Online Media Cultist

I titled this piece very deliberately in response to Josh Catone of ReadWriteWeb’s Video Comments? No Thanks – 5 Reasons They Don’t Work.

Now, I’m not a maniac fan of video comments; they don’t turn me on tremendously on a personal level. Also, not that many people have webcams so they’re not going to hit massive scale anytime soon.

That said, they add a really nice wrinkle and option in the way that people can interact with a blog or website (for a bunch of examples, check out TechCrunch, which rolled out video comments through its partnership with Seesmic yesterday). Think about it: if someone’s going to take the time to turn on a webcam and say something in front of it that the whole world might have the potential to contemplate, isn’t that a pretty cool thing? And when we’re talking tech and media-related blogs, I think in the vast majority of cases people who leave video comments are going to at least try to be thoughtful and intelligent about it.

Below are the reasons that Catone feels that video comments don’t work, and my responses.

* You can’t scan them - Josh says that video comments take longer to watch than video comments take to view. But for people who don’t want to watch them, it’s effortless to skip them. Further, I’d argue that video thumbnails always give a page some visual flavor and help to break up dry-looking text. Finally, it will be rare for any site to get a huge number of video comments on any given story, so for the present they are more garnish than main dish anyway.

* Harder to moderate - As I mention above, it will be rare for any site to get a lot of video comments, so the time to watch and moderate them likely won’t be excessive. And there are always going to be spammers, flamers, and trolls on any popular site, so whether they exist in print or video they’ll need to be dealt with. And I imagine that people who flame via video will end up looking pretty hilarious in many cases!

* They’re inaccessible - I’m confused about what the point is here. Perhaps that video comments will be difficult to access for handicapped people? “In order to make video accessible, you need to add captioning — which is probably not something you’ll see on Seesmic anytime,” Catone writes.

* You can’t leave links - If a publisher wants to, it’s easy enough to attach a unique URL to every comment, thus providing a unique URL (if not embed code) for every comment on a site, including videos. I get what Catone is saying, that a wonderful thing about comments is the ability to link out to related content, but a workaround here of course is to let people leave a text description sit with their video comment, in which you can write something like: I blather on insanely about my obsession with Twitter on this video. Check out Twitter at Twitter.com, y’all! Or some such.

* They increase load time - They don’t though. A well developed video comment system will simply load a little Flash and a thumbnail image, so that it’s not that much heavier than publishing a small .gif to the page. Catone mentions that using a service like Seesmic will make the load of the video comment a third-party call, but think about how most blogs are jammed to the gills with widgets and ads. Those are all third-party calls too!

I actually think that a big time video blogging platform will emerge over the next year or two. Viddler is one of the closest plays I’ve seen in this direction, a video and social networking site that is stronger than YouTube in terms of creating a home for videobloggers to promote themselves.

Video content and video feedback from the community will become an increasingly essential part of dialogue on the web. So in my view we might as well embrace the video commenting beast.

After looking at a State of the Vlogosphere report issued last month, I’ve begun to look at videoblogging in a new way. Not only is videoblogging the newest area of explosive growth within the wider blogosphere, I’ve realized, but there is no single market leader on the Internet that videobloggers can look to and say, Now that’s where I need to go to get my stuff seen and noticed.

There’s YouTube, of course. But anyone who has spent any time there will tell you it’s a clunky and rambling fun house of both crap and hidden treasures. The best chance you have of finding anything there is via search (search for “cat toilet training,” and welcome to the web 2.0 revolution!) or “related videos” to the one you’ve just watched. The real killer app of YouTube though is the ability to embed videos on any blog, website, or social networking profile.

Videoblogging start-up Viddyou is looking to create a new space catered specifically to videobloggers. Here’s one from a videoblogger named Cottonwood:

I had recently did a little back-and-forth e-mail interview of sorts with CEO and co-founder Aaron Wadler.

How do you position yourself as an alternative or standout from YouTube?

Aaron:YouTube is an incredible site for video file hosting, and sharing. Some YouTube-based vloggers have awkwardly shoehorned their posts into the YouTube model only to get lost in the masses of videos uploaded. YouTube simply isn’t designed for videoblogging. Our narrow focus has allowed us to design and build a pure video blogging community from the ground up allowing anyone curious about vlogging to easily get into it. With Viddyou we developed functionality specific for video bloggers and their audience.

Where do you see vlogging heading over the next year or two?

Aaron:Right now videoblogging is in the earliest stages of its infancy. I think what we’re seeing now from the vlogosphere is merely a glimpse of what it will develop into. And when I say vlogosphere I really mean all the components involved: from the individual vloggers, to the distribution and publishing platforms (Internet, and beyond), as well as the monetization models and companies. In the future vlogging will be as commonplace as text blogging is today. The video format of vlogging will open up the blogging concept to a much broader audience of publishers who may not necessarily be good writers or proficient typists, but nevertheless they still have a valid and interesting message they want to express, and the video format will resonate with them.

What specific vlogs stand out to you, and why are they special?

Aaron:There’s really some incredible untapped talent out there in the comedy world, so I watch a lot of comedy/skit vlogs (Lookshiny.com, zefrank.com, sweatyrobot.com).

There are also a couple of instructional vlogs I really enjoy. One is by O’Reilly’s Make Magazine and Winelibrary.com has a cool one as well.

And lastly, I especially enjoy the raw viewpoint that many of the personal vlogs out there offer: joshleo.com, Renetto on YouTube, lisanova.info, ummahfilms.com, and many others.

How does Viddyou plan on making money? How do you see vloggers themselves (as opposed to Viddou) making money, if at all?

Aaron: Being a brand-new company in a newly emerging space has allowed us to be experimental in our revenue plans. Currently we’re focused on building the absolute best platform possible for vloggers. Ultimately our revenue model will be as diverse as the community we support. For the professional vlogger we will offer premium services for a nominal fee (subscription model). Pre and post-roll adverts, targeted sponsorships, and even banner advertising may become relevant options as well.

Vloggers – like bloggers – are diverse in their aspirations, focus, and goals for their content. The majority will be happy with having an easily accessible vlogging platform available to share their thoughts and lives with family, friends, and others. Some will be able to leverage this new communications and entertainment medium into a career. Vlogging is still in a period of discovery in how someone can be compensated for their work. This could take the form of everything from banner ads placed near the video, to television-like commercials, premium paid content subscriptions (like HBO/Showtime do with broadcast television), product placement, etc.

< <<<<<>>>>>>

The key for Viddyou and others looking to create a premiere videoblogging destination will be to provide tools for vloggers to promote and market themselves (and perhaps, eventually, make money) and particularly to provide the audience with a user experience that allows for intuitive and elegant browsing of videoblogs. If I find a videoblog that I like, for instance, I want to instantly be able to “subscribe,” download it as a video podcast, place it in the “favorites” area on my profile, and so on, so that I can ensure that I catch future episodes.

From there, the race will be on to aggregate the top videobloggers on the Internet.

Meanwhile, I wonder what Zeke the cat is up to.

I’m not exactly sure how to define videoblogging (or vlogging) but I suppose it is episodic video content that can be found online. So, if I upload a video of my cat falling off the television to YouTube, that’s not a vlog, but if I upload a series of videos showing my cat falling off various pieces of technology in my home, that would be a vlog.

In all seriousness though, vlogging is still a relatively new area that is seeing tremendous growth, at least according to a State of the Vlogosphere report put out by Mefeedia. Whereas there were 617 vlogs in January of 2005, there are 20,913 only two years later in January of ‘07.

Extraordinary growth to be sure, but the overall current number of vlogs still pales in comparison to the many millions of “written content” blogs that exist today. Because of the explosion in YouTube’s and other video sharing sites’ popularity (built upon the now widespread penetration of broadband and other high speed Internet access), I think it’s safe to say that vlogging will see hyper-growth for years to come.

Now the real trick is how to make money from vlogs, a nut that more and more people and companies are trying to crack. The popularity of Ask a Ninja (which is basically a dude dressed up as a ninja riffing semi-spontaneously about various topics for comedic value), Rocketboom, and Digg Nation proves that particular vlogging “brands” can gather significant numbers of repeat viewers. The distribution platforms – from YouTube to Revver to iTunes to television sets to the millions of “regular” blogs – are nearly infinite. So the challenge is to get high quality (or popular, if you like) content in front of eyeballs and generate revenue from that.

The Ask a Ninja fellas hired United Talent Agency (UTA) and wound up signing a deal with Federated Media. So right now it seems the model that vloggers are taking are to translate online popularity into some kind of deal or contract.

That will change – vloggers will figure out a way to make money. It’s just a matter of when and how. Once that happens, the size of the vlogosphere will really take off.