Part 4 of our series on Tech Crunch is up.  I updated our rudimentary pyramid from 2007:

with this one.  It’s a work in progress and I will add more layers to it:

A few notes on it:

- Triangle represents all video content online

- The line above UGC represents professional content, be it super premium, premium and prosumer.

- Circle represents content producers; outside of circle represents aggregators.

- The Profitability Index captures

a) Profit margin on operations,

b) Total Return on Investment as measured by income and capital gain,

c) Likelihood of positive Liquidity Event.

- Center of circle represents highest Profitability Index because production costs are lower and rights are less restrictive. It is also the best risk/return adjusted investment opportunity when measured by ROI.

- After all, only the #1 aggregator has real value, though the #2, 3, etc., content producer can still have a lot of value to a would-be buyer.

- DailyMotion, Veoh, Metacafe, Break and YouTube all began as aggregators of UGC and then shifted towards premium/super premium content, but today they house everything.

- Break, in particular was an aggregator of UGC but is now moving towards more and more premium content and is producing premium content as well after acquisition of HBOlab aka Runawaybox from HBO.

- UGC Producers splintered into Prosumer and UGC, clearly some of the top prosumer producers are massive commercial / promotional endeavours now, some of which even have successful ad models.

- The budget levels and production quality within Premium varies considerably.

- Super Premium producers will need to offer more online to remain on top over time as Premium producers embrace the Web and offer more content to users.

Now read the Post.

Ross Levinsohn interviewed on Beet.tv:

Good question.

Ever since Google launched text ads and adopted the pay-per-click model, search revenue paved the way for online media’s growth. Today, Google generates the bulk of its $24 billion in annual revenues from search ads. In turn, search ads account for 40% of all new-media spending.

Will that ever change? It depends.  I first examined that question in 2007, today we look at the trends that will make it happen.  Read more on my first article on MediaPost.

All graphs from the folks at eMarketer, and graphs I referenced in my first article on MediaPost.

I will add a link to a story soon to this blog post to put all of these graphs in context.

The trend is clear:

He emphasized Aol’s content strategy, with the build out of AOL’s new content management system Seed and acquisition of StudioNow on the video front.  Armstrong went into some detail about AOL’s nichebuster strategy, noting that “fragmentation is our friend.”  He also said that AOl will pursue new paid subscription services in the future.

Read more.

From PEHub:

For starters, Digg is planning to launch a spate of new Digg sites centered around niche content. To continue broadening away from its original base of men ages 18 to 34, Digg is “extending beyond our one-size-fits-all home page and atomizing content,” says Digg’s chief stategy officer, Mike Maser. If you’re interested in rock climbing or knitting, Digg aims to have in-depth news for you to vote up or down on a separate home page.

We shall see.  This is the problem with platforms: they can catch fire and scale rapidly, but despite the perception of defensibility (”it has 40 million registered users”) there is nothing all that defensive about any of them (just ask MySpace).  This is why Digg founder launched Revision3, a video content company.  Content is king and over time, unless you’re clueless, you can only get bigger and more entrenched.

This is the third installment of a series of posts I am writing on Tech Crunch, looking at video content.

The first piece, The State of Online Video was a kind of “balance sheet” assessment of where the industry is at.

The second piece, 12 Surprising Things Holding Back Online Video Advertising was more of an “income statement” that looked at the surprises over the past few years that have held back the economic side of online video while the consumption thereof soared.

Before looking at the future of video advertising next week, today I published Part 3 which looks at How Videos Are Found and Consumed Online.  This time, we actually included graphs. Here is the intro:

To try to understand—let alone guess—the future of video advertising, one needs to start by looking at the biggest trend in media over the past few decades.  In November 2006, Bear Stearns Cable and Satellite analyst Spencer Wang published a study called “Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment”.  While Bear Stearns has since been acquired by JP Morgan and is now a mere footnote in business books, the study’s findings are more relevant than ever.  Let’s examine 8 key factors behind online video consumption.

Read the rest here and check back next week, where we look at how videos will be monetized…

Watch it on Apple here.

I guess I can call off that iPad skit, Mad TV - now defunct - came up with this year.   I guess their genius was years ahead of its time.

Found via Huffington Post.

Some of these are absolutely ridiculous!!

Continue laughing HERE.