
How do you monetize a video sharing website? - rms
http://www.videosift.com/talk/VideoSift-Fundraiser
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dag1
Hey, dag from above mentioned VideoSift here. We have seen about a 50%
reduction from our network supplied ads.

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trapper
Can you explain what you think is causing the reduction? Could you make the
space more attractive for advertisers (e.g. decrease cost, increase space
etc)?

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dag1
We use a couple of big networks for CPM, one starts with a "Gl" the other has
the initials TF. Traditionally the CPM revenue has been fine with these and
more than paid the bills - in January it just dropped off into hell. The cause
is that advertisers have slashed their budget and are no longer shelling out
for CPM ads.

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trapper
I don't run an ad supported site, but am interested to know: has everyone seen
a reduction in advertising dollars?

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patio11
I don't run an ad supported site either, but I buy space on them. Google will
tell you how much you paid for ads on a per-site basis, and I just ran reports
for the last 30 days and the same days for 2008.

Here's what happened to the three sites who made most from me last year. All
three are names you'd recognize. [Edit for clarity: these are the CPMs paid
Google. The sites probably get substantially less than 60% of these.]

Site A: Effective CPM has declined from $3.20 to $.80, spend declined 66%

Site B: Effective CPM has declined from $3.80 to $1.90, spend modestly
increased (impressions obviously quite up)

Site C: Effective CPM has declined from $8.84 to $3.50, spend flat
(impressions obviously quite up)

The kicker: I'm one of the few advertisers practically begging for traffic --
there are a few hundred bucks of slack in my budget, so if they've got it for
sale I should be buying it. Its just the cratering CPM prices that are keeping
my spend that low. My guess is this means that the other advertisers are
sharply reducing spending, which means I win the "auction" easier and get the
clicks for cheaper (thus decreasing effective CPMs).

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Fuca
$8.84 CPM? thats is really high, how many visitors?

Anyway excellent job.

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scorpioxy
Interesting approach, but i am not sure how feasible it is. You can't ask for
donations every month.

I am not in this business, but i think i would go the flickr route for video
sharing. As in, offer a paid account which you can opt to make private or just
allow some people to see(like family videos). Make the payment terms easy(so
yearly or per GB stored or something). Also, offer some kind of export
mechanism to make customers feel more easy about their data in case something
wrong happens. So aside from the digital export, offer a Blu-ray mailing
option or something similar.

As for amateur remixes, i would offer affiliate links to content used(just
like youtube did) and also offer a tip-if-you-like-this option which i will
take a small part of.

So again, i am not in this business and monetizing video sharing websites
without premium content like movies and video clips is difficult, but this is
what i would do.

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danielrhodes
Videosift used to charge for a premium account that would enable you to have
more community options. Perhaps they should make the premium account cheaper
to drive up volume and get more.

They don't pay for video bandwidth, so it's kind of weird how they have such
high costs.

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rms
Their premium options are here: <http://www.videosift.com/upgrade>

At first thought the lengths they have chosen make it seem more expensive than
it is. There is something psychologically odd about the base 10 numbers
chosen. 30 days/90 days/180 days feels better, I think.

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Fuca
I would make a bigger difference between a free and premium account.

