Beyond Viral: How to Attract Customers, Promote Your Brand, and Make Money with Online Video

Chapter 14. Can You Make Money from Online Video?

In this chapter, you will learn:

• Why most video start-ups have failed.

• How to make money via online video if you're willing to invest time.

• What video content will engage your audience instead of making them feel "pitched."

• About another attempt at the Web-studio model that may work—or not.

Reality Check

There have been countless companies attempting to cash in on the growth of online video, and most have failed. When I began covering the space in 2005, there were dozens of online-video sites, and several that shared revenue with creators (Revver.com and Metacafe.com as the pioneers). As with almost any other industry, a dominant player emerged in YouTube, and most of the other web sites eventually folded. The market can sustain multiple search engines, but we tend to prefer one or two primary video or social-media sites. The video sites were reaching people, but the advertising revenue dollars to subsidize them has been slow to migrate from television and print.

Likewise, there have been countless attempts at creating a Web studio, which would produce online-video series with the funding of investors or sponsors. However investors are weary given online video's unproven economics—most consumers expect it for free, and advertisers are still "dipping their toes" in the medium. Even worse, many of the potential Web studios expect advertisers to bankroll a show that has not yet found an audience online.

The fundamental problem with the new ...