CNET is reporting that Current TV is severing its distribution/content partnership with Yahoo! and looking for greener pastures. The usually astute Paid Content is hinting that maybe because Current TV’s Al Gore is an advisor to Google, this was to be expected. Al Gore being the former VP of the US, I doubt he would care too much about his advisory role with Google stop anything that helps his investment in Current TV. After all, when did politicians let a conflict of interest stop them from profiting.
This comes about a year after another high profile partnership between Yahoo! and Nick Denton’s Gawker media fell apart.
First the note on Current TV and then my take on it as both someone who has done large business development deals with the major portals and a producer of video content for the Web:
As of December 1, 2006, pursuant to the Contest Rules, Current TV, LLC (”Current”) has TERMINATED the Yahoo! Current Launch Contests in connection with the Yahoo! Current Network (”Contest”). All Contest entrants will be notified of this termination by Current TV, LLC. All rights related to any Contest entry that Current has not optioned as of December 1, 2006 shall immediately revert to the original owner and Current shall have no rights in or to any such entry. Thank you for supporting the Yahoo! Current Network. We apologize for any inconvenience.
I could be wrong but content providers are realizing that the video file sharing platforms are getting an unfair deal when they provide content to them. This is not to say that the portals (including YouTube here) are being unfair, just that as the model for online video develops, there will be changes.
Let’s examine:
Back in the day when I worked in online text publishing (at online magazines), we partner with AOL, MSN etc. and give them portions of our articles in exchange for traffic. Say MSN would take the first 200 or 500 words of the article and host this on their site (and generate revenue and traffic to the subsections) and then link back to us, the online magazine for the remainder of the article.
Even if a lot of readers did not care to click through, the sheer numbers made it so that we would get anywhere from 100,000 to 1,000,000 clicks back to our site. It was win-win: they would add content to their site, they would generate ad impressions and make money and would send enough traffic back to make it worth our while (little side note: this is how two of my articles were read by over one million readers on both MSN and AOL - they were linked up by the portals).
With video, it’s a whole other ballgame: you cannot really cut a video in half. You can, as we do when we have, say Part 1 of a multi-part segment like we do here on WatchMojo.com, but the portals and file sharing sites ask for as much video as we have meaning that they do not exactly say “for Part 2 click back to WatchMojo.com” - they retain all of the traffic. They do add links back to our sites, but the traffic is nowhere near the 100K to 1M figure as with text content.
I should probably not be saying this, but what are they going to do? Cut the traffic? It’s non existent. It’s good for branding and all, and it gets VCs excited, but getting VCs excited is not my main concern: building traffic and revenues are (which we have). We all know Alexa is not the most reliable source out there but judge for yourself:
Imagine if Al Gore was on our side, he did invent the Web after all. Jokes aside…
My gut says that Yahoo! probably presented a huge opportunity to Current TV and Current TV worked out the numbers and thought it would blow up their site, and it did not. Video producers need to realize that just because video is sexy and hot does not mean that they will get easy lay-ups; because there is so much hype surrounding video, the stakes are higher and the greed runs deeper: no one really wants to share traffic. The greed runs so deep that my former employer outright sued me claiming I was violating my non-compete because they might one day want to produce video even though to this day they have yet to post a single video they have produced… why, because video is all the rage even though the numbers do not yet justify it.
Back to the assessment here: We work with Google Video, YouTube and even Yahoo! and hearing them you would think that they are going to send us hundreds of thousands of clicks but the truth is that we need to look elsewhere for traffic, which is what Current TV is doing, and what we have decided to do as well.
A friendly word of advice to my counterparts at Yahoo!, YouTube, Google Video and the more rogue file sharing sites: video advertising is not as big as it’s going to be: keep up your “thanks for the content, too bad for the lack of traffic” tone and we’ll simply build up our own traffic and our video library and when advertisers fully embrace online video advertising, you just might find yourself with no video content apart from low quality video content of a) two teenage girls making out, b) a cat falling off a chair and c) a frat boy drinking beer out of a funnel.
Back in the days when I was in online publishing: I would never dare talk like this about or to our “partners” at Yahoo!, MSN or AOL… the fact that I do now shows you how little these “partners” actually mean to our business. Remember, a partnership should be somewhat win-win, when it’s not, like Current, the content provider bolts.
Disclosure: Loosely speaking, I do not think Current TV and WatchMojo.com are competitors. Broadly speaking, as video content companies, they are. Furthermore, I mentioned Mr. Denton, he runs a network of blogs over at Hawker media, as do we, of which this is one of the many blogs, do we hardly doubt anyone would be kind enough to consider us as their competitors in that space.
Furthermore, I own stock in YHOO, but apparently not enough to get them to send us more traffic!
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