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MillimeterProfitability on the Web
Mar 5, 2010 5:01 PM, By Trevor Boyer
On his Chicago Sun Times-hosted website this week, Roger Ebert, the don of American movie critics, bemoaned the site's lack of profitability. If Ebert and the Sun Times haven't figured out a way to turn a profit hosting about 10,000 movie reviews by a world-renowned critic, what chance do the rest of us have? More unsettling is the fact that from a bandwidth perspective, Ebert's site is far from gluttonous. There's no Flash intro. The photos are relatively small. Video is embedded and hosted elsewhere, on sites such as YouTube.
Ebert's solution, at least for now, is the introduction of The Ebert Club, a special level of access to the website that will offer "value-adds" such as special members-only discussion threads, exclusive alerts in your inbox, and so forth. Ebert acknowledges that this sort of thing has been tried before, with limited success. (Remember the New York Times' attempt at a paywall, known as TimesSelect?)
This is all by way of speculating on the long-term profitability of video on the Web. For video producers, it's certainly a topic worth your attention. If there's a "video bubble" (or more accurately a "bandwidth bubble") on the Web, it's helpful to seek out a set of best business practices for your own sites or, more realistically, those video sites with whom you partner to host your work (the Vimeos and YouTubes of the world). Ebert is convinced there is no model as of yet, but there might just be a few ways to make a buck.
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Granted, it's somewhat disheartening to see that hope materialize in the form of the aforementioned YouTube, which is, of course, owned by Internet Goliath Google. I remember reading a couple of years ago that YouTube was due for a crash, as the site's business model depended on more and more users uploading more and more gigabytes of video to the site, leading to higher and higher bandwidth costs. Well, the corollaries to Moore's Law that speculate about cheapening bandwidth and storage costs are not to be ignored, nor are Google's almost singularly successful efforts to monetize the entire Web. The upshot is that YouTube might just be poised to turn a profit this year. Now, this comes after the best minds in the business have spent several years devising sponsorships and marketing partnerships to turn that profitability dream into a reality. That's a lot of caveats.
As for the rest of us? Monetizing video is still quite a jungle out there, as Ebert can attest. But there's hope.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.