Beet.TV Transcripts

GigaOM's NewTeeVee Relaunched with Expandable Video Players -- Traffic Is Doubling Monthly at the Essential Industry Blog

Om Malik, Founder, GigaOM; NewTeeVee and Liz Gannes, NewTeeVee

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[Start  of Audio]

David Kavanaugh: Hi. So we’re here in San Francisco, a place that many would say is the mecca for the online media revolution. Today we have the privilege of meeting with some of the minds behind newteevee which is an exciting new blog about online video.

Om Malik: So we basically had started the site in December and initially it mimicked the look and feel of GigaOM and the reason for that was that we weren’t very sure if it was going to stick.

Three months into the new site, we realized that it was a different audience, right? It wasn’t my classic GigaOM audience. It was very different from what my typical readers were.

Liz Gannes: Maybe ____ for changing the design of our site was to better reflect our subject matter and also just to be attention grabbing and catchy and make you actually want to click through to our site where a lot of the action happens hopefully in the comments and in the video surrounding the posts.

David Kavanaugh: Liz is the creative force behind the web page’s new look.

Liz Gannes: We had a really great designer come in and turn this into something visual. And if you go to the top of the page, over in our new video bar, I’ll show you this video, a special episode of Ask a Ninja in which the ninja sneaks on to some kind of press junket for Blades of Glory, the new Will Ferrell movie and interviews Will Ferrell and his costar, in character as the ninja. Well, of course, the ninja’s always in character. And they have a pretty funny discussion which includes, as usual, the ninja telling them that he looked forward to killing them.

David Kavanaugh: What sort of model do you guys use to find out who’s looking at your site?

Liz Gannes: We get emails. We get comments. Sometimes we specifically solicit feedback. We definitely try to respond and foster some kind of a community on the site rather than just an audience.

David Kavanaugh: So, yeah. I think that the online publications, they really have an upper hand over the other formats because you can get really good feedback from your viewers?

Liz Gannes: Yeah. So it’s a particular skill to foster feedback, I think, and one that I’m striving to have. But to be open and engaging and approachable in a way that people feel like they’re invited to offer their opinion. And it’s been fun to see that develop as the site goes on because when someone comes to a site and say last December, there are no archives, there’s very little kind of site identity, it probably took a lot more to step in and say here’s what I think. But now we have kind of a regular gang of commenter’s. Schlo-mo’s always ready to step up and criticize someone for self-promoting in the comments which is really nice so we don’t have to go do that ourselves.

And this guy, Nat, is always ready to jump in with some kind of insider view on the P to P industry and keep us in check if we forget to mention something. So it’s nice to have an idea of who’s out there and who’s contributing and include them as members of the site.

Om Malik: I mean, that’s the beauty of the Web is like you can walk with your audience and our readers are basically the reason this Web site redesign happened. And I hope people are liking it, you know?

Liz Gannes: Om was just telling me inside that he was just looking over our traffic stats and we’ve doubled our number of visitors every month that we’ve existed.

[End of Audio]

Om Malik, Liz Gannes, Online Video, NewTeeVee

The Payoff for Online Video Uploaders is "Reputation," Not "Beer Money" Says WIRED's Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief, Wired

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Do you think there’s an opportunity for a business of a long tail of individual video creators to make money in addition to sort of having their image seen or searching –

Chris Anderson: Yeah –

Andy Plesser: Or visible, which is sort of the democratization of media, but how about the business model –

Chris Anderson: Yeah –

Andy Plesser: Would emerge?

Chris Anderson: It’s interesting. Two things become very obvious in long tail marketers. The first is the aggregators have the big obvious business, so Google can make money off the web in the way that the individual participants might not be able to. ITunes can make money off music in a way the individual artist may not be able to, and that – the role of the aggregator makes perfect sense. So clearly, the role of aggregating web video, long tail video, is a big opportunity, but you asked a more interesting question, which is what about the creators themselves, and I’ll give you two answers. The first is that we measure return on investment. We measure reward usually in terms of money, but clearly the fact that there are 55 million bloggers out there blogging for free, the fact that Wikipedia exists for like people creating it for free, suggests that people can be motivated by more than money.

There is another economy out there, the economy of reputation, the economy of attention, the economy of even expression, that people can be motivated by just getting a readership, by being noticed. This is enough, because it’s so cheap and easy to produce these days, the tools. Everyone has a camcorder. Everyone has video editing software. Everyone has access to distribution. It’s so cheap and easy to do it; they don’t need to be paid. They’re clearly doing it anyway.

However – so there is a reward, and the reward is more psychic than it is economic. However, there is a possibility for some of them to make money as well, and we’re gonna figure out how that is. So right now, in the text world it’s pretty easy. If you wanna make money off your blog, if you have enough traffic, you can put a couple lines of HTML and you’ve got AdSense. School AdSense. You can have an Amazon Associates links, etc. Is it – again, it’s beer money for most of us, not much more. What would the equivalent be for video?

Well, text links don’t work for video. Running AdSense against video doesn’t work, ’cause the targeting doesn’t work. Amazon Associates probably isn’t gonna be very much money either. Would there be a sort of a marketplace of web video ads that you could run post-roll against web video content in a way that scales to the long tail of video producers? Don’t know. Doesn’t exist yet. Clearly a big opportunity going forward if someone can figure that out. I think you then have not just a sort of psychic award, but actually a monetary award for long tail video producers.

Andy Plesser: What do you think about the opportunities for traditional print publications with a big online presence including Wired, or the New York Times or other media to have – become multimedia and to incorporate video?

Chris Anderson: That would – I mean they’re obviously huge. I mean so let’s start with this. People want video and it’s easy to do it. So those are the two necessary – supply and demand. The question is what’s right for us, and the answer is we’ve thought of some things. We’re gonna think of many more things going forward. Let me give you some examples of what we are doing. So right now when we do a photo shoot, we obviously – there’s the pictures we use in the magazine.

There’s the other pictures we didn’t use in the magazine we make available online, and now, increasingly, there’s the video of the shoot. So for the Lonely Girl cover that we have here, that we have in the current issue, there’s the photos we used in the magazine on the cover, the extra photos on the sort of the photo foot book online, and then you can see a video of the shoot. And for something like this, which is kind of a celebrity – it’s kinda cool to be there on the set, it’s actually quite a compelling thing. So that was easy. We were doing it anyway. We already had our people there.

Just take out a camcorder in the shoot and to take this sort of – bring this new dimension to the experience and make it available online was easy. Another thing that we’re doing is when we have events, the old model for events would be that we would hire some video crew to come and video the event and we would edit it, etc. The new model is you invite the participants to video them. You have permission. Anyway can video it. Go for it. Go crazy. Bring your camcorder. Bring your camera phones, whatever.

We can then identify the ones that we like the best and then we can – and it’ll all get uploaded, of course, to YouTube – and that we can just link to the user generated videos that were created around our events that are out there anyway. So in a sense we’ve crowd sourced the work of recording our events and bringing them to a broader audience. So those are two examples. Other examples would be things like where you have television show coming up, which is Wired Science gonna be coming on PBS in February.

Clearly, that’s – now that we have a video side already as part of what we – our editorial mission and our work, we have an opportunity to bring video from that and video out – around and outside of that outtakes, extra shots, etc., onto our site to bring this new sort of video dimension to – out there anyway so in a sense –

[End of Audio]

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail

News Alert: Walt Mossberg, New Face on Beet.TV (Well, Sort of) -- Wall Street Journal Unlocks Videos for the Blogosphere.......

Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Brightcove

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[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: So Jeremy, tell me, the Dow Jones is actually allowing and embed of their code to be shared. That’s pretty interesting. Tell us about that.

Jeremy Allaire: Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, Dow Jones is really taking advantage of several forms of controlled distribution that are possible. So when you go to the Wall Street Journal or Market Watch, you’ll find their video channels and they’ve got a huge amount of original video. Within those, they have, within any of our standard templates, a get code feature, which they can turn on or off. They’ve turned it on and when a consumer clicks that, they get an embed code and then that content can be embedded and redistributed. So they’re doing that across the content, which is great.

So if you’re, you know, blogging or writing or have a website that deals with business and marketplace, you know, issues, it’s a great service to that community. Now one of the things that we do that’s different than, say, a Youtube or other sites that offer these embed codes is what actually gets shared. So if you, say, run a business blog and you grab, you know, a marketplace overview or whatever it is, the content owner can control the brand and skin and features of the player that gets virally embedded. So it’s not just a single embedded video frame.  

When you grab that code from Dow Jones, you actually get a Dow Jones or, in this case, Wall Street Journal branded experience that skins and chromes the player. It’s got contextual links that take you back to the location of the video channel on their site and once that’s there, they can actually update it with additional content and programming so it’s not just the video that you embedded, but they can actually attach other things in as well.

You can also allow people to register as an affiliate so if you have a website and you want to distribute the top news stories from Wall Street Journal or ______ Mossberg’s you know, personal, you know, video column, you can sign up as an affiliate and get that content and get a richer package, not just a single embed. You can embed like a whole sub-channel with lots of content.

So we’ve given them the ability to do that and on top of that, those nodes, whether it’s a, you know, a virally created node or a managed affiliate, become nodes on essentially their own extended ad network. And they have a set of ad products that they use from Bright Cove, video commercials, synchronized banners, overlays and other formats and their sales force can sell that advertising and it will get trafficked out across all those other sites in the same way that they sell ads within their own site. So it really gives them this syndicated ad network that they can take advantage of in their media business.

[End of Audio]

Wall Street Journal, viral video,Walt Mossberg, Jeremy Allaire

Get Better "Google Juice" Through Effective Blogging, Six Apart's Anil Dash Explains

Anil Dash, Six Apart

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[Start of Audio]

People see Google and its searching system as this kind of angry rain God that you have to sacrifice to, and you don’t exactly know why, and if you don’t do it right, your crops won’t grow, and when the crops don’t grow, you figure out, “Oh, I must have not sacrificed enough goats or something.”

It’s actually a fairly logical system. It’s saying the more frequent you update, the more frequently they’re gonna index you. The more frequently you update, the more likely that readers are gonna say there’s something of interest to them. It’s not a videogame. It’s not a kind of push-the-button harder, and it does more – I think it’s this really straightforward idea of the more you are of service to people, the more value you provide, the more the system is designed to reward you. Is it perfect? No.  But it’s pretty good. It’s a pretty good approximation of what are the traits that make someone find the site valuable.

And then absolutely, links are a huge part of the economy of blogging and of the public blogging. Personal blogging; you don’t care if somebody links to that, but if your blog’s part of your professional career or part of your brand presence, you absolutely wanna get people linking to it, and the ways to do that are really simply.

Give them something that’s worth linking to, and then be very generous. I think the more you give, the more you get, so the more you’re sharing a lot of it, then go out and see the content and go out there and look at these other sites, the more people are gonna link back to you and reciprocate.

[End of Audio]

Six Apart, Anil Dash, Video Search, Google Juice, Google