IP Democracy: ManiaTV: Monetizing UGC is Like Dumpster-Diving

Internet video site ManiaTV is relaunching today with a new focus on professionally produced video content. The company has decided to jettison 3,000 channels of user-generated content for good reason: it doesn't make money.

ManiaTV says that 80% of its visitors watched only professionally produced content and that advertisers "wanted to distance themselves as far as they possibly could from the user-generated content," according to CEO Peter Hoskins. Great quote from Hoskins that summarizes ManiaTV's decision to jettison all the cat videos and dorm-room documentaries:

The user-generated world was dumpster diving for gold, and we didn't find any gold in the dumpster.

ManiaTV is going to produce content itself using pros and will launch a studio to supply content.

Is this the beginning of the long-awaited shake-out of companies that had staked their business models on making money off of user-contributed videos? Even YouTube, the vast reservoir of user-generated content (Hoskins tells former ManiaTV contributors to head on over to the Google-owned site if they want to post their crap...actually what he says is "We would love for them to go to YouTube and have great success there"), is counting mostly on professional videos for its in-video ad revenues.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 22, 2007 8:59 AM to IP Democracy