Bill Cammack

Having now placed videos on YouTube, Google Video, Revver, Brightcove, Blip, and Myspace… as well as hosting video on my own site and feeding my podcast to iTunes…..

I’ve come to the conclusion that marketing is more important than location. I purposely didn’t publicize any of the videos that I posted in order to see what would happen on each site. YouTube continues to get the most random hits, but that’s probably because they have the most viewers that are searching for random topics. MySpace had a slowly rising number of views, probably for the same reason.

A couple of the sites (I forget which, at this point) only count your video as a “view” if someone watches the whole thing. That’s pretty useless for the types of videos that I had posted, because mine have beginnings and ends. It’s clear that the video is over before it’s actually over, so there’s no real reason to go all the way to the end. That’s because I made the clips as mini-shows and not viral video. They’re supposed to take the viewer through a complete entry into and exit from the world of ReelSolid. That format’s going to be changed for my next show, which I’m working on right now.

As far as revenue-sharing, that’s all well and good IF you’re making videos that people are going to want to watch over and over, like the one where the guy gets his foot caught in the rope swing and gets bashed into the stone wall like Wile E. Coyote. :D THAT’S viral video. That’s video that someone watches 20 times, then tells 20 of their friends to watch 20 times, then watches another 20 times the next day and so on and so on. If you’re not making those kind of videos, the ROI is just about nothing. I suppose you could say that if your “I” is nothing, then you have nothing to lose by putting something on Revver or Brightcove. Some people litter those sites with tons of very short videos and get a lot of hits and make money from them… kudos! :)

Ultimately, I like serving my own videos. I haven’t been impressed with the playback from other services, but that might be because I’m on an older computer and those sites are opimized for dual-core-blah-blah-blah.

My next show is going to be a form of videoblog, so I’ll be changing the site… AGAIN, and moving videos to blip.tv. One of the reasons for this is that Revver and Brightcove are clearly viral video sites, and that’s what they specialize in. Blip’s more geared towards videoblogging, so it seems more ‘natural’ to have a presence there than the other sites. I might make viral versions of the shows, and that would be fine for me to have on these quick-hit sites, but for now, I’m going to focus on the actual content and placing it where I feel it’s part of a community instead of somewhere I tossed it to see what would happen.