What's this all about?
Simple. After eleven years of waiting (I commissioned a very early article on Internet video back in 1994), the time finally seemed right (summer of 2005) to start a publication that focuses on Internet video issues.
For a free highlights version of this blog, go to http://www.internetvideomarketingletter.com/
Hard to believe, but it's been three years since I wrote about a little company called Pure Digital and its
interesting - but dumb - idea for disposable video cameras.
While it was cool to be able to buy a video camera for $29, being able to use it only once was not cool
That's where the hacker came in.
As I reported nearly three years ago, hackers were already at work to unlock the camera's "one use"
limitation so it could be used over and over again.
To its credit, the Pure Digital got a clue, raised the price on its cameras significantly and took over the market for super small, super cheap video cameras beating giants like Sony and Panasonic.
The result is they just sold their company to Cicso for $590 million dollars. Not bad considering all the gloom and doom these days.
What's the message? There are actually lots of them.
1. Listen to your customers - even people who are hacking your products
2. The right idea at the right time executed the right way trumps bad times and big companies
3. You really should be paying close attention to what we're up to at the System. We constantly catch meaningul trends and opportunities long before they appear on the radar screens of others.
They're still time to find out what we're doing at System 2009 this march 27 & 29 in Chicago:
http://www.thesystemseminar.com/inc.html
.
Can you put your offering in a headline with the formula "Attention (fill in the blank)"?
If not, you may have what I call a "diffused" (widely scattered) audience.
Not that "diffused" and "difficult" start with the same four letters.
I could also add to that the word "diffident" which means "lacking in confidence" - something marketers who don't have a clear target in mind eventually become.
The solution is another "diff" word: differentiate, one meaning of which is "to make specialized or distinct."
If you're aiming at a target, it helps a lot if there's one clear target and there's a big red bulls eye painted on it.
What does this have to do with monetizing web video?
A lot.
There are many fascinating topics in the world, but unless you want to become like "YouTube" what you're really looking for is not a topic, but a clearly differentiated market.
One of the bells your advertising MUST ring in your prospect's mind if you want to be successful is the "This is for ME!" bell.
That's hard to do if you're trying to be all things to all people.
I see this mistake being made over and over again.
If you're YouTube, maybe you can get away with it (though I'm not sure that YouTube with its tens of billions of views is doing that well. )
But if have e a one-person operation (or one that aspires to run "lean and mean" forever) you need tightly focused targets.
It's true that one micro-market might not be enough to support you, but if you target a micro-market you will get that business to its natural critical mass much faster and you'll get a much better yield on the market you attract. Then, once that enterprise is on solid ground, you can start another one.
What does all this have to so with marketing video on the web?
A lot.
Here's an example of someone who "gets" this.
If you're a jazz fan, you will LOVE it and will want to subscribe and tell all your fellow jazz fans about it.
If you're not, you should still study what this guy is doing. Simplicity can be deceiving.
http://www.jazzonthetube.com/page/16.html
Ken
I'd didn't have much time for blogging this year.
Instead I spent my free time making and promoting videos.
(Hint: Making and promoting Internet videos pays better than blogging.)
Results: We crossed the 11,000,000 video view mark for 2008 yesterday. No one is more shocked than me.
Total costs to host, serve and promote?
Less than $100 for the year.
Net revenue (entirely from AdSense): more than 1 cent per view.
Total time spent: 15 to 20 minutes per day - every day.
If you do the math on the return on my time (assume 20 minutes a day and 1.2 cents per view), you will discover something interesting.
See? I told you Internet video was for real :-)
It took me two and years of modest, steady effort to get it to this point. Note the word steady. This is not get rich quick. On the other hand, with constant tending, the revenue is virtually bullet proof - and it grows.
The tools I used: YouTube, aweber and a very simple web site. And that's it.
Later when realized what I was doing had promise, I created a custom page creation/content manager program to speed up the page creation process and allow me to track my stats easier.
I explained this unique video publishing system in detail at the Smart Beginners seminar in Chicago and at the UK Intensive in London. The people who attended those seminars were very smart indeed.
I will not be teaching it again in a public setting again until the fall of 2009 at the earliest. Watch this space for details.
It seems like a hundred years ago.
Overnight, it became dead simple to copy and post video to the Internet and everyone started doing it.
Copyright owners wailed and gnashed their teeth. Can you blame them? Suddenly, it was easier to copy and repost their uber-expensive products than it was to make paper copies. (At least you have to pay to make photocopies.)
To get the ball rolling, Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube. (That lawsuit is still pending I believe.)
In the meantime, someone got intelligent.
A company called Auditude ran the numbers...
It turns out that viewers upload 20 times number of clips that content producers do and viewership of viewer-uploaded videos is SIX times higher than the viewership of videos posted by content owners.
In short, unpaid volunteers were generating more viewers for content owners than the content owners were able to produce for themselves.
MySpace, working with Autitude's technology, can now identify clips produced by Viacom (MTV etc.) uploaded by MySpace customers and automatically attach relevant ads to them.
How beautiful is this?
Viacom gets paid for its content. MySpace gets paid for access to its audience. Users get to go wild and do what they want to do which is repost video's they like.
Imagine being able to expand the distribution of your product SIXFOLD by just letting people do what they want to do.
For years, "viral marketing" has been the holy grail for marketers. With help from Autitude, Viacom is getting it instead of filing lawsuits to try to stop it.
Well, I have one.
A genuine viral video
How about 1,234,411 views for one page in September - with no advertising, no SEO, no nothing? Just raw viral power.
Just in case you didn't read that right, that's over ONE MILLION TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND views for one page in one month.
Now that I am a genuine viral marketing "expert", here's what I've learned...
We did it.
We took an important subject that the media wants to ignore and put it - and kept it - at the top of YouTube's "New and Politics" charts.
As I write this, the video - "The Truth about Katrina" - is the #10 highest rated video in this category of this month. Amazing when you think about what we're up against - McCain, Obama, Palin, Wall Street melt down, etc. etc. and the fact that the Katrina anniversary and Hurricane Gustav are long over.
The underdog - in this case the people of New Orleans and Southern Louisiana - can win...if the underdog has some Internet savvy.
Speaking of savvy, YouTube is adding so many cool "bells and whistles" that it's hard for me to keep up.
Can anyone point us to a good online resource (maybe hidden somewhere on YouTubes's site) that goes into the fine points of creating and customizing a YouTube channel and using all the other new stuff they're offering (text annotation, automatic transfer to another video, click from video to a web site)
The speed of change in this medium has swamped my ability to keep up. If you've got anything to share on this point, I'm sure fellow SystemVideoBlog readers will appreciate it. I know I will.
(Please limit posts to this subject.)
Thanks.
Ken
In July, my "hobby" site broke one million views per month.
The numbers are in for August.
We did it again PLUS 10%.
I'll be revealing the formula I used to create this amazing traffic magnet at the London, UK System Intensive and the Chicago System Boot Camp.
Cash required to start: zero. My total time commitment: 15 minutes per day.
Revenue: Currently just a hair away from five figures net per month. And growing at 10% per month. Perfectly scalable. Could be ten times the size with no additional work required and the market has at least that much room to grow.
A few days ago, I accepted what sounded like a totally insane challenge.
A friend asked if I could help promote a video I made for her group on YouTube.
"What category?" I asked.
"News and politics," she said.
"Let me get this straight. The Democrats are right in the middle of their convention. The Republicans are starting their own soon. All the TV news, all the newspaper headlines, all the blogs are focused on the conventions and you want to go up against that?"
(I mean, really. Can you imagine anything more impractical, more pie-in-the-sky, more unlikely to ever happen?)
Then she hit me with the zinger:
"It's for New Orleans."
"Oh...OK...Let's do it!"
24 hours ago, we had a zero ranking on YouTube. Now look at where we're at...On the top line of the highest rated videos, right next to the Democrats and the Republicans.
Let's see...the candidates have spent tens of millions of dollars to promote themselves. The news media threw in, what, maybe another $100 million worth of free exposure. They have thousands of minions and operatives at their beck and call.
And we're right up there...for zero dollars...in our spare time...all from a lap top.
That's Internet power baby. The System Way.
Can your guru do that? Can they go up against the real world's biggest media guns, call it, win it and do it in real time?
Sometime next week, I'll explain how YOU can do this too - and you won't have to touch your credit card to learn.
Meanwhile, here's the video. Soon we're going to get knocked down to the "Weekly" top rated instead of "Today's" top rated so I'm still hustling for traffic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wln_iq5bc8k
Check it out: Bottom right hand corner. It's called "The Katrina Myth."
Best placement money can buy - but we got it free.
We hit a million plus viewers again in the month of August, but that's not what I'm really excited about.
A friend and I made this video from scratch - from concept, to script, to production, to being seen by thousands online - in just three weeks from start to finish.
All the footage was "found" on the Internet and it was a very part time effort for both of us.
I'd like you to click through to YouTube and rank it (with five stars), favorite it, and comment on it.
If readers of this blog generate at least 20,000 YouTube views, I'll interview the guy who did the production and post it for you.
If you guys generate 50,000 or more visits, I'll explain how I get 1 million plus visitors to a video site working just 15 minutes a day.
You have seven days to make your numbers. Good luck - and as you'll see - this is for a good cause.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wln_iq5bc8k
After two years of very part-time experimentation, I've come up with a formula that this past month (July 2008) generated over 1,000,000 video views.
Better yet, traffic for the test site is growing at 10% per month - and it's all free - so next year this time, the site will be doing well over 2,000,000 views per month, unless I get ambitious and start pushing it a little.
Total time investment to keep the thing going and growing: 15 minutes per day.
More details later, but here's the screen shot:
I had friends who played in virtual worlds in the late 1970s (they needed mainframe access back then.)
I didn't get it then - and I don't get it now - but whether I get it or not doesn't matter.
This year $1 billion was invested in various "virtual world" ventures. OK, there's a lot of hot money around right now, but it can't ALL be dumb money.
Also, if "community" is the key to the Internet, what could be more of a community than a place where you completely immerse yourself in another world with fellow virtual world inhabitants.
Two resources for you if you want to keep up-to-date with what's going on:
!. Virtual World Management
The virtual world industry is big enough to have its own conferences, expos and industry analysts.
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/
2. Machinima
What is it?
It's "animated filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3-D environment."
Frankly, I've yet to see a good machinima (I haven't looked all that hard), but clearly this is a medium to watch. It's growing fast and the current fan base is very passionate.
You can get a crash course here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima
Ken
A bit long-winded (he's an academic) but when he finally makes his point at the end, it's a pretty good one.
Actually, John Walker, co-founder founder of AutoCAD, made this same point brilliantly way back in the early nineties. The folks who are going to make a killing in software, he said, are the folks who create tools that let people make their own stuff.
There's so much going on in Internet video, just tracking it could be a full time job.
Unfortunately, I already have a full time "job" (actually a couple of them): running a business; organizing and hosting the annual System Seminar; counseling non-profits in New Orleans.
So the number of posts to the blog has suffered, though I do think the quality has been sky high.
In fact, we accomplished the most important thing: alerting Internet marketers to the impending breakthroughs that were on track to put Internet video on the map as a major force in Internet marketing. Folks who took our advice were well positioned when the reality we predicted (with a pretty good degree of precision) arrived.
Now video on the Internet has practically become "business as usual."
With that in mind, let's talk with a real Internet video veteran, a guy who, while he was at Microsoft, was already looking at video's online potential seriously TWELVE years ago.
Hundreds of high level, high stakes online video presentations later, he has a lot of practical advice to share with us:
Did you feel the earth shake?
You should have.
Little Apple, Inc. (formerly Apple Computer) which many were ready to write off as dead as recently as ten years ago is now the world's biggest music retailer. It just beat out the former champion Wal-Mart.
Who says this is so? The NPD group.
There was no online music industry to speak up five years ago. Chalk up another one to the Internet.
If you haven't heard from me lately it's because I've been far too busy making and promoting Internet videos to take the time to write about them.
If you're new to the site, just check out the archive. It's got plenty of very useful, on-target information on Internet video - including the original premise of the site itself.
This is my 15th year of talking about the impending impact of the Internet on TV and my third year of this blog.
Since then, my clients and I have used Internet video to sell millions of dollars worth of products in all categories. I routinely get uploaded videos to 10,000+ viral view status and have occasionally hit 100,000 plus with one video crossing the 500,000 views mark - all viral without penny one of advertising (or real effort for that matter.)
A casual, extremely part time video publishing experiment I started in August of 2006 with a mailing to 50 colleagues has now blossomed into an active subscriber list of 23,000 and growing. Again, all without a penny in advertising. Amazingly, because it wasn't my intention, the site accidentally nets over $3,000 a month. Imagine if I invested in it a little bit.
A quote in an article in yesterday's New York Times by Alan Wutzel, the head of research for NBC put it best:
"(Watching video on the Internet) has become a mainstream behavior in an extraordinarily quick time. It isn't just the province of college students or generation Y-ers. It spans all ages."
I know. I called it three years ago (fifteen really, but who's counting?)
It was inevitable. After all, corporate TV sucks. Always has. The only reason they were able to get away with it for so long was because an alternate distribution hadn't emerged. Now it has. "Game Over" for the bad guys.
In the same article, Quincy Smith, the president of CBS Interactive summed up the big broadcasting industry's problem quite nicely:
"The four and a half billion we make on broadcast is never going to equate to four and a half billion online."
Well, boo-hoo. After all the big networks have done such a good job maintaining and raising cultural standards and educating people about health, personal finance and citizenship that it would be tragic to see them go out of business. NOT.
Internet television will generate many billions of dollars in revenue and that revenue will be distributed broadly. Network executives may actually have to work for a living some day. Meanwhile, people with their wits about them and content that people want will be doing just fine.
Will it all be good? No, of course not, but a lot of voices that are currently not being heard thanks to what amounts to Corporate Amerikan censorship will be heard and the country and world will be a better place for it.
You gotta love this.
A web site and TV channel that are nothing but commercials.
It's called Firebrand.com
Content: free. Production values: sky high.
Will people watch? I watched for a while last night in a hotel room. It was better than the cr@p that was on the local cable service.
Monetization?
They do a lot of call outs to people who view the channel online. I think they could be doing a lot better on the monetization front, but hey, it's a start, and they're both online and on cable.
To see it in action: Firebrand.
For over a year now, "Video" has been one of the choices Google has offered on its very spare home page along with other popular search services like "Images", "News", and "Maps" etc.
Well, I just took a look on my spanking brand new MacBook and "Video" is gone as a home page choice.
It's been replaced with a button called "Products."
If you google "Google Products" what you come up with are lists of the all the software products that Google makes available above and beyond their search results (ex. gmail, Google Earth)
A very quick search on Google itself turned up nothing about this new initiative.
So what is it exactly?
First, "Products" is shorthand for "Google Product Search" and like all things Google it's in "beta."
Second, it is a very slick, lightening fast search engine for...products. You name it and it appears Google has got it. Think UBER-catalog.
Not only that, but it appears Google has made is dead simple to shop across multiple online catalogs with a service called Google "Shopping List."
The experience ends, of course, with a visit to Google "Checkout."
Do you selling physical "stuff?" You need to get on this...like now.
By the way, Google's catchphrase for the service is "search for stuff to buy." Talk about cutting to the chase. I have a feeling this is going to be huge. There's got to be a cold chill going through the folks at Yahoo Stores and even eBay right now.
Here's what the page looks like: Google Product Search
Here's in the info page for sellers: Sell with Google
I happen to be in LA this week so I'm seeing lots of new about the looming writers strike.
Writers on strike?
Believe it or not those charming airheads on the tube don't write the words that come out of their mouths. A back office of writers keeps the game going.
Now those writers are on the verge of walking off the job. Their complaint is that they're not receiving compensation for DVD sales and other digital repackaging of their work.
Is this really a big deal?
Yes it is for two reasons, one micro and one macro...
If you want to take a look at an NBC/Fox attempt to steal market share from Google/YouTube, you can take a look at the beta here: Hulu.com
It makes sense that some big "me too" ventures would crop up. The smart thing would be for these two networks to promote Hulu.com heavily on their broadcasts. They'll be able to generate a surprising amount of spike traffic this way.
Interesting counterbalance to Google's lock on search traffic.
TV still trumps search when it comes to eye balls, but of course the the Internet, the distance from screen to play button is a whole lot shorter.
There have been illegal TV episode viewing sites for years, each getting shut down by the MPAA and similar entities for illegal distribution. You might have visited one of these sites, watched a few episodes of The Simpsons Season 4 and the next day, the site vanished. Apple Inc. in the past year has been making agreements with cinema and television companies in order to provide video content for iTunes and the iPod. Other companies are beginning to follow suit.
An Online TV Application called Joost was recently released to the public. Joost claims to be the first Broadcast Quality Internet Television service. The Online TV Company secured $45 million in financing back in May 2007. Joost has since made agreements with major networks like MTV, CNN, Discovery Channel, WB, and CBS so they can provide over 15,000 shows and several channels at launch.
Joost is an application that you can download for free for Windows and Mac. You need a broadband connection to use the service. Joost boasts an amazing interface that allows you to browse channels via a grid. You can search for a show you want to watch. There are chat rooms, so you can talk with others watching the same show, similar to watching TV in your own home. There is instant messaging support for gMail and Jabber. Joost supports multiple accounts, so different users can customize the interface to their liking. There are commercial breaks with only one commercial per break.
Look at Joost Press Releases Here.
Download Joost from the Official website to see what the buzz is all about.
Microsoft has now launched its online video service out of Beta.
http://video.msn.com
Aside from the fact MSN Video will distribute content for NBC Universal and News Corp, and this video content will include full-length programming, movies and clips from at least a dozen television networks and two major film studios.
Forget the fact that they have years of experience in encoding and distributing video across the Internet, or their robust and scalable content delivery network.
The real buzz is the other side of the new MSN Video portal.
It's Microsoft's "User Generated Content" section called SoapBox on MSN.
There are over 100 websites that offer the ability to upload your videos for the world to view, most notably YouTube and Google Video.
So why would Microsoft's SoapBox be important?
Three words: "Mass Market Reach".
For the last 24 months Microsoft has really been investing in a collection of integrated services and products called Windows Live.
The most familiar is Windows Live Messenger, the replacement for the market leading MSN Messenger.
So wouldn't it be a nice idea if Microsoft would let you create a list of videos on MSN Soapbox and then actually watch them with your friends and family in Windows Live Messenger.
Well you can... here is an image of how it looks:
http://www.marctalkstech.com/images/messenger-soapbox.jpg
Now realize that Windows Live Messenger is free to download and is available in 26 languages and is used in more than 60 countries by more than 240 million active accounts each month. And you should start to see the attractive nature of this new video portal.
Can anyone say "Viral Video"? But it does not end there.
Microsoft is adding MSN SoapBox functionality directly within other Windows Live software that can be downloaded free of charge.
Windows Live Writer (Blog posting software for the desktop) and Windows Photo Gallery (desktop photo/video management software) now offer SoapBox support for uploading videos to Microsoft's portal, and in the case of Live Writer actually posting SoapBox videos you find directly to your blog.
Also don't forget the Microsoft Search engine "Live.Com" which serves up videos direct from its own MSN Video portal!
After purchasing YouTube, Google always seemed to be unrivaled in terms of online video.
But that may be about to change now Microsoft has entered the arena in a big way and with a sound business model included. Whilst you may argue SoapBox is no YouTube, Microsoft does have a huge user base to tap into - and it is!
Let the battle begin.
Marc Liron
Microsoft MVP
www.marcliron.com
Note from Ken:
P.S. Did you know I'm on the road this fall?
For the first time in three years, I'll be
offering small group trainings in Internet
marketing.
Here's where I'll be and when:
Toronto - October 13
Los Angeles - November 3
San Francisco - November 10
Vancouver - November 17
Details: http://www.SystemIntensive.com
I like this promotion from the magazine Streaming Media
It expresses the urgency that small businesses should be - but for the most part are not - feeling about the unfolding Internet video revolution.
It's an advertisement for a white paper on Internet video and education, but it equally applies to anyone who has a story to tell or a product to sell.
The old adage "the more you tell, the more you sell" is as valid as it was 100 years ago. Internet video is evolving into one of the premiere ways to tell. Ignore it at your peril. I guarantee your more ambitious competitors are not:
"Think the video revolution is limited to user-generated content and online movie downloads? Think again.
And you'd better think fast, because learners of all kinds-whether college students, outside sales forces, or technicians in the field-are increasingly demanding the ability to receive both traditional academic courses and training materials on video. They also expect that video to work as seamlessly and easily as YouTube and with the portability of their iPods, but with the kind of interactivity and supplemental materials they'd receive in a traditional classroom.
All of which means that academic institutions and enterprises alike are looking for the most advanced, efficient, and cost-effective ways to teach and train online..."
Here's Shelly Palmer, president of the New York Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the guys who award the Emmy's. Palmer shares some very good business advice for people who want to create Internet TV channels.
Of course, the smartest use of Internet video is for entrepreneurs to use it to sell and educate their customers directly without a media middleman.
This is a hard concept for people from the traditional television and advertising industries (the middlemen) to grasp. They'll get it - some day. In the meantime, here's some state of the art advice on niche video publishing.
I'm going to keep saying this until it become "common sense":
Video is the new paper.
Some quick history...before the second half of the 19th century, paper was fairly expensive and it not rare, it was not ubiquitous. There were no mass market books; newspapers existed, but sparingly; and there were no catalogs.
Industrial sophistication made paper cheap and launched the print explosion. Yes, Gutenburg invented the printing press way back in the late Renaissance, but in those days printing presses were like mainframes or television studios. They existed, but they were high capital items.
Moving pictures have been around for a little over 100 years. Video for about half that. Most of the population has been conditioned to think of moving pictures in terms of movie theaters and television screens. This conditioning has been so strong that most people over the age of say 25, don't get that we are in a Brave New World as far as moving pictures are concerned.
Video is going to be EVERYWHERE. (It already is for those who use the Internet with awareness.)
Here's what this means:
Just as print communication became a necessity for businesses once paper became inexpensive, so will video.
Video won't be a relatively rare experience that only shows up on certain screens according to a railroad- like timetable (how 19th century!) and produced only by specialists in NY and California. 24/7 on demand video will become part and parcel of every day commercial life: to sell products, to provide customer service, to train...you name it.
A little more history:
The web started with engineers and scientists, then migrated to digital artist/activist types, then spread to bleeding edge entrepreneurs and consumers with lots of random time on their hands, then colonized "the enterprise" (aka Big Business staffs), and then became ubiquitous.
That's the very path that Internet video is on.
The bleeding edge entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) are all over it and Internet video is slowly being seen as a useful internal communications tool for The Enterprise. The next stop: true mass market ubiquity, or as I've been putting it for the last three years: Video is the new paper.
Here's a sign of how seriously The Enterprise is talking the idea of Internet video as an everyday corporate communications tool: YouTube for the Enterprise
Amazon has long used its customers comments to help sell books. Customer reviews and recommended book lists have led the way. (I wonder if that makes them a pioneering web 2.0 company?)
Now Amazon has joined the video age.
Go to Amazon, pick any book and select the "review" option and you'll be given two options: 1) the standard text option and 2) the new video option.
Just like with YouTube, you get an easy-to-use interface to upload your video to Amazon.
Interestingly, Amazon recommends the PureDigital line of video cameras we first reported on a year and a half ago. I remain amazed that Google/YouTube hasn't made a similar deal with PureDigital (or bought the company.)
PureDigital seems to be thriving in spite of their low profile. New cameras with new features. Where's Apple? Micro video cameras is a cool niche that fits their mission to a 't.'
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System 2009: The world's greatest Internet marketing seminar rides again
