I blasted GooTube (in my diplomatic way, of course) just last week after I spoke to my contact there:
:: Google/YouTube Strategy Highlights Why Video Advertising Might Never Actualize
:: Is Google a Conglomerate? Their Challenges in Video Suggest It Is
I wanted to come out and say that “Google and YouTube were being both greedy and risk-averse.” I implicitly hinted at both of those things. I did not want to sound like I was bitter, but I was disappointed. The reason was simple:
I was pissed, mainly, because I was getting tired of distribution partners such as YouTube call us at WatchMojo.com, tell us how much they loved our content but stop short at actually giving us anything of value.
The simple truth was that vanity notwithstanding, having our content up on YouTube etc., was nice, but to continue pumping our content on those networks, we’d need something tangible.
Online, you have branding, revenue or traffic benefits. Sure, our content has been seen over 600,000 times on each YouTube and Google Video, which is not too shabby, but when you consider that we only have 200-300 videos on each of those sites, you wonder what the tally would be if we put up more of our 4,000 video clips. We own the rights to all of those videos, so naturally we have to balance between building our own audience on WatchMojo.com and leveraging the marketing platform that is YouTube.
I am not stupid, I can imagine that a portion of our audience of 250,000 unique users found us through YouTube or any other distribution partner we have. But unlike text content, it’s hard to gauge how many. With text content, everything is clickable so you can imagine that the bulk of traffic is direct.
Back up a bit: total traffic is direct and indirect. Direct is “our content is on Google Video and someone clicks on the link back to our site,” it’s tracked. Indirect traffic is someone sees a video, sees it’s from WatchMojo.com and eventually types it in. Judging by the direct traffic, YouTube is marginal. Guesstimating by the indirect traffic, YouTube and other such services are valuable to a startup like WatchMojo.com. If I had 1M unique users, it would be less so.
Anyway, there’s been a lot of grumbling online over Chad Hurley’s assertion that they will pay content providers something. While Steve Chen and I have had the sporadic email exchange in the past, I have not had any exchanges withg Chad. Though I did make one thing clear to my counterpart at YouTube last week:
the fact that YouTube - via Google - was publicly telling media companies with copyright-violated content on YouTube that they would pay them to house content yet tell online-only video producers that they would not pay me would backfire.
This was partially why yesterday I posted this: Need for Online-Only Video Producers’ Network?
It was a not-so-veiled reference to the fact that online-only video producers would be a major make-or-break player in the video content and advertising landscape but that we would have to be wary of the media firms while recognizing that video distribution firms like YouTube would disregard our interests if they could.
It’s nice to see Chad come around. Let’s hope it’s not immaterial.
We (the online only producers) can add so much content to Youtube that it would become the future of Web TV. The reality is that it will take a lot of revenue to entice an established media company like News Corp., Disney etc. to want to risk the $75B TV ad revenue or the syndication cash cow they risk up losing by going online; but us online only guys? Hey, it’s all bonus and it’s all incremental steps towards making the broader video community a reality.
Now let’s hope the amounts are not gimmicks and actually something tangible.
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January 27th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
[…] Like many others in the blogosphere — including Ashkan Karbasfrooshan at HipMojo, Allan Stern at CenterNetworks, Fred Wilson over at A VC, and my pal Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 — I’m intrigued by Chad Hurley’s comments to the crowd of tall foreheads at Davos that YouTube plans to start paying users. The only questions that remain, of course, are a) pay whom? and b) How? […]