Online Media Cultist

As online video producers experiment, fumble, and tinker their way toward a model for making money on scripted online video content, an old school premise emerges on the new media scene: product placement.

It makes sense. Because online video needs to be able to be seen where there’s audience (see: YouTube), advertising that is already “baked in” to the video content itself can help producers to monetize their product.

Fred Seibert, creative director of NextNewNetworks, talks about creating programming around “community need” and then finding a way for video content and sponsorship to crossover to meet that need. Interesting stuff.

(Found via Beet.tv.)

Online video advertising is still, relatively speaking, a brand new industry. People only started watching videos on a massive scale over the last three or four years, as broadband penetration peaked and video platforms like YouTube emerged for non-technical people to easily upload and publish video to the Internet. And it’s only in the last year or two that online video advertising has emerged.

Much like for the Internet itself, the idea of advertising for online video was strange at first. But over time, people are getting used to the idea, and depending on the quality of the content, will put up with it in certain forms. Further, if the advertising is contextually relevant and/or blended effectively with the content itself, audiences might actually enjoy it.

Here’s what we know: people are online, they watch video online, they spend money online. Therefore, video producers and advertisers are going into overdrive to figure out a model that works. And as this marketplace matures, we’re going to see higher quality video content online and advertising models emerge that make money for producers.

There are probably many people who will disagree with that last statement, by the way. It’s conventional wisdom in some circles that you can’t make money online from scripted video content. I disagree. It’s simply a matter of time and experimentation.

A semi-cerebral look at the strange phenomenon of YouTube fame on Slate makes mention of Commenter Business Meeting 2, by College Humor.

This was produced last fall but is definitely worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. Think of it as what Slate refers to as Internet commenting as its own “special form of social idiocy” made flesh.

Oh, it does veer from slightly naughty to somewhat raunchy by the end, so fair warning. But once again, it’s Friday at OMC so we’ll make such allowances. Enjoy!

This is one smart and hilarious and bizarre slant on this Internet Party that we all get down with everyday.

“Do you want me to poke him back?” Priceless.

Warning: it’s ever so slightly naughty. But come on, it’s Friday.

Ah, the wonders of YouTube. Since I’ve been so busy of late and shamefully ignoring the OMC, I leave you with the comic delights of Gabe & Max’s Internet Thing. True low budget comedic wunderkinds, says I.

Enjoy…

The first sentence of the third paragraph of a New York Times story covering Google’s launch of video ad units to its Adsense members that include YouTube videos says it all: “The service, which represents the first major combination of a Google product with YouTube, will give video creators wide distribution beyond YouTube via Google’s network, known as AdSense.”

We also know that Google will share revenue from the ads with web publishers and video content creators. So beyond that, what does it all mean?

Mathew Ingram frames the big picture question: “Whether this is a breakthrough use of YouTube as an advertising platform, or a lame scramble by Google to justify the billions it spent for the video-sharing site, depends on who you believe.”

Andy Beal provides some detail on video content providers that will be launched with the program, such as TV Guide Broadband and lonelygirl15.

A significant question will surely be whether or not Google/YouTube can provide compelling video content that a) web publishers will be willing to run on their sites and b) whether said content will be interesting enough for audiences to sit through to make money for three parties: web publishers, video content creators, and Google/YouTube.

A bunch of websites, including Lost Remote, are quoting Brightcove’s CEO as saying that getting high traffic sites to run “arbitrary content” is a difficult proposition. Which may well be true, but something tells me that Google will have more success at this than Brightcove.

Overall, I see this as an interesting experiment and strategy, but whether or not it will be successful remains to be seen. It’s certainly a side-run around the big question stemming from Google’s purchase of YouTube: how will they make money on a massively popular video site fueled by user contributed video content? We’re starting to see the answer: carefully selected commercial and “amateur” video will have some form of advertising, some of which will run on YouTube, and now we see that some will run on websites that already are part of the Google Adsense program.

Which is one of the places where Google makes real money.

TV is heading online, even if most people aren’t fully aware of it.

Let’s do the math while dispensing with the numbers (it’s Friday, you know?): People, and especially young people, are online. Broadband penetration is high. People watch video online. Many people spend more time online than they do in front of a television screen.

The marketplace is wide open for high quality video series to originate online. All that’s needed is for a few early experimenters to figure out the model in terms of structure and distribution and deals and advertising revenue, and the floodgates, they shall be opening quick-like.

Quarterlife, a new Internet series by My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething creative team Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick that premieres in November (full disclosure here: I’m involved on the webby end of this project), has as good a chance as any to lock down the model and signal a bevy of well funded and produced online video shows to follow in its wake.

In the end, it’s not about how much money goes into making shows, it’s about story and characters and developing a following. Herskovitz and Zwick are experts at doing just this, so if they can produce a high quality show that is easily accessible and viewable on a computer monitor (and it helps that Quarterlife will roll out its first season in 36 eight-minute episodes), it makes sense that people will tune in.

YouTube helped to ring in an era of highly popular user generated online video. If you think about it, millions of people liked watching cats fall off a table or men of all ages getting their nethers slammed by some blunt object on television via America’s Funniest Home Videos, and YouTube was a conduit to fulfilling that need, so to speak, online.

Lonelygirl15 and Prom Queen are more recent examples of online video series to earn a following, the significant difference being that these are examples of fictional episodic video content that just happen to be broadcast over the Internet.

Quarterlife, the story of a young woman who videoblogs about her friends and her life, represents the natural next step in this evolution. And if it does gain a large scale following, the way that the public thinks about and watches “television” will significantly change. Quarterlife also will offer a social networking community and invite its audience to participate and become fully immersed in the show.

Check out the trailer:

Quarterlife Trailer

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Maybe gangsta rap videos and violent movies (man, I saw that slasher flick Hostel a few weeks ago and it literally made me sick to my stomach) do have an effect on kids?

It’s not something I would have seriously entertained until recently, but this story of British thugs using YouTube as a way to flaunt their gun-laden muscle, taunt their adversaries, show off their drugs, and even boast about an 11-year-old kid that they allegedly murdered makes you wonder.

I suppose I’m just trying to find a connection here, a way to understand what would compel people to commit violence and murder and then to want to proudly head off to the Internets to brag about it. Is it a natural extension of bullies shouting at each other in the schoolyard, or is something else going on here that I’m not smart enough to comprehend?

That’s the downside too of having a massively popular communications platform around like YouTube. You get people coming along that you wish you never knew about, showing off about stuff that they shouldn’t be doing.

I hope they’re stupid enough to get busted for their illegal activities.

Or maybe somehow it’s all a LonelyGirl15 kind of prank?

One of their videos is here if you want to check it out.

YouTube’s announcement that it is finally going to start running video ads along with some “media partner” videos is causing all kinds of reactions across the blogospheric Milky Way.

In my view, the biggest takeaway is that we’re finally seeing how Google – which purchased YouTube for about $1.6 billion – thinks it can make money from online video, which will surely be massively influential on how the rest of the industry attempts to do the same for some time to come. The basics are: run an overlay ad that pops up on part of the video a short time after the video starts playing, and allow users to either click an “x” to “opt out” of the ad or click a play button to pause the original video and play the video ad. The key in the case of YouTube is to only run the ads on “approved” videos, which avoids the sticky issue of placing advertising on top of content that may not be copyright protected or may include content of questionable standards.

Personally, I’m surprised to see a major shift away from a 15-second or so pre-roll and post-roll method of video advertising, which seemed poised to become something of a standard. Doing it this way does a few things: guarantees that eyeballs will view the ad, which satisfies advertisers who are paying to get their wares seen. The big question is which form of advertising is less obtrusive: pre-roll or overlay during the video? Again, personally, I’m happy to get the short pre-roll ad out of the way straight off so that I can then simply enjoy the video without worrying about taking action to opt-out of advertising. But this form of advertising is so new that Google/YouTube likely has the power to create an industry standard.

Meanwhile, the conversation in the blogosphere is focused on who invented the video ad overlay concept first. VideoEgg seemed poised to claim the title, though this morning Mike Arrington at TechCrunch seems overwhelmed in explaining that “everyone” invented video ads “first” (YouTube, VideoEgg, Brightcove, and Adbrite all argue that they either were “thinking about it” or doing it first!).

Jim Kukral closes off the debate nicely by writing: “The fact is, it doesn’t matter who did it first. YouTube is the biggest shark in the pond, and they did it before everyone else.” I’ll just extrapolate that to mean “they did it in a big way before everyone else.”

Around my office, we like to say that when you come up with a good idea, don’t worry, you’re not alone. Someone else has already come up with it, or is thinking about it at the same time!

Facebook has been the rage of tech-geek conversations over the last few months. Beyond its stratospheric growth as a major competitor to social networking behemoth MySpace, the reason why is its “platform,” an easy way for outside developers and companies to install their own widgets, or applications, right into Facebook and thus have the potential to get seen and used by many millions of users.

The popularity of MySpace and Facebook has given way to a discussion of “the new portals,” web platforms that have the power and “stickiness” to attract massive audiences and keep them there for a full range of activities, from e-mailing friends and sharing photos and videos to reading articles and gathering information.

MySpace is actively angling to maintain and grow its massive audience, and one of the ways it has been doing that is to syndicate content and add original content to its offerings. For example, MySpace announced that it is adding The Onion’s unique brand of satire in the form of articles and video.

Until quite recently, MySpace relied almost exclusively on user generated content, or content created and uploaded by its millions of members. But in an effort to combat both the popularity of YouTube and Facebook, MySpace is using YouTube-competitor MySpaceTV and content partnerships as a way to bolster its own sense of portality, if I may coin the term.

One of the reasons why the Facebook platform works so well is because it allows Facebook members to opt-in to put “extra stuff” – i.e. widgets that let you do things like listen to hot songs and scroll through slideshows of pictures – on profile pages.

This gets down to how people, and especially young people, use the web in 2007. A typical experience with a social networking site involves logging in, checking out what changes friends have made to their profiles (newly uploaded photos, for instance), writing an e-mail or two, perhaps browsing around for new members that have joined that live in the person’s area… and that’s it.

Therefore, it’s not enough to add original content or syndicated content. You have to make it compelling and attractive, and then you need to give users the tools so that they can easily and seamlessly integrate it into their own web experience.

Facebook has done this. RSS is also great for this, but it has yet to break into mainstream web adoption in a big way. MySpace is trying to find its way to doing this, through what seems to be a multi-tiered strategy.

Meanwhile, MySpace appears to be making real money.

Starting on Tuesday, people who own a TiVo DVR (digital video recorder) will be able to order and download movies from Amazon.com and watch them on their television set.

This is the kind of thing that changes everything.

What I mean: the ability to seamlessly deliver video content from the Internet to the television is a huge game changer.

Watching videos on the Internet tends to be a solo experience: you’re at work, you’re bored, someone sends you a link, or you’re just fiddling around on YouTube while you should be doing something else. In other words, the family doesn’t tend to gather around the hearth of the PC to watch the latest episode of Desperate Housewives that you bought on iTunes.

A computer monitor also tends to do best with short attention spans. Thus, people tend to like short and sweet articles, and they tend to prefer short videos (how often will you sit through a YouTube video that’s longer than seven or eight minutes?) online. Of course, there’s download time and bandwidth considerations as well. The longer the video and the higher the video quality, the better your pipes and machine have to be to handle it.

The television, a relatively more ancient piece of hardware, is a fully different beast. You’ve sat in front of the thing for a marathon session of cathode ray-binging at least once or twice, and more likely (me: guilty!) on a regular basis. And social time in the home, like it or not from a cultural perspective, is often spent in front of the set. Add in home theaters, flat screens, surround sound, and all the rest of it, and you have a pretty sweet place to watch a show or a film.

Now, until very recently, the television was a highly limited distribution mechanism. The few television networks got to choose what they thought the TV masses would like. The advent of cable television, and later VCRs, DVD players, pay-per-view, and on demand greatly expanded viewer options.

But the ability for the Internet to directly pry its way onto the TV set is absolutely huge. It will continue to make brick-and-mortar video stores irrelevant, for instance. Why take the time and effort when you can do everything from your couch with a remote control? Why bother paying Netflix – a service I love dearly – $20 a month?

But the greatest implications are in terms of the nearly infinite number of options people now have to get high quality video content in their homes. The limitations of a set number of cable channels or shelf space in a video store no longer exist. What’s coming next is the ability for online video content distributors to directly compete with broadcast and cable networks for people’s attention. And that’s when things will really get interesting.

It should be noted that Amazon’s move is just another step down a long path. It was already possible to purchase movies online and watch them on television via Amazon’s Unbox service. And you can also do so via Apple TV and Xbox 360. But the TiVo-Amazon connection and the freedom to not have to go to a computer to dial up and watch movies and shows could prove to be a tipping point in how video is distributed and watched from now on.