USA Today’s Stephanie Armour has this piece today that presents an interesting downside to user-generated videos: videos made in the workplace. It seems that employees are making videos at work, or about work, and the results can be not-so-pretty.
Armour profiles one poor schlub, Michael De Kort, who used to work for Lockheed Martin. De Kort had the idea that some patrol boats made by the company were defective and decided to post a video about his concerns on YouTube after failing to catch management’s attention. Not surprisingly, the guy was fired and is now probably poison to most personnel managers; he’s working on a site for whistle-blowers.
I have to say that for the average disgruntled employee, or even an employee who harbors legitimate concerns over his or her company’s activities, the temptation to go around photographing and video taping stuff must be really strong. In fact, I bet there are tens of thousands, if not millions, of employees out there with incriminating evidence stored on their cell phones and other portable video recording devices. And they’re just itching for the right moment to post their stuff on YouTube or Flickr or some other web site.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:58 PM | Print | Comments (0)
After well over a year of running TechMeme (and some other impressive, addictive blog/news aggregation sites) with no source of revenue, Gabe Rivera is now accepting advertising. Gabe’s ad model befits the nature of TechMeme — no Adsense or traditional banner advertising for what has become the first stop in the morning for the world’s tech bloggers and journalists.
Instead, Gabe has taken the blogging concept and built it into his advertising. He’s offering sponsors the right to have their blog items appear on TechMeme in a special, prominent box. A sponsor’s blog feed is polled every few minutes, with the latest post appearing in its assigned slot.
These slots don’t come all that cheaply, either, but that’s the way it should be. Gabe is selling the first, second, and third slots for $4,500, $3,500, and $3,000 per month respectively. But sponsors get something pretty powerful in exchange: the ability to engage on a deeper level with what is bound to be a fairly elite group in the tech and media worlds. TechMeme visitors that click on a sponsor’s blog link will undoubtedly read what the sponsor has to say and might even interact by leaving a comment or signing up for an RSS or email subscription.
Nice guy that he is, Gabe has suggested on his own blog that a simple plug-in could be developed for WordPress or MT that does the same thing for other bloggers or sites out there. I know how hard it is to live on fumes in order to build a business and I know how tremendously difficult it is to come up with a truly new idea. Gabe has done both and he’s willing to let others benefit from his hard work and inspiration. I hope he makes a fortune.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:44 AM | Print | Comments (2)The New York Times’ Miguel Helft casts a spotlight today on Diggnation, the geek-oriented web video show produced by Revision3, an Internet video start-up founded by Digg’s Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose. Although Revision3’s biggest product is Diggnation, a niche video show (two geeks, one of whom is Kevin Rose, sitting around drinking beer and waxing forth on top Digg stories), it apparently has big ideas and $1 million in venture capital with which to pursue them.
It is trying to capitalize on the rapid growth of Internet video, and its founders hope that their programming formula, a hybrid of the polished shows created for the networks and the amateur videos that populate sites like YouTube, will be the path to commercial success in this medium.
Revision3’s Adelson claims that each episode of Diggnation is downloaded 250,000 times and that all Revision3 shows are downloaded 1.5 million times per month. That’s downloads and not necessarily number of times viewed, but that’s not bad particularly given what must be incredibly low costs of producing the show — the main studio is Rose’s San Francisco walk-up apartment.
Even the commercials shown on Diggnation are cheap. Rose and his co-host Alex Albrecht basically get around to mentioning sponsors in their bull sessions and sponsors seem to be lining up. Diggnation is generating revenue of $50,000 to $100,000 per month and most of that’s got to be profit.
The article suggests that Diggnation and other successful niche shows won’t be able to take on the big guys because of their narrow markets. But, who cares? Revision3 is already profitable. If it sticks to its low-cost and high-value appeal (young, smart and probably soon-to-be-rich techies), it’s bound to grow and make even more money.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:15 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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