Hello, On Feb 12, 2008 10:44 PM, Renat Zarbailov <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Your words are golden Bill. Only good content is king, rather than > just any content. Just because content is created doesn't mean it's > worth watching. > > On another note though, I am surprised that none of the companies, > including blip, takes notice about what the producers need to monetize > online shows, they only look at the scenery of online video from their > software programming mindset. And when they flip, they wonder what > they did wrong... It's all about usability testing!!! Put yourself in > the shoes of the end-user and see if you will resonate to the existing > video ad approaches. > > Big advertising platform creators like Maven networks and Move > networks have it tailored for huge Fox-like corporations to be > smoothly transforming their traditional TV content to the web. > However, there's no company with a practical solution that does that > for the independent producers. Does that mean that the future of > online video advertising is only for the established TV brands? Why > can't independent content producers establish an alliance that works > with advertisers directly? There needs to be an RSS video ad approach > for this to work. If there's any Adobe Flex programmers reading this > they should take notice that this is where online video can prosper > benefiting all. Similar to Google's Adwords this RSS feed would > automatically embed itself to the most watched episode of an online > show, hence advertisers are happy that the ad is seen by many. Also > URL hotspots in the video is also essential for product placement for > new tab opening when the end-user clicks on it. > > What are your thoughts on this?
Take this from someone who was the principal software engineer at an online advertising network for 3+ years and someone played most the roles of this.... take this as advice from the engineer creating this technology... from a publisher selling ads on his sites... from an advertiser creating ads and finding places to put those ads... and to some degree (from daily observation of my former co-workers)... from a sales person dealing with advertisers... and a business development person attracting publishers..... AND not someone who's just rambling and giving advice about something he doesn't know anything about. ATTRACTING ADVERTISERS Create an "advertise here" page on your video blog. And make sure potential advertisers can find it and get to it. (There is alot that can be said about this... but to make it so my reply isn't too long, I'll keep this brief.) OK... so you want to get advertisers?! Have you told them how to contact you? Have you even told them you are accepting advertisers? Do you provide information about how you sell advertising? (CPM? CPT? CPC? CPA? Etc?) What about how much you charge? The minimum you should probably do is create an "advertise here" page giving this kind of information. (You probably want to keep SEO and other promotion techniques in mind for this page too when creating it.) Ideally though you'd have more than just an "advertise here" page... and have a self serve (and automated) system where people could pay you money online and see their ad get scheduled to come up right there and then. (All automated without them having to wait, and without you necessarily having to do much anything... other than quality control, fraud detection, etc.) Really though... if you really want to get advertisers... I strongly suggest you get sales people. They can really help But, I know... I know. How can you afford one?..... if you can't afford one by yourself, then team up with other people and get some. Get enough people and you should be able to afford some sales people. But make sure the people you team up with make your combined offering attractive to advertisers. Either make it so your combined content could be considered to be about the "same" thing to advertisers... or where your audience is very very similar (according to the metrics advertisers use). Additionally, teaming up with other advertisers can help you sell your ad space too. Many advertisers will consider most video bloggers to be way too small for them to bother with. (Purchases of hundreds or thousands of dollars isn't worth it to them.) It's just too much hassle for the ROI. (They feel that they send too much time on something that's no worth very much money to them.) They're trying to make purchases of tens of thousands of dollars (or more) of ad space... and you probably don't have enough traffic for those kinds of numbers. But if you team up with other people, all of you together may be able to offer that much "advertising inventory". RSS AND WEB SYNDICATION There's a problem with RSS, the way it is today. Well... 2 problems actually. The first problem is that you can only have one single video file per episode, because there's is only one <enclosure> allowed. (And yes I know about MediaRSS. See my VideoPress Video Feeds plugins if you want to add MediaRSS to your WordPress-based Video Blog... http://changelog.ca/project/VideoPress_Video_Feeds ) The second problem is that the video is always prefetched. (So if you happened to get an ad in there somehow... it's probably very very old. Which is bad from an advertising point-of-view.) So... for the first problem... how do you get an ad in there? If we had playlists (like MediaRSS offers) then we'd be half way there. But without playlists we have to "magically" stitch the ad into the video blogger's video. This is something that's computationally intensive (especially in the online advertising environment where you may have to do this thousands of times a second!) which can bring difficulties in engineering the technology, which usually translates to higher costs. But if RSS playlist support was common, we could solve this problem. The second problem (which is equally important)... after we have playlists... the second problem is being able to control which video files get pre-fetched and which get downloaded at the last possible minute. (We could probably solve this HTTP headers... but software needs to follow these headers!) For ads... most the time, you want them downloaded ads at the last possible minute. But the parts of the actual show, it's OK to pre-fetch them. Now... to side step this 2 pronged RSS <enclosure> problem, you could not bother using the RSS <enclosure> and just send a Flash-based video player or a Java-based video player instead... but... that's not really video. And, although it may be a solution in the short term... it's going to cause us problems in the long run. So it's important to get this RSS <enclosure>, playlist, pre-fetching thing right now IMO. There's alot more that could be said... but I'll end this here. See ya -- Charles Iliya Krempeaux, B.Sc. http://ChangeLog.ca/ Motorsport Videos http://TireBiterZ.com/ Vlog Razor... Vlogging News... http://vlograzor.com/
