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March 2, 2006
Nothing Stupid About This
I met earlier this week with Erik Hawkins, CEO of PureVideo, owners of StupidVideos. Any of you with teen age kids have been exposed to email snippets sent along from this site, including a cat getting caught in a ceiling fan or the immortal Numa Numa song now in its Sock Puppet version. Don't laugh, folks, this site is now the fifth largest streaming content destination on the Web, streaming 50-80 million videos per month and 3.7 million visitors each month. The average video clip is 24 seconds. There is plenty of discussion about each video, akin to an Amazon book review. The audience is largely boys/men ages 12-24. Seventy five percent of the audience is in the US, with the balance split between the UK and Scandinavia.
The next generation of the site will offer a community feature, in short a friends network. There will also be collaborative filtering, where you are automatically fed videos that are similar to those you have selected (again think Amazon book recommendations). Content will be able to be ported to Windows Mobile, generic MPEG 4, PSP and other mobile devices.
How does he make money? Advertising is the number one source, with one ad played for every seven videos viewed (not by viewer choice by the way--I got a Budweiser ad). He hopes over time that Subscription fees, generated by revenue splits with mobile providers, will become a more important source of funds.
So why does any of this matter for those of us in PR? And what should we be doing about it?
1) Note that the tendency of these new media is still to rely on Advertising for the bulk of revenues. Yes it has to be a different form of advertising, more hip, less sales oriented but it is still Advertising.
2) This network is relying completely on consumer generated video. This underlies Yahoo's decision to reduce the amount of money going to proprietary self generated content because it is expensive and not what the audience wants.
3) As communities are self segmented, with niche audiences, there is a need to organize meta communities which bridge across the divides. My new colleague, Steve Rubel, suggests that meta-tags can help to create community pull.
4) Stupid does not mean anti-corporate. Note that the #1 rated video on the site is the Ebay song. Companies that get it can have a bit of a sense of humor, loosen up the automatic control device on the corporate psyche, and get huge return in a hard to reach audience skeptical of corporations.
5) There are opportunities to work with companies like PureVideo on cooperative PR oriented ventures. Let's assume you work with a car company. Why not suggest to the stupidvideos.com audience for a Halloween promotion that a $10,000 award awaits the producer of the best stupid video on pumpkins and cars. The possibility of fame tied to money is powerful.
6) Why not reinvent product placement by giving avid community members samples David Weinberger's immortal word swag so they can make videos that help to co create the brand reputation prior to brand launch?
Let's commit to taking a few risks so that we can achieve a real land grab from the advertising guys. We cannot self-segregate and say that we only care about serious content and reputation management. We can be the future stewards of brands but only if we establish these powerful emotional connections with passionate consumers who will radiate the message to their peers.
Several Edelman bloggers have banded together and recently launch talkshop to facilitate discussions across our own network about building brands through word-of-mouth.
Posted by Edelman at March 2, 2006 2:35 PM |
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Comments
"Let's commit to taking a few risks so that we can achieve a real land grab from the advertising guys. We cannot self-segregate and say that we only care about serious content and reputation management. We can be the future stewards of brands but only if we establish these powerful emotional connections with passionate consumers who will radiate the message to their peers."
You are writing my company's future. I am deeply grateful. Thank you.
Regards,
Brian Connolly
President
Furthermore, Inc.
http://WePublishing.com
Posted by: Brian Connolly at March 2, 2006 9:16 PM
Someone's finally figured it out: what worked on America's Funniest Videos, works on the Web.
Posted by: Mike at March 3, 2006 4:15 AM
Just to respond
Only data I have was from the single site stupidvideos.com Which was scandinavia at 12% of users Will have more from Technorati in June
Posted by: Richard Edelman at March 3, 2006 11:43 AM
BC good man keep pushing it
Posted by: Richard Edelman at March 3, 2006 11:44 AM
Dear Richard Edelman,
Your latest blog on stupidvideos.com got me to thinking and I thought about http://www.bigchampagne.com/. This firm tracks all the peer to peer downloads of music from all the popular file sharing sites and conveys that data back to record labels and broadcasting companies in regards to what consumers are really listening to. I thought how can PR utilize this concept of file sharing since this is a type of word of mouth communication between users all over the world. Companies could release digital products on these sites or new specialized sites. Any number of products like XBOX video game demos or even digital coupons could be traded on a particular site. Multiple product and product lines could be evaluated at once. In the same manner record labels can determine what song should be the next single for release companies could gain insight on their products potential success or failure in the market place broken down by demographics and regions.
Keep Pioneering ,
Djuan Smith
Posted by: Djuan Smith at March 7, 2006 9:55 AM