Monetizing Your Videoblog

In light of Rocketboom’s announcement to sell advertising via eBay, there has been a lot of discussion about ways to monetize your videoblog or video podcast. I’ve brainstormed all the ways I could conceive of to generate income from a videoblog.

Here’s what I’ve come up with:

• Text Ads (i.e. Google Adsense, Yahoo Ad network)
• Embedded Video ads – ads that play at the beginning or end of a video.
• Sponsors/Underwriters – in the mold of Public Broadcasting
• Product Placement – payment for featuring products in the video
• Subscriptions – charging viewers a scheduled fee (i.e. monthly, annually etc.) to download
• Pay on demand – charging per episode or show
• Merchandise - selling swag
• Donations - groveling
• Grants – for the more artistic or experimental videos
• Services – Selling yourself as a consultant or your production service

I’d like to hear other creative ways videobloggers are considering to offset the cost of their productions.

It's been awhile since the last post but tiny tube has been coming out weekly since the first week in november...Episode 12 just came out Tuesday so check it out.

The publishing schedule has shifted to a Tuesday release on the Web site - followed by uploads to a few different hosts.

Here is a quick synopsis of my hosting practices. First upload to my Web site which is hosted by GoDaddy. This is where the video is served on the Web site. I also upload the video to blip.tv - which has a featured to automatically upload it to ourmedia.org. It appears to me having your video hosted on ourmedia.org helps your results in Yahoo's video search. Then I upload it to vSocial which provides a nice flash version.

The downside is keeping track of all the downloads. If I was serving the video from one spot I could get a more accurate count on the numbers of times people watch, or at least start to watch the video. Currently, I have to tally the stats from the different hosts. But I think the added viewership warrants its for now.

I'd am curious to know what other people are doing for hosting. Do you have your videos hosted on multiple sites? What hosts do you use and why?

Tiny Tube Episode 5 - Phoneswarm is no up and ready to be experienced. I'm still trying to figure out the best workflow for getting theses things out. I'm estimating that it takes about 12-15 hours to get a show done from conception to birth; a lot longer than I thought it would.

The writing time varies depending on what implants itself in my brain each week. Basically though roughly 2 hours. I usually write one stream on consciousness style and then go back and edit and tweak it. Shooting time is averaging about 2 hours.

Loading the footage and breaking the clips down take about 2-3 hours. Editing is the biggest unkown. It depends on the episode and but so far it has been about 5-6 hours including rendering. Finally uploading the clips to the directories and updating the Web site can take 2-3 hours.

If anyone has any workflow tips or suggestions I'd love to hear them.

I learned how to add a poster image for my vodcast to generate a representative photo. In QT Pro scroll the playhead to the frame you want and then select view set poster image. You will need to then move the playhead back to the beginning of the video and then save or else the video will start playing at the poster frame.

Episode 4 of Tiny Tube went up this evening. I have resolved to remain with my Web site host to also host the video until bandwith constraints dictate otherwise. It’s just simpler for now and the video seems to be loading without any hiccups.

However, during this first month of figuring out the best practices here are the various free hosting services I’ve experimented with:

Blip.tv http://www.blip.tv
Ourmedia http://www.ourmedia.org
YouTube – http://www.YouTube.com
VSocial - http://www.vsocial.com/

A few notes on each of them.

Blip.tv seems to be the most popular with serious videobloggers. It is a reliable host with a dashboard feature that provides some basic stats. This would be my first choice. There are rumblings about charging for their services in the future but I’m sure they’ll provde fair warning.

OurMedia – I have heard problems about downtime with their servers. However, they might serve as a good backup solution.

YouTube – This site seems like it has some money behind it. There are some interesting features for sharing. It provides code snippets for myspace and friendster. But the video is inserted into a flash player which I don’t particularly care for. Good categories and site architecture.

VSocial – I just discovered this and for some reason I like it a lot. Very simple site with a star rating system, easy and quick uploads. It doesn’t have nearly the volume of content as the others. It reminds me of the Technorati site in some ways. I would keep an eye on these guys.

If anyone has any insight on better hosting opportunities let’s here’em!

The third episode of Tiny Tube is now up. I'm still figuring out some issues regarding hosting. I went from hosting the video with my Web site hosting company. However, I wanted to save bandwith so I upload the video to blip.tv and everything seemed to be working and the load time for the video was noticably faster the my host.

However, I noticed that there was a problem with the rss enclosures generated through wordpress and feedburner. The feeds wouldn't work in DTV, Fireant or iTunes. I discovered that the issue was with wordpress. The enclosures were not created when a video was being hosted outside of wordpress.

Luckily David Meade created a wordpress hack tha allows it generate the enclosure. You can get it here http://www.davidmeade.com/post/post.php?topicID=579.

I haven't tried it yet but it is reported to work swimmingly. I'm hoping have the next episode back on blip.tv.

I'm still investigating other options for hosting. If anyone has any strong recommendations please speak up!

After my first vodcast of tiny tube I noticed a few problems with the video loading. I used QT Pro to compress the video using the 3ivx codec and ended up with a 19 mb file for a five minute broadcast. This seemed inline with the size of the other vodcasts I subscribe to in iTunes.

The problem was the video would choke after about 10-15 seconds. I was server my video from my Web site host (GoDaddy). I decided to try another server for hosting the video. I uploaded the video to blip.tv. I tested the download several times and it played completely though each time.

I was reviewing my Web stats the next day and noticed an increase in visitors but I drop in bandwith. And it clicked that I should've been doing this all along. Not only does the video play better but I'm not using up valuable bandwith.

I also created an account with ourmedia.org but I have yet to test it.

These are two substantial advantages of having your video hosted on a server other than your Web host. If anyone knows of any other places the will host video for free let me know.