Show Me The Money! (Part 2)

A nice woman involved with Cooking with Rockstars is getting brand specific mentioning but she doesn’t feel quite empowered enough going up to Kraft or Doritos—is she crazy to think there’s value there? It depends on how many viewers she has. You can get in touch with either brand’s agency, which might be interested in talking to you if there’s something in it for them.

Violet is saying… What’s interesting about that is how you’re feeling disempowered—that’s an interesting concept because maybe they would naturally want to associate themselves with that, but at the same time she’s hearing that these big brands are scared to associate with independently produced content. How much time do you spend educating advertisers about video content in general…? Nate says that they spend an inordinate amount of time doing exactly that! But this may change in a year or two, he says, because we’ll be able to reach these people in more ways that make sense. As a network, it’s Nate’s job to make it something that’s more easily digestible. Interesting.

Mike: The first sponsorship we closed probably took a couple months, but recently we closed one in three days—because we’d been working on that agency for months, talking about opportunities, etc., but it takes time and effort.

So the dealbreaker is not so much independently produced content but independently distributed content… Attendee asks, What are some of the strategies you lay out for an advertiser to get them over that fear? Past episodes, Mike says, members of the press have written nice things about this show, quotes from the press, you can give a deck with these things and other things this person is doing in the media, give an overview, let them see that this person is building a career they don’t want to fuck up—and that if the guy murders a prostitute (sex worker, Violet says) in the next episode, the advertiser will get their money back and the guy making the show won’t get paid! And that made them feel better.

Nate says, there ARE tv shows where prostitutes get murdered and they have advertisers…

Interesting.

It’s that they feel more in control of the television format than the independent video format. The advertisers have to meet us halfway, but they’re only about a quarter of the way there, Nate says—some will, some won’t (like the Air Force).

The future of ad platforms… They’re very simple right now, Mike says. We’re incredibly early in this industry – we’re building them as we go. Google doesn’t even have a video ad serving system yet. Right now we’re focusing on dynamic insertion and statistics, but it will get more sophisticated from here. We have to walk before we run. Banners are targeted, Adsense is targeted, Nate says, it’s important to think about how you set this stuff up, tags are important, statistics are important, the money people will want to know these things.

For Nate: What’s the difference in the money you can make between contextual ad networks and sponsorships or brand associations? Nate says…

Irina Slutsky just grinned at me. She has a gorgeous smile. And I totally lost my train of liveblog thought. Mrrr!

Nate’s response is that it’s all over the map, but metadata is important for contextual ads. Tag your videos well! Revenue sharing = tag your videos well!

If I were to do video, I would just want to do it for me, as an extension of my blog. The idea of developing a video in order to make money only appeals to me so far, then it falls apart in my head.

Spencer Nutting has heard that if he posts a video on MySpace he might lose some rights; Mike says there are a good two hundred and ten video sharing sites, all with different terms of service; one site might take complete ownership of your video, they can do ANYTHING with it and never give you a time—they may or may not do that exclusively, believe it or not; they might say you’re not allowed to put it anywhere else. There are other sites who don’t take any rights whatsoever, so if you apply a CC license to your work, you can give it to the Internet Archive, who won’t do any of those things (but also won’t help you make money). YouTube used to have awful terms of service, but they’re going to start doing revenue sharing. You HAVE to read the Terms of Service. You have to ACTUALLY read them. You have to know what they have the right to do. Blip only takes the right to put your video online—that’s all, and they help you find support to make money (in a certain way, I need to look this up). There are five or six different revenue sharing models out there—check out LightReading.com. Phil Harvey wrote a great article last week summarizing all the video sharing services that share money, ten on the top line, and then a really big table of everyone else, very cool. Some sites are appropriate for one-offs, some for series… great resources.

Every time Bre says something I think his voice is coming from further back in the room. I don’t know why.

We’re concerned about the advertisers, the audience… how do different people feel that affects the material and the content they’re producing? You’re trying to produce advertiser-pleasing content, but the advertisers aren’t the only ones who are important!