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Today is a benchmark day for us at Rocketboom as we release the merits of a great new effort with blip.tv. Together we’ve integrated our systems to demonstrate a flexible model for distribution, sponsorship and advertising.
At Rocketboom, earlier this year, we designed a sponsorship model so far culminating in a week-long sponsorship by Real Player and a rev-share deal with YouTube.
I personally love our sponsorship model and consider it to be hardly invasive (you can expect to see more of these from us throughout 2008). It’s also a great system because we burn the sponsorship message into our master file and thus distribute it across all platforms. Not just one flash file, but all of our files, everywhere (e.g. the sponsorship message travels through our own site, iTunes, Facebook, YouTube, TiVo, etc.).
Now blip takes us further with the additional ability to serve interactive, post-roll ads and collapsable overlays in flash AND Quicktime files. After talking with Apple, we believe this is the first time anyone has used Quicktime to serve overlay ads. Our daily publishing method now incorporates this dynamic serving in perfect sync with our hard burning.
Blip brokered the sponsorship (many more to come) and has integrated their run-of-site framework into our site for extra coverage between sponsor runs. This gives us the ultimate flexibility to manage multiple sales of various types at the same time.
The blip folks are some of the brightest and smartest people in this space so its been a real pleasure to finally come together. Thanks especially to Mike and Dina for maintaining such strong passion and good will. On our side, I want to give a big thanks to the Rocketboom team, especially Mark Mathewson and Jamie Wilkinson whose persistence saw this project through.
Check out Mike’s post here.
To see in action, visit Rocketboom.
Want to get involved? Contact us!
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Have you ever wondered how the various video sites determine a view count?
TubeMogul conducted a study of the various video hosting sites by uploading videos, monitoring the conditions and recording the counts.
| Site |
Full View |
<1/2 View |
>1/2 View |
Refresh |
Embed |
| AOL Uncut |
Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
| Dailymotion |
Count |
Count |
Count |
No Count |
No Count |
| Google |
Count |
No Count |
Count |
No Count |
No Count |
| Metacafe |
One/IP addr. |
One/IP addr. |
One/IP addr. |
One/IP addr. |
One/IP addr. |
| Myspace |
Count |
No Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
| Revver |
Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
Count |
| Yahoo! Video |
One/IP addr. |
No Count |
No Count |
One/IP addr. |
No Count |
| YouTube |
Count |
No Count |
No Count |
No Count |
One/IP addr. |
As you can see, YouTube only ads one count per i.p. address, per fully watched video. No partial views get counted. When a video is embedded, it only gets counted once per i.p. no matter how many times the video is viewed. Yahoo Video and Metacafe are even more stringent.
Compare this to Revver which gives a count to a full view, a 1/2 view, less than 1/2 a view, refreshes and embeds. Big difference. Why would Revver be so slack on a count? The only reason I can think of is hyperbole.
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Several weeks ago we started to use TubeMogul and have been really impressed. It’s now a part of our daily workflow.
Each morningnnnwe upload our 3ivx 270×480 Quicktime file to Tube Moguel, enter 3 fields of metadata (title, descriptions, tags), select a category and then TubeMogul quickly uploads the video to 9 different sites all within a few minutes:
YouTube, Brightcove, Blip, Dailymotion, Revver, Google Video, Metacafe, Myspace and Yahoo.
We have never distributed through any of these sites before mostly because we just haven’t had the time to go around uploading all day on top of the 9 different files we serve ourselves.
TubeMogul has been really fast. They also keep track of stats across all the sites so it’s very easy to keep tabs on how things are going.
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Google has implemented their jumping feature into YouTube videos and it’s really nice. As you know, with most flash videos, you can’t scroll ahead until the video completely loads out beyond the point you want. With a YouTube video, now you can jump ahead and the video will start to load out from the new point foward, wasting no more time or energy loading any of the prior sections of the video.
Above, you can see I clicked the scoller to the middle of the video. It then began to play from the new point and started to load out ahead (and then behind next).
This is a very elegant feature that saves bandwidth and gives the audience way more flexibility for consuming information quickly.
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It seem as though Om Malik’s NewTeeVee weblog has emerged as one of the top authorites on online video news. It seems to be in a league of its own right now and there are surprisingly few other blogs that cover this kind of information. The staff of writers are just conservative enough, very insightful and in the know. Their coverage of MSM as well as independent media is comprehensive. News, reviews. I’ve met a few of the writers and think they are all very nice too.
Tilzy.tv is another new site which seems to be pretty good too (creative, insightful and on the pulse). LostRemote is another one – speaks more to people who have been in the media business for a long time and need some online nudging.
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