Is it possible to make money on Online Video?

Turning out to be a great panel tonight at Ultra Light Startups At Your Imagination on W. 27th Street.

Even as I smell the “sweet” aroma of Pizza just arriving I’m think about just how happening our New York Tech Community is.

I’m enjoying hearing many of the one minute pitches, which seem better than what I’ve heard, overall, in previous months when I’ve attended ULS.

That reminds me, I’ve thought about what makes a successful business, startup or established brand, and I’ve come to believe the answer is tied to amplifying, simplifying and organizing existing primal needs.

Almost any new businesses I’ve seen is based on something we already do (Flicker, organize, post, share photos; PayPal, move cash easily; FreshDirect, deliver groceries of great food, ETC
).

A really good panel (see ultralightstartups but since I’m on my iPhone, I can’t type the names easily.

Zak – landscape of online video change in last 3 years. Level of interest and specific content that is unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Lady from ComScore – how to translate video streams into something meaningful for Metrics

fYi – success depends on 6 factors, advertising, sponsership, merchendizing, subscriptions and pay for view and custom content. But not everyonce can do it.

Monetizing online video using methods of television doesn’t work out, better to increase value of each interaction.

Video Standard Metrics (how is a view measured?) but much of the structure to monetize is based on laziness and the mechinism to buy smaller isn’t yet working that well, it’s not really a Metrics problem.

How valuable is your audience? You have to put up 30K to 50K on the table for advertisers to take you content seriously, these days.

Online video viewership and relationship is based on a difference from offline and viewers want to tell you what they want and content providers produce it. That’s much different than how content had been produced and sold till now.

Are people content creators or advertisers? Content may be sitting in several different buckets.

The idea of “eyeballs” is becoming useless as consumers multi task and hardly anyone is going to give undivided attention, therefore, the returns from TV Ads are rapidly dimishing.

How do you define engagement? Content placed on sites related to the content and visitors spend time watching.

Bootstrapped Video Content – there are a few people who make 100K a month by achieving “scale”. However, smaller niche online video shows can be successful if the niche audience is considered valuable to advertisers.

Is it that we’re too early on in this to monetize online videos?

Based on the audience, hardly anyone in the audience left after the intermission and pizza, it’s obvious people are captivated by online video.

And now, I’m sitting and at the Dewey Flaterion bar with my friends hatching a new and exciting project, more, later.

Pretty strong panel for online gaming at the Hatchery at Scholastic, tonight (see panelist names online) – you can watch a recording of the session here.

Scaleform is a company that wants to be a real time 3D gaming development, UI middleware, real time engines. I thought the Scaleform presentation was good and smooth, but not that exciting.
A lot of Scaleform’s focus is localization and they enabled Other software such as Adobe.

Btw, the opinion of the panel – Scaleform needs to expand the audience they are going after. Interestingly, the value of many these new startups is 1x annual revenue. Transition from a developer platform to an Artist/Creator platform.

The next company to present was Goozex that is a trading platform for used games, but I found myself to be disinterested and this presentation is going I forever, yawn.

Dimension M (M=Math) was a better presentation for online math training. I liked what I saw with Dimension series of games.

I was about to leave but this speaker and his presentation convinced me to stay longer. Questions about distribution strategy came up next with targeting is done at the district level.

Takeaway – the charisma of the presenter and the quality of the presentation are all important.

Canary In The Coalmine: NYT Sees First Decline In Online Ad Revenues

Posted using ShareThis

Note: I saw I can use “ShareThis” to post to my blog via Social Media – though it doesn’t really add anything more than the link back.   More and more, I’m finding that my blogging is spilling into my Facebook Feeds and into Friendfeed – and I’m trying to bring that richness back to this blog – but so far, haven’t had much luck.

It seems none of the plugins I’ve found actually replicates my entire Facebook profile feed as a widget that I can put in the sidebar – Facebook Connect doesn’t seem to do that, either, at least, not yet.

Next year, I think we’ll see more and more blogging morphing into mini feeds, like what we’ve seen in Facebook, FriendFeed and even, the Google Search Wiki.

And mind you, for the New York Times to have declining online ad revenue just bespeaks to the overall weakness of the economy – advertisers are holding back, more and more on spending – partly because, people have less and less money left to buy anything.

With out that – money, liquidity, credit – whatever, the only thing left is advertising for Branding, or to inform of an event or service.

What’s surprising is the downturn in advertising at the New York Times wasn’t more.

BTW, an interesting side thread on more activity going into mini feeds and away from blogs – and dare I say – newspapers – Of Course There Is a Social Media Backlash Coming.

But, so what – maybe mainstream media will turn into one big social network next year (who knows)?  My point being – if people are getting more involved in mini-feeds and micro blogging – maybe that’s because they suit us better – in some ways.

That’s what I’m grappling with too – I want to bring the richness of Facebook into my blog – but the functionality just isn’t there quite yet  – and I read well over 200 feeds a day – and comment on a lot of it – and that stuff is going into my Facebook feed and into Friendfeed – but not here ….

…. wouldn’t it be nice if it could also be here and illuminate my blog posts?