Read Write Web covered the news of us crossing 50,000,000 streams, as did Tech Crunch yesterday. New Tee Vee also mentioned it in its Vid-Biz update. Thanks to them all.
It is extremely interesting to see tech-oriented blogs and their corresponding readers comment on the content and media business. Yes, technology has made it possible for a site like ours to scale distribution as we have… but we do remain, at our core, a content and media firm. As such, I’ve learned alot from these posts and their comments over the past 24 hours.
A few things stand out:
1- Destination vs. Distribution, Redux
We decided to focus on “distribution over destination” because we had limited resources and believed that viewers would continue to consume content where they already watch videos, but we now do realize that there is a demand to build up our property. This is something that was in the works, and now becomes more of a priority.
2-Content Does Scale, and You’ve Seen Nothing Yet
In the RWW article, Phil Glockner commented:
“According to ComScore, YouTube has served over 5 billion videos over its lifetime, and it is estimated they stream over 100 million videos a day. However, if you think of that total as a ‘market capitalization’ figure for video services like WatchMojo to shoot for, the sky is the limit.”
Indeed, when you realize how little of our library is on some of these sites (even YouTube “only” has 2,800 out of out library of 4,100 published videos), then indeed the sky is the limit. And what to say of a site like Hulu, which is growing rapidly but only has 400 or so clips.
In turn, even our own site only has 4,100 out of the 5,000 or so clips we have shot but not have had the time to publish.
Point being, note to self: get on this, and get every freaking clip you have on these sites.
Then again, the reason we’ve not done this is due to the fact that by not doing this, we have built a business model to boot:
3- I am more bullish than ever on professional made-for-web video content.
A year or two ago, when the UGC hype machine was at its peak, I really doubt if popular social media focused blogs such as Tech Crunch and Read Write Web would have covered any news pertaining to us (New Tee Vee is supposed to cover online video, so I expect them to at least mention such milestones, if not write profiles on successful companies). Of course, 50,000,000 is a nice, round, phat number… but not only has UGC stumbled in profile, professional value has surged quite a bit as advertisers continue to sit on the sidelines.
4- Not all streams are created equally…
and props to our regular reader Bob Jenz for getting a discussion going on this (despite our oh-so-crappy Captcha that would make the folks over at Fort Knox blush with jealousy, envy, and if our inbox is any indication, rage).
But, my friends, that requires a post by itself…
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Surfing on your favorite newspaper website, you can’t help but notice that newspaper companies are not only embracing video content, but they are monetizing as well.
Leading the charge is McClatchy, the nation’s third largest newspaper group, who will make $200M in digital revenues this year. McClatchy’s video platform partner is VMIX. Some say that this is a case of too little, too late. Perhaps, but not necessarily so. The main argument of the “print is dead” camp is that no matter how much online revenues grow, they won’t make up for print’s decline. True, but that implies that the online content only limit itself to text content. Since video content can fetch up to 10x the ad rates, it starts to get interesting (so long as the company also cuts their bloated structures, of course).
I’ve long argued that while TV-centric media firms see online video as a threat (ironically the way print media firms saw the Web early on), print-centric media firms see online video as an opportunity that can give them a shot to survive and thrive in this brave new world.
Not that for one second I am delusional into thinking we deserve any credit here (of course), but worth noting that McClatchy is one of many companies that WatchMojo.com supplies videos to.
Here’s a breakdown of all the current McClatchy sites that are live with WatchMojo content.
- Star Telegram here and here.
- The News Tribune here, here, here, here, here.
- Bellingham Herald here and here.
People sometimes ask me “what is the pain you solve”. I like to think this post answers that question. Here’s a link to the study in question.
