Be careful what you ask for. A lot of people get into things for money, others for power, a few for respect.
Say you were an entrepreneur and someone came to you and:
- offered you $10M in funding but asked that you had to stay on for 3 years as a condition. Three years isn’t long, but it is an eternity online. YouTube went from URL registration to $1.65B in about 18 months…
- alternatively, what if someone else came to you and offered you $10M in funding but insisted you had to step aside and make room for their new hand-picked CEO.
Would you accept either offer? I think I would. Truth is, I think which offer you prefer has a lot to do with your state of mind. For the record, neither one of these things have happened. I swear we’re talking about the hypothetical. But as more and more advisers approach us and talk to us about the virtues of growing a company, I’ve had different people ask me how I would feel about either scenario.
Interestingly, if you wake up wanting to get the hell out of your company and do something else, I think because life is funny, then you are bound to stumble upon an investor who will tie you down forever as a condition of investing.
Alternatively, if remaining the captain was all you ever wanted and all that was important to you, I am pretty sure that someone would come along and insist that you make room for a new leader…
Trust me, life is odd that way.
I really don’t know what I would do in either situation if it happened, though.
I think, in all honesty, that if an investor came in and told me that they wanted me to step aside and make room for a new CEO, I’d check their heads because very few people know what the f*** is going to happen in web video, let alone web video content or web video advertising.
But by the same token, I also realize life is short, so if someone was capable of running a startup in such a field, it’s not like I would turn the opportunity away.
In life, you usually want what you can’t have and when you have something, you want something else. Trust me, it’s just the way life works…
Ultimately, just be grateful for having options… that’s more than what most people have.
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WatchMojo NewsletterIt’s a numbers’ game, for sure, but you shouldn’t be cooking the numbers to win. Call me naive, call me idealistic, but that’s my philosophy.
A recent post on Tech Crunch talks about how “two top Hollywood movie studios, a major record label, a variety of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international” use less-than-kosher techniques to boost views of their clips on YouTube.
My first reaction was, no wonder most “top Hollywood movie studios, major record labels, varieties of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international” suck and fail to succeed following the launch thereof, because the hype that preceded and surrounds their products and services is illegitimate and fake.
The poster states:
Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.
When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy - videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. - videos with millions and millions of views.
This raises an interesting point: YouTube is a distribution outlet that offers both a promotional and commercial platform. If you are Hollywood movie studios, major record labels, varieties of very well known consumer brands, and a number of different startups, both domestic and international, you probably view YouTube as a promotional platform and as such, only care about driving as much views of your video as possible.
If you are a content producer that turns to YouTube for distribution, as we are, clearly you care about the number of views, but you are more concerned about sustainable and legitimate views. Historically, publishers that create fake traffic or drive up pageviews through low-quality end up paying for it by having a hard time to charge premium ad rates and retain advertisers.
Interestingly, when people ask me about our business at WatchMojo.com, they naturally ask if our strategy is to get one of videos to be seen by a million people. To their surprise, I tell them we don’t.
In fact, for some time now, I’ve been telling anyone that will listen that video producers who focus on hits are the most likely to fizzle out.
Advertisers might get interested by how many people have seen your clips in the past, but what will get them to advertise alongside your content in the future is what you will do for them tomorrow.
So if you churn out volumes of high-quality videos that each get seen hundreds of times per month, week or day and each video serves as a promotional tool for other videos you’ve produced, then the streams start to add up considerably. It’s the theory of diversification at work, any single one video might not do a million streams… but as a group, you have millions of streams over thousands of videos.
Of course, if you are a “top Hollywood movie studio, major record label, variety of very well known consumer brands, or a number of different startups, both domestic and international”, then you don’t care about advertising revenue, you care about marketing potential.
What the poster is saying, basically, is nothing new, though it does seem odd that Tech Crunch would run the post… but that’s a different story…
One of the main things missing from the web video landscape is proper analytics.
A recent article on Media Week quoted CBS Interactive’s VP of Marketing Patrick Keane as saying how “no one has a solution” for them now.
Keane said CBS plans to release some information on how its audience network is fairing based on internal data. But right now, that requires combining streaming data from its own video player with data from multiple partners using different methodologies. “That data is not as clean as we’d like it to be,” Keane said. “We’d be doing a disservice to our advertisers.”
Sure, you can measure how many people view a video on YouTube, you can even measure how successful videos are across more than one site, there are some so-so tools out there… but for a major producer, publisher and syndicator of web video like WatchMojo.com, it’s a Black Box.
I took advantage of the calm of Turkey Day to run some numbers. And indeed, at best, you get a fuzzy picture. I’m not going to call out anyone in this post, but a lot of distribution sites that are trying to be the next big player are not cutting it.
Essentially, our total reach has grown 5x in the past 5 months, and if you look at peaks alone, then it’s 10x.
Our Total Reach of Video Streams =
Streams on WatchMojo.com Property + Streams on Network [Push Network + Pull Network]
We have a push and pull network, the nuance is technical. The Push network allows us to push out clips to some of the partners we have. The Pull network is different, in that we upload our clips to the clouds and syndication partners pull them into their content management systems. The following graph is one of the many analytics tool we use, but it only measures the growth and scale of our Push network, but it does justice to the trendline of our total reach:
Not bad, heh?
Word on the street is that News Corp. is about to purchase LinkedIn. Some time ago I compared TheLadders with LinkedIn, and included News Corp. as one of the many potential acquirers of the business social networking service, but I certainly did not put them atop the list.
I think News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch wants to get an option on all online assets. He was miffed that YouTube did not go his way and I think that every company on the Web will invariably be seen as a fit with News Corp. for the simple reason that offline, News Corp. spans the globe and all media. Online - after $2B in investments and acquisitions of MySpace, IGN, Scout, Photobucket - Fox Interactive Media is a force to be reckoned with.
The point is: any company can find a home in FIM or News Corp.
In this case, the recent $5.7B acquisition of Dow Jones makes the acquisition of the most popular business social networking site is pretty darn reasonable, especially when you consider just how much operational leverage LinkedIn would give FIM and News Corp.
The main reason why LinkedIn is a good deal is that Rupert Murdoch is aiming for $1B in digital revenues for FIM, the problem is, all of the pageviews and ad impressions on MySpace won’t achieve that as easily as he’d like. IGN, too, is not showing the kind of growth that Murdoch envies. But much like WSJ gave Murdoch the world’s most valuable audience in print (and arguably, online), LinkedIn bolsters that audience and allows Murdoch to leverage his advertiser base to really drive rates and revenues across both his offline and online empire.
This one is smart for many additional reasons:
- Facebook is encroaching on LinkedIn’s turf as a business communications tool (I get more and more business emails off Facebook, which is odd, but to be expected)
- Facebook is encroaching on MySpace’s turf as the leading social networking site, even though MySpace remains gargantuan in size
- MySpace is invariably going to become a bigger commercial platform for merchants
- MySpace is already the leading media and entertainment promotional tool in the world
- MySpace is not really an effective tool for business networking for professionals, and as such, LinkedIn (which would remain separate, I am not suggesting merging the two at all) would complement Fox Interactive Media’s coverage across social networking quite well.
- LinkedIn would really complement News Corp.’s business assets, including Dow Jones’ Barrons, Marketwatch.com and yes, Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com sites.
All in all, Linked In - who has hinted at an IPO but failed to get Silicon Valley nearly as excited as Facebook - would not cost FIM all that much. I’d say in the same ballpark as Photobucket, which fetched $250M. But devoid of actual financials, I am just guessing.
