Making Money with Online Video

As we find ourselves in a shifting economic climate, it's important to remember that there are some overarching trends that aren't going to change as the media world evolves. More and more video viewing will move from conventional TV and Cable to the Web, in particular as the Web becomes the new source of discovery for channels that can play on broadband enabled devices, mobile, and living room flat-screen TV's. Secondly, advertisers are being driven to re-think how they can target consumers in a more efficient and accountable way. Mainstream mass media advertisers are going to be the last to the party. Already there is a huge shift in local and regional advertising from newspaper, radio, and local TV to web-based emerging media solutions. This trend is only going to accelerate as ad networks consolidate and analytics and ad formats develop standards that reach across media sources. So, how can you make money today - and tomorrow? Laying Claim. Building a destination in the multi-media land grab. Today, video is just starting to become part of the web browsing experience. The early adopters are going to YouTube, or Veoh, or one of the many other destination sites - looking for a video that either entertains them, or answers a question. It would appear that we are living in the era of video search, but in fact video search is on its way out. Just as we don't go to Google and search for "Turkey Sandwich” and land on a recipe, we won't be finding ourselves searching for "Viral” or "Funny" on YouTube much longer. Instead, we will be looking for viral and funny video on sites such as CollegeHumor or bored.com that have a entire libraries of Viral and Funny videos at the ready. Video will no longer be a clip, but rather an experience that is deeply and intelligently integrated into a web site that provides a complete suite of content, community, and commerce inside a single URL. This is good news - because there is a HUGE opportunity here for content

Making Money with Online Video entrepreneurs to step in, and start building and growing the destination communities around content that will feed the evolution of search in the next 24 to 36 months. So, here's the first of a series of ACTIONABLE tips you can use to build a web based video business today, embed video and you keep all the revenue from the inventory around the videos. Yes, that's right. It isn't a published fact -because the rules around video are changing too fast to keep up with the rulebook. What is in fact happening is that video owners are moving from a destination site strategy to a syndication strategy by making their video available on video destinations and making them available for embedding on other sites. The display-advertising inventory around that video is now up for grabs. That means - simply put - if you embed a Hulu video on your page, then Hulu may well put a pre-roll ad in their player. They're going to get paid, and therefore, whatever you do with the inventory on your page is yours to keep. This is an important shift. It means that there is now a terrific opportunity for entrepreneurs to build contextual, well curated, and well-maintained sites that organize video around useful and thoughtful verticals. Example: Let's say you're an extraordinary and passionate skier. Let's talk about what you know well. Do you know about skiing in Switzerland? What about the Midwest? Colorado? New England? Upstate New York? Well, chances are - there's set of mountains that you know well. Next - what about your skill level. Are you a pro? Or a family skier? Well, once you determine what your passion and knowledge is - you're ready to start building landing page destinations. The web is full of content that you can discover and embed. Text from RSS, Photo's from Flikr, Google Images, and Yahoo, News tickers, Live video, Aggregated Blog Posts, Skiing weather reports, and much more. There's way too much content - but that's where your curation and knowledge come in. Will your curated landing page be the answer that everyone is looking for? No, of course not. But if Iʼm looking to take my family on a ski vacation to Gore Mountain in upstate New York - then I'm going to want a landing page with video, data, knowledge and - COMMERCE. Here's where it gets interesting. Travel services will allow you to offer airplane car rental, hotels. You can sell gear, lift tickets, almost anything that a family skier is looking for through their affiliate marketing programs. And, if you give your visitors the tools to suggest videos, provide editorial input about various lodges and destinations, and provide UGC (user generated content) in the form of video - well, then, you may well have built a self-sustaining and growing destination that needs just your care and curation to keep it growing and

Making Money with Online Video valuable. Some key points on the video based destination landing page business model. There are lots of sites that already have landing pages that are focused on ecommerce and text. But video is the new explosion here, and search engines are increasingly going to favor sites that are video-centric over sites that have just a few videos on a site. If you just search and add 5 new videos to your site every day - you'll have more than 1,800 videos on your site by the end of your first year. And not any videos, hand selected and hand approved that are contextual to your focus. That is probably a commitment of just 10 min a day. The question is - are you going to build one video-centric site, or 5. What if you build 5 skiing sites for family vacations? New York, New England, Aspen - or would you go deeper. How about a network of sites like this: Western U.S. (California, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Nevada) Rocky Mountains (Alberta, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming) Pacific Northwest (Alaska, British Columbia, Washington) Mid-Atlantic (New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia) New England (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont) This is 20 sites, and you could start to cross promote and build traffic across your family video network. As traffic grows, and sales on your ecommerce and ad links grows, you're going to be well along the way to building your own network. Here's an example of just what a few minutes of sorting and curation can do: www.NewYorkFamilySkiiing.magnify.net

In just 15 minutes, we've been able to build a curation solution that finds, and

Making Money with Online Video updates family ski videos in the Northeast. You'll be shocked at just how many videos there are on the web waiting for you to ad your knowledge and organizational skill. So, that's just the start. There are free services that can give you the tools to build sites, curate content, and begin to build pages that will increase in traffic and value over time. Advertising

Now, we're going to get to the part that everyone wants to learn about: Advertising. First, if you haven't played with Google AdSense yet, now'se the time. With AdWords, it's credit card simple - so go and spend $20 and learn about how the system works - it will help you understand the AdSense side of the equation when you go to put ads on your site. It's good to know, at least in part, where they're coming from. It's self-serve, low cost, and you're off to the races. We've used lots of ad networks here at Magnify.net, and I can tell you - we haven't found any that perform better, or do a better job of ad targeting than AdSense. If you don't have an AdSense account set up, do it right now. It's worth the 10 minutes it takes. I promise. So, you've set up your AdSense account, and if you've got a Magnify.net page - or a page from any service that lets you put ads on your pages, youʼve got ads

Making Money with Online Video running. Ok, that's a good start. Now, how do you grow that business? There are two kinds of ads you care about: Cost Per Action (CPA) and Cost Per Click (CPC). Those are different businesses. Cost Per Click is those Google text ads you see on the page. They're targeted, but they only pay if someone clicks on them, and on the other side, the advertiser only pays if a potential customer clicks. Cost per action is going to pay you more money if somebody buys something - CPA ads work, and there are CPA ad networks out there that have a huge inventory of CPA campaigns that you can put on your site today. This is particularly true if your site has nice traffic and you've organized your videos so that youʼre the best collection of car repair videos or mountain climbing or backpacking - whatever your specialty is. Now, not all CPA ads are created equal. Each campaign has a different offer, and a different payout. So, for example, Eastern Mountain Sports may be paying a 7% commission on all sales from your customers who click in and buy - while other advertisers may look like they're paying more, but then what you find is that the advertiser is dropping off your visitor on the product home page, rather than to a shopping page or shopping cart, making it a ton harder for you to get paid. So, CPA is really powerful - and since you probably know better than an algorithm what folks on your site might want to buy - and you can mix and match and update as seasons and products and tastes change. So, if you want to manage a CPA campaign, thereʼs real money in it for you- just takes some time to get the mix right. Among the networks you may want to take a look at. PepperjamNetwork.com CJ.com ShareaSale.com LinkShare.com Last but not least, if you're looking for the Holy Grail, it's probably not CPA or CPC. You've watched Hulu; you've seen those pre-roll ads. Yes, theyʼre a bit of a pain when they run: 30 secs - but heck, thereʼs gold in them thar hills. So if you want to get pre-roll in front of your videos, itʼs about volume. You want to join a pre-roll network, but they're looking for quality videos and volume in order to take your traffic and put ads in the mix. Here's the thing I want to stress. If you work your butt off - and make as many videos as you can, youʼre probably going to make 5 videos a week for your site. Maybe you can make 10. That's not enough to generate traffic and therefore pre-roll inventory. And you can't run pre-roll in front of YouTube, or Revver, or

Making Money with Online Video Blip or any of the other sites that allow you to discover and embed videos on your pages. Which raised the BIG question. Are your visitors contributing video to your site? If they are, youʼre building pre-roll inventory on the videos you make, and the videos your visitors contribute. If they aren't making video and uploading to you - why not? Invite them to participate. Do it right away. Because the more people get comfortable with your site being a mix of videos you make, videos you aggregate and curate from across the web, and videos that are submitted by your visitors that are pruned and curated by you - well, that mix is going to generate SEO goodness, pages, and revenue. Three kinds of advertising: Cost Per Click, Cost Per Action, and Pre-Roll. Three kinds of video on your site: Video you make (created), video you gather and sort (curated), and video you get from your visitors (contributed). This is a magical combination -and now'se the time to jump in feet first!