Via Paidcontent:
The Christian Science Monitor is a 100-year old organization and even they get this (this is one area WatchMojo has a lot of room to improve):
One of the reasons our site traffic increased 20 percent from January to February of this year (even though February had 10 percent fewer days) was emphasis on search engine optimization. Everybody who is doing news on the web is thinking SEO, so best practices are—or soon will be—a given. It can be as simple as editors thinking like searchers and writing headlines accordingly. Breaking/developing stories like healthcare reform or the Chile earthquake provide opportunities to drive more readers to our site and keep them there longer. Embedding links to our deeper content (a healthcare reform 101 primer, a science of earthquakes piece) invites readers to understand what we are all about: news for people who are trying to understand the world and are searching for solutions. Paying this sort of attention to content can easily amplify a news story that garners 3,000 page views by a factor of 10.
Another thing about the article that struck me was the following:
What about multimedia and interactivity? You’ll see very little video on CSMonitor.com. This is not to say that we haven’t experimented with the medium. It just hasn’t delivered enough clicks to justify the effort. That will probably change one day, and if it does we’ll take another look as long as it enhances our editorial mission. As for interactivity, we typically don’t invite readers to comment at the bottom of our stories. Don’t get me wrong, we want thoughtful comments. But comment-happy sites that don’t moderate often allow a brilliant piece to be followed by a string of rotten tomatoes thrown by—how can I put this delicately?—comment jerks.
The number of media companies that have stopped doing or reduced videos over the past 12 months is amazing. Ultimately, the output is a result of an ineffective process, a poor product and/or an inefficient cost structure.
In the past year we’ve doubled our output and resources but remain far more efficient than most. Time will tell if we were smart or dumb about that decision.
Digg this Blog
Share on Facebook
WatchMojo on Twitter
WatchMojo on YouTube
Add to Favorites
WatchMojo Newsletter
The first time we had a massive peak in streams was in March 2008. We were doing 1-2M monthly streams, and then on two separate days, YouTube and Veoh featured a couple of our clips on their respective main pages.
From Day 1, I’ve told the team that we need to create a catalog of premium, evergreen, ad-friendly video content that in aggregate and over time will deliver sustainable streams. We need to be totally agnostic to any one video, distribution partner or even, platform. But if once in a while, a distribution partner drives more views to a given clip, so be it, it’s a bonus.
In March 2008, we did something like 4.1M streams and I feared we’d never hit that mark again. Before I knew it, we beat that mark in December 2008 with 4.2M streams. Once again, I thought we’d never pass that mark.
That’s the thing about most entrepreneurs: extremely confident and bullish but also very insecure about success and unsure of the strategy at once. That is one of the great paradoxes of risk-tasking and entrepreneurship. It makes success and validation all the more rewarding, though the smart ones never take that for granted and realize what happened yesterday is meaningless at best and misleading at worst.
Anyway, once this month is over, we will have had 10 - count ‘em ten - bigger months than March 2008:
So in 24 months since our first peak, we have had 10 bigger peaks. Just imagine where our numbers would be if we embraced hyper-distribution and totally opened up our network. Oh, right, totally broke. But that’s a separate post.
The graph above is a conservative estimate of March 2010’s final figure, the one below is more representative of where March 2010 will fare… which means bye-bye March 2008 for sure:
Yesterday I shared a video from Beet.tv in which 5Min’s CEO Ran Harnevo talked about the merits of evergreen videos.
Today, I wanted to highlight an important balancing act that Break.com’s Keith Richman touches on: content creation vs. distribution:
That’s one of the 2 balancing acts, the other is content creation and aggregation.
In yesterday’s video, we talked about Microsoft, Google and AOL’s potential target companies, today we look at some of the other companies who might acquire startups Livestream and TubeMogul. I also made a mistake, it’s Visible Measures, not Visible Metrics (we were talking about analytics/video metrics, but still… my bad). Here’s Part 2:
We did 65,000,000 videos in 2009, but in the past 12 months, we’ve done 80,000,000 (we also crossed 125,000,000 all-time streams in March).
I am guessing that in the next couple of months, we will cross 100,000,000 in trailing twelve months streams. I am also projecting 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 video views in 2010, depending on whether we continue to focus on a licensing model or successfully move to an ad-supported model.
Time will tell.
Very good video from Beet.tv with 5Min CEO Ran Harnevo. We partnered with 5Min over a year ago and their growth of late has indeed be nothing short of breathtaking. But, I must say, I also think that our content is perfect for their distribution network, which he explains in the video a bit better:
Nice overview of YouTube growing up and helping the advertising market grow up.
In this series of videos WatchMojo.com hears from billionaire industrialist Richard Branson on a number of interesting topics from the origins of the Virgin brand to how he’s embracing green technology. Enjoy:
Here is a video I did recently with The Deal - I believe this is Part 1 of 2. (Note to self: maybe time to hit the gym again?)
Back in October 2006, a few days before Google acquired YouTube, I wrote a post called YouTube is wildy profitable, no doubts about it, it was probably the first I published on this blog that got a lot of attention. Anyway, I had no proof that YouTube was actually profitable or for that matter generating material revenues, but the point was: it could be in a very strong state despite the alleged hosting fees, which we now know through peering arrangements can be contained.
However, with Viacom and Google disclosing numerous documents, it turns out, that while not profitable (after all expenses), YouTube was indeed generating revenues which covered most of their expenses as early as August 2006. You knew that if Google was willing to pay $1.65B for a company that was 18 months old, it wasn’t doing so simply for the promise, but still, that is quite impressive. I guess what Steve Chen and Chad Hurley knew then was that at that pace, YouTube’s growth would ensure that its costs would far exceed its revenues in the short term, and a sale to Google would make that concern evaporate.
