Tom Gardner Was Right About Online Video, But .TV Is Not the Way
Online video and streaming is huge. YouTube.com was the ideal purchase for Google at the time the acquisition was made, and the timing was right. The price tag was staggering, but the number of users and contributors is most enviable for any domainer looking for better traffic numbers.
In 2006, during the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. East show in Hollywood, Florida, Tom Gardner of the Motley Fool stated he believed that online video such a phenomenon there would simply not be a way for anyone to full grasp the significance of it. He predicted .tv would become the .com equivalent for the online video world. So far, he was correct in part and mistaken in part, or so the acid test seems to show.
There are some companies that are using the .tv TLD and doing well with it. Ustream.tv is one example, but companies that are purveying online video and doing very well with it are bypassing the .tv TLD in favor of the all- powerful .com extension.
I have been watching video on Hulu.com and Veoh.com for well over 14 months. It is just better for me to watch John Stewart’s Daily Show when I want to watch it, not when the cable schedule says I have to be there. Of course, there are commercials. There are innumerable users who do not own a DVR and have no plans to acquire one. There are cable users who will not pay for the DVR upgrade. VHS is history.
Companies like Fox Broadcasting are posting current episodes of their most popular shows on Hulu.com, which gets 1,300,000 visits per day. CBS is running the programming at Veoh.com and generating 3,100,000 visits per day. Cartoon Network posts its video at AdultSwim.com and generates 140,000 visits per day.
If you want to watch an old Battlestar Galactica episode, followed by a new Battlestar Galactica, slide over to Hulu.com. If you want the old Star Trek, without buying the entire series from Amazon.com, head over to Veoh.com.
If you want to buy the shows, well go to your iTunes and head to the iTunes store. You can play the video on the larger screen – not six inches from your computer screen – using Apple TV.
One of our domains, a small site called turnpikeinfo.com (I have written about that domain previously), was generating a small amount of traffic until we decided to use my broadcasting experience to implement morning and afternoon traffic reports. We record them so users can play them on demand, not have to wait for “traffic and weather together on the 3’s” on the local news station. The text is updated continually, with new video every 15 minutes.
The result has been fabulous, to coin another “Dan’s” term. The trend line, prior to the video, looked like a flat-lined patient, and then the video went online. After only 20 days, the traffic numbers have tripled. 80% of visitors are now bookmarking the site. Wait until we put the traffic cameras up to show the actual roads!
People love video. That is why Google wanted YouTube so badly. And now you can add YouTube to your Ad Sense account to generate income from YouTube video content, albeit only a few pennies a day at the moment. Anyone with an Ad Sense account or any moxie in the industry knows this, and it perfectly underscores what some of us already suspected and implemented.
Just look at Chef Patrick. I am stunned nobody thought to do a video blog before now. Why read when you can see and hear someone?
Rodan Media | 1317 South Andrews Avenue | Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33316 | www.RodanMedia.net
The idea of video is certainly not new. Forbes, Business Week, CNN and MSNBC and a host of other large news and information domains long ago implemented video on their sites. It is the reason the sites are so attractive. The CNN domain attracted nearly 500,000 users during political town hall last fall. They were the kind of users you and I want: young, hip, forward-thinking web users who do not give a damn about reading a news letter. In other cases, video is a superb addition to a variety of mixed content.
They spend money online, they live online. When I grew up, we lived in front of the television. When my grandparents grew up, they lived in front of the radio. I have produced content for print, radio, television and online, and bringing all those mediums together in a single location is the ideal way to immediately produce higher numbers on a domain that already has an inherent value. Why else would Google be purveying YouTube for Ad Sense?
Tom Gardner was right about video online. He just missed the mark about .tv. Oh well, the video part is the most important, anyway. If you missed his keynote address during the show, it may be worth it to order a copy from the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. website at http://www.targetedtraffic.com/NewSite2009/speakers/keynoteWall.htm.
Rodan Media | 1317 South Andrews Avenue | Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33316 | www.RodanMedia.net