How do you monetize a video sharing website?

http://www.videosift.com/talk/VideoSift-Fundraiser

by rms • 17 years ago

14 13 17 years ago

trapper3• 17 years ago

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

patio11• 17 years ago

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).

trapper3• 17 years ago

Thanks patrick, it's great to see some numbers instead of anecdote.

Fuca2• 17 years ago

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

Anyway excellent job.

axod• 17 years ago

No not in the least. Online advertising is still very strong from where I'm sitting.

dag13• 17 years ago

Hey, dag from above mentioned VideoSift here. We have seen about a 50% reduction from our network supplied ads.

trapper3• 17 years ago

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)?

dag13• 17 years ago

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.

scorpioxy• 17 years ago

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.

danielrhodes• 17 years ago

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.

rms• 17 years ago

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.

dag13• 17 years ago

I'm surprised that you are surprised that our costs would be $4,000 a month. VideoSift serves around 3 million PVs per month, and not a lot of flat content - we have 4 large dual Xeon servers and a CDN to distribute content to local servers. Throw in taxes and misc fees - and we've reached $4K on some months without even paying anyone to work on the site. And yet, a site like Digg can lose $5.3 million in 2008 and it seems perfectly normal. Sure we are tiny by comparison, but we are not <em>that</em> tiny.

Fuca2• 17 years ago

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

How do you monetize a video sharing website?

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