping Internet Video the Bird
I thought the most pragmatic (and interesting part) of Fliqz CEO Benjamin "YouTube is Doomed" Wayne's followup in Advertising Age was this: "We have three broad categories of the way people use video." Now, I couldn't figure out what those three broad categories were (other than one of them was using video to "drive more page views" and thus make more money from existing banners/ads on the site), but I did like the part where he says "I think what marketers need to avoid is what I could call video for the sake of video, which is why most people did it in the first place." I think it could be argued that DJTV was "video for the sake of video" (and so was this site before I had the book for sale). Again, nothing wrong with "video for the sake of video" (anymore than "Art for Art's Sake") - just don't expect to magically get rich. |
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Re:Flipping Internet Video the Bird
Jun 20 2009 21:27:42 When we comment on an article it shows up in the forums?
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