Self Publishing: First Books, Now Videos
Filed under: Business Models, Internet Subscription Models, User Generated Content, Video
Bob Young, the founder of Red Hat formed lulu.com a few years ago to enable authors to self publish books. The site has an Alexa ranking of 3,386. It has a nice 3-year Alexa chart.
Last week Lulu Enterprises launched lulu.tv, an online video sharing site where 80% of the revenue from subscribers will be shared with those who have uploaded video content. This revenue share is extremely generous. It will be interesting to see how many content providers will take the time to upload content here. There might be a catch-22 here: until there are enough paying subscribers, content providers might not want to make the effort to upload. But why would anyone pay $14.95 per month to subscribe when there is so much free video content on Google Video and YouTube, and dozens of other sites.
But content providers should be really happy that Lulu is pushing the envelope in terms of generous revenue sharing.
YouTube hailed as advertising medium of the future – vnunet.com
Filed under: Advertising, Internet Marketing Tactics, Video, Viral Marketing
YouTube hailed as advertising medium of the future – vnunet.com
My next Connect magazine article will focus on the power of online video in marketing and advertising. (I’ve been working on it today.) So I was glad to discover this article quoting Leo Burnett’s Chief Creative Officer saying YouTube is the ideal advertising platform of the future.
Explosive Growth of Online Video
Here’s an excerpt from this Fast Company article showing how explosive the online video industry is:
With some 18 billion videos streamed online in 2005–up 50% from 2004–it’s not surprising that new businesses are sprouting up around this digital explosion. Each day on YouTube, more than 40 million video views are delivered and 35,000 new clips are uploaded. Google and Yahoo have video search sites and large caches of moving content. Apple’s iTunes Music Store sold 12 million video clips for $1.99 each over the span of just a few months. A new company out of Berkeley, California, called Dabble is vying to become a micro movie studio for the masses by inviting users to create, remix, browse, and organize video online. These aggregators are fast becoming the central nodes of an entirely new video marketing and distribution system, one far from Hollywood’s control.
Like Wayne Gretzy reportedly said, “I skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been.”
If you want to have fun and make it big, start a company in a fast growth industry. Do something new, something innovative. Don’t just go copy some other business model that anyone else could do just as well. Be different. Be cutting edge.
At Provo Labs (an incubator), we try to invest in areas where there is significant growth. Starting a business in an explosive growth industry gives you a much better chance to get to profitability than if you are trying to compete with a lot of other players in a no-growth industry, where you are all fighting each other for the same customers.
But with online video, there will be billions spent in this space over the next few years, and a lot of new companies will succeed. Look at what has just happened in the last six months. YouTube’s Alexa chart is the best I have ever seen. It validates the online video space like nothing else.
It’s really quite exciting for us to have a startup company in the online video space. We can benefit from YouTube, Google Video, and even the increasing popularity of video iPods.
Our company 10Speed Media began last year as Blastyx, a renegade video company patterned after Microsoft’s Channel 9.
In addition to renegade videos we will be launching some new technology and an innovative distribution model in the next 60 days.
The company is building a great management team. We are working with some great customers, and our revenues are growing each month. We are launching a major partnership with a well known online company in July. We have some new technology and distribution announcements coming soon as well.
We think we have a very cool and unique business concept. Nothing is unique on the internet for long, however, so we know we will be in a race with players large and small.
If you want to get a flavor for the kind of work 10Speed Media can do, check out this video our team produced for the Winter at Westminster program, hosted by YouTube.com.
I launched 10x Marketing, a search engine marketing company, back in early 2002. We were pretty early in that space and the company has been fairly successful.
But our feeling is that 10Speed Media is catching this online video wave even earlier than 10x Marketing caught the search engine wave.
Hopefully 10Speed will end up 10x or 100x bigger than 10x Marketing.
(Don’t ask me why we keep starting companies that being with 10. Originally it was because in any alphabetical list, digits are ranked higher than letters. So 10x outranks just about any other company, including AAA Plumbing.) If you look in the yellow pages, most companies seem to start with an A. You always want to be listed first.
Well online, the numbers help a lot. Back in 1997, at Ancestry.com we were very happy when AGLL (American Genealogical Lending Library) changed its name to Heritage Quest. That gave us a slight advantage whenever people showed genealogy companies in an alphabetical list.
The advantage today is much smaller that it was a few years ago because a lot of directories are not alphabetical anymore, they are sorted by something else. Like Google’s directory is sorted by Page Rank. (See this example from Google’s Directory of Online Broadcast Video Shows.) Other directories are sorted by popularity. So this 10x strategy really isn’t a big deal anymore. (And the branding is getting confusing!)
Provo Labs: Business Incubator
Filed under: Incubators, Provo Labs Companies, Utah Entrepreneurship, Video
I recently wrote an article for Connect Magazine about business incubators and Provo Labs in particular. It explains what we are trying to do at Provo Labs and why we think it will work.
One thing we have learned already since December is that our internal team needs to focus on one major project at a time and get it to completion, rather than having 5-10 simultaneous projects that are "on the brink" of completion but aren’t generating any value for customers.
For the last 2-3 weeks, most of our development team has been working on getting LDSMedia.com launched. It is the largest LDS search engine in the world. Our new version rolled live yesterday. I like the new author search and title search functionality. It makes it easy to find any article or book by any author. I especially like doing keyword searches in the title search box. (For example, do a title search for the word "debt" and find 142 articles or book chapters that contain the word debt. This feature will be invaluable to anyone wanting to do a quick survey of Mormon literature on any topic.)
Next the developers will be working on our PlugNSearch technology for the next few days. I described what PlugNSearch will enable in a post on March 24th. Phil Burns described how PlugNSearch fits into our web site management software framework on April 9th.
Shortly thereafter the developers will fix up our world history search engine and then we’ll likely put our entire Provo Labs team on our new genealogy search engine project. Both sites will be designed like LDSMedia.com — easy to browse and to search — and the major databases will be listed after any search along with the number of hits in each database. This makes it extremely easy to navigate through search results.
We’re hiring our first search engine marketing employee on May 1st and soon thereafter we will be bidding on tens of thousands of keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN. (And of course we use web analytics software to track our results.)
The constant temptation in an incubator is to start more projects. But each one costs money and requires a ton of energy and attention. So we are trying to launch some of our projects without incurring any payroll costs. For example, we have a blog network project underway where 4 individuals own 20% of the company and Provo Labs owns 20% of the company, but besides an investment of some server space and startup costs, we won’t have any payroll expense. The ROI on this "investment" will be excellent.
As incubator projects mature, they attract dedicated full-time employees and then Provo Labs doesn’t have to nurture them so much anymore. This is when success really starts to happen: when a talented team focuses enough energy on reaching customers and solving real problems.
This happened last year when FundingUniverse.com, a company that helps entrepreneurs meet angel investors, attracted its management team and got new life. FundingUniverse was recently mentioned in the Wall Street Journal online Startup Journal and got some good coverage of its new online video pitching service.
This is what is happening now with 10Speed Media, a company that we incubated that grew out of the Blastyx vidcasting vision of Phil Burns. It then merged with Big Idea Communications (a PR 2.0 company) and BusinessJive.com (a business podcasting company.) Under the leadership of Chris Knudsen and Judd Bagley, 10Speed Media is really starting to rock, landing clients in multiple states already. 10Speed Media can dispatch a vidcasting crew virtually anywhere to capture events or interviews that companies want to promote and then get online distribution for video clips.
A Glimpse of the Future of TV
Filed under: Business Models, Companies to Watch, Video
In April 2000 I first learned about TVeyes.com from this company press release:
Most experts agree that watching too much television is bad for humans, but it’s the key to success for a new Internet company called TVEyes.com. Southport, CT- Even as TV is blamed for everything from teenage violence to declining morals, TVEyes.com has a new vision for watching television. The Southport, CT company tracks keywords on network, cable and satellite television broadcasts—and sends instant e-mail alerts to users when their requested keywords have been spoken on TV. Users can obtain a transcript of the text in which their keywords appear, as well as a brief history of the previous mentions. TVEyes also can instantly link users back to the web sites of the TV show or network where the keywords were mentioned. Best of all, these services are absolutely free. The initial target user has been the individual with a specific interest who can’t stay glued to the TV set (such as an investor trying to monitor the buzz on a stock). But because of its own buzz, TVEyes has positioned itself to make a play for marketing and PR professionals, information outlets, corporations, watch dog groups, politicos and lawyers—even as it continues to cater to its base of loyal individuals. TVEyes.com is the brainchild of software wizard David Ives, who has created his own patent pending technology. Because the system is automated, TVEyes can watch television around the clock and send real time e-mails to users whenever their keywords are spoken. Other monitoring companies and clipping services have humans watching endless hours of TV, only to notify subscribers hours or even days later. Talk about burnout. Coupling a less labor-intensive system with significant ad revenues allows TVEyes to offer its services for free. TVEyes.com recently completed its Series A round of funding led by Redstone7/Trident Ventures. The undisclosed amount of initial funding will go to expanding coverage in local and international markets, and to creating full-service programs for both the professional and non-professional user.
TVEyes used to be text based. But try it out today. Search for any keyword and TVEyes will bring up matching online video clips (recorded from television.)
Click here to see a TVEyes search on the word Google. About 25 TV clips come up that mentioned Google in the last few months.
You do have to endure a 30-second advertisement to get to the video clip you want; but over time I think this model will become more flexible.
The two year Alexa chart for TVEyes isn’t great, but it does look they are beginning to gain some momentum.
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