Posting news video on YouTube
Last week, during a lunch with business execs of two television stations, I asked them whether they would put their news video on YouTube. One station had had a bit of goofy video uploaded to YouTube by a viewer, which had resulted in some station embarrassment but ancillary traffic through the roof.
The response from both was basically the same. The page views primarily go to YouTube, and it doesn't add up to new revenue. (Local advertisers aren't buying a viewer from Peoria.) As a result, neither station does it.
Therein lies a difference between the business and news sides of media operations. We newsies say, "Let's put it all out there. Why not? It extends our journalism and allows an audience -- perhaps a different audience -- to find it. If it informs, helps or amuses one person online, it's got value." It is, in our limited view, the business side's role to figure out how to make money on (monetize!) that value. Makes for some tough decisions sometimes.
Meanwhile, a station in California has made the leap. (Via Matthew Ingram.) Posting on YouTube makes it easy for viewers to leave comments, pause and rewind, share videos with others, embed videos on their sites and easily watch highlights from local news if they are outside the area. It also makes it possible for people anywhere in the world to find and watch videos made by the production team of a small town station. That's very cool.
Comments (4)
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"The page views primarily go to YouTube, and it doesn't add up to new revenue."
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. I can hear Jarvis' groan from up north. Don't they GET it? Put together a community/group at YouTube and put up good stuff and your site's page views go up and advertising and oh jeez, what else can you do but smack them upside the head with a 1024x768px .png of a TV station buried 6 feet under.
Posted on January 17, 2007 11:16 AM
they may not get ad dollars right off the bat, but what good is the footage doing for the bottom line after it's hits the TV now?
consider it no cost advertising for the station by the people themselves. looking for actual revenue is myopic.
Posted on January 17, 2007 11:26 AM
Maybe if they prefaced the video with some sort of audio/visual promotion of a business. Some sort of brief display of a business's products or services. I know it's radical, but I'm thinking outside of the box here. I'm not sure what you'd call such a thing, but since it promotes commerce how about a "commercial."
Posted on January 17, 2007 12:41 PM
JR... JR... JR...
Why don't you start posting the text of your news stories on Yahoo's site? (and not charging Yahoo for it). Or, just give your stories away to the TV stations so they can put them on their websites?
Why don't you send all your photos to Flicker or allow everyone to take them and post them all over their personal blogs?
Video is to TV stations as your text and photos are to your newspaper... why should you expect that just because they CAN put their video on Youtube that they should?
What I can't figure out is why TV station web sites havent built the same functionality that Youtube allows? Hmmmm... Maybe for the same reason that the News & Record hasn't figured out in 8 years how to create a decent entertainment and venue database...
The answer to both questions is because neither has a clue about how to manage technical resources and focus on things that really matter.
The best I can tell about the News & Record is that your online organization (which seems to change names every two years) is run by a committee (run roughshod over by whatever Lex Alexander wants to do at the time) and a VERY few people who actually do the daily work.
Just from what I see from the outside (thankfully) about how it works there, I'd say it's very much dysfunctional -- and hardly run as a business with any focus. Perhaps if it were then there would be less consentration on blogs (that bring in exactly how much money and audience?) and more on things that really work and draw all kinds of viewers (and advertisers...)
Seriously? Musical garbage can? How many visits does that blog get? And how much has it grown in TWO years? If that person had spent the time they have on that blog instead on something like, oh, an event database MAYBE you'd be getting somewhere... instead I just looked through the ENTIRE month of December and found NO comments left on the Musical Garbage Can blog...
Now, I KNOW we will never know how many people visit the blog (you'd never tell us) and we'll never know how much that has grown relative to the overall growth of the web.... but, I bet it's very small.
Where is the FOCUS?
Posted on January 17, 2007 10:26 PM