Posts tagged advertisements

The Monetization Conundrum Of Online Video – Part 2

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8 years
by in Recent Posts, TOTWs

This article is the second in a two-part series on the advertisement conundrum of online video. If you haven’t already, check out the first article in the series HERE.

In the previous article in this series, I explained the current monetization situation in online video, and how the $2 CPM ($2 per thousand views) is, as of right now, the industry standard ad rate. As I have begun to learn, along with many others in the field of online video, the $2 CPM is neither a sustainable nor beneficial model to anyone but the companies paying for the ads. There are a few reasons why the current $2 CPM standard simply doesn’t work. First of all, it’s just too low; with only $2 per thousand views, YouTubers have to grow a very large audience, which is incredibly hard in the current YouTube landscape. There has been an explosion of creators and content using YouTube in recent years, and as of now, it’s very unlikely that any one small YouTuber will hit it big, simply because of the enormity of the amount of channels out there in the first place. Secondly, even once you factor in the $2 ad rate, YouTube takes away 45% of that revenue for their own profit. While it isn’t surprising that YouTube has a “platform tax”, after all, Google is a publicly-traded company whose investors care about the bottom line. Yet 45% can be a big hit to smaller and larger channels, and compares unfavorably to Apple’s already high 30% revenue share for App Store products. But my suspicion is that this won’t be the part of the equation that will be changing, as YouTube has in the past addressed this issue and said nothing about reducing their share of the monetization.

Finally, the $2 CPM restricts the production quality of growing YouTubers who are forced to produce cheaper content more often to make ends meet. YouTube has addressed this as well, and their counterargument is that YouTube isn’t and wasn’t built to be the main source of revenue for a channel, and only really works in that capacity for smaller channels. And it’s true, YouTube is good at growing brands and personalities, although that attribute is shrinking because of the low odds of being successful.

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Hank Green, a YouTuber, entrepreneurs, and author of a great article on Medium on the topic of the $2 CPM.

Basically, they’re suggesting that you as a YouTuber derive your main or secondary source of income elsewhere, perhaps through sponsorships and other marketing deals. And while many channels do that type of marketing, at some point creators just don’t want to surrender their editorial control in exchange for money, most likely part of the reason they came to the platform in the first place. Hank Green, in his Medium article on the subject of the $2 CPM, posed the “just ask” strategy, i.e., just ask your audience for money. You might think that strategy would never work, but the website Patreon is built directly off of that strategy, and it has grown substantially and has become a great source of money for many creators.

Creators tell their audience that they would like, in exchange for some small perks, those who can afford and would like to, “pledge” to give them a certain amount of money regularly, commonly every video or every month. This allows creators to realize another source of income, without such a prominent middle man, and simply because the viewers like their content and want to creator to make more and better videos.

You may be skeptical that this strategy would work, but take Crash Course, which earns $29,000/month directly through Patreon, and they aren’t the only ones. As Hank Green wrote in his article, giving to creators because you like their work and want them to make better content doesn’t encourage more lower quality videos but “it encourages a different kind of content. Instead of challenging creators to figure out how to get the highest view counts, creators have to puzzle out how to make the most valuable content.”

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Even still, we can’t expect Patreon to completely cover a creator’s budget, as even for large YouTubers only a small percentage of your audience is willing and able to pay on a regular basis. Ads certainly won’t cover the costs, and while sponsorships hopefully would fill the rest of the budget, for many creators you still end up on the short side of where you want to be. YouTube has only been around for a little more than 10 years, but it’s still on a path to realizing its full potential in terms of influence and popularity. Hank Green feels that the rough transition from TV to online video may actually be a good thing for creators:

“Part of me is actually glad that advertisers have been so slow to adapt. It’s made it clear to a lot of people that advertisements aren’t the only (or even the best) way to monetize content… What that leads to isn’t just new business models — we’re seeing new creation models, new audience relationships, and new kinds of content. With a couple of simple new tools, the economic arrow is suddenly pointing in new directions, and I’m very excited to see where it leads us.”

We’ll see where the ad conundrum of YouTube takes us, and if it can be solved in the near future. Right now, YouTube ad rates are valued at 32x less than TV and 250x less than film, figures that I doubt anyone who is familiar with the platform would agree with. Money guides everything, even an open platform with a negligibly small barrier-to-entry. In my opinion, despite all the constraints that are financially-cornering creators, the community as a whole will get past this issue and grow a thriving, profitable, and revolutionary (well, more revolutionary than it already has been) platform for creators and audiences of all kinds.

The Monetization Conundrum Of Online Video

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8 years
by in TOTWs

With the possible exception of the Super Bowl, I’d bet it’s safe to say that nobody likes ads. Whether before a movie or video, in commercial breaks during television programs, or in the middle of your favorite podcast, nobody really enjoys being told to buy this product or use this service (often in a cringe-worth way) while they are enjoying their entertainment. Yet advertisements aren’t going away anytime soon; with the larger and larger audiences their ads are reaching, companies remain willing to allocate precious dollars to get their name out in every way they can.  In the world of Internet publishing, ads have persisted as the staple of a creator’s income, despite significant shifts in the media landscape. But for online video, currently dominated by YouTube. advertisements have been a challenged revenue channel for creators hoping to earn a living.

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I love YouTube and have a massive respect for the creators who have made it their full-time occupation to publish videos on the platform. These individuals spent an incredible amount of time and effort to become popular enough just to quit their day jobs and spend their time earning a living via YouTube. The sad part is that making a living on YouTube is harder than one might think. With popular YouTubers like PewDiePie making up to $7 million per year, it might be easy to regard YouTube as an easy path to fame and riches. But really, every YouTuber with even just 5,000 subscribers have put their heart and soul into their videos. As it is, money coming from ads just isn’t enough to allow YouTubers to start making videos full-time until they become very popular, a level which many never reach.

Let’s do the math. The average personal income in the United States is roughly $30,000. The current YouTube ad rate is a $2 CPM ($2 for every thousand views). To earn even the average U.S. income, a YouTuber creating weekly videos (a common schedule) would have to average nearly 300,000 viewers per video, an average usually only met by a YouTuber with around 2 million subscribers. (this varies from channel to channel) Of course, the rate at which you create videos is key in this calculation; if you make a video every day, the average view count drops to a more plausible 40,000. Compare that to the average CPM rate for TV, which is $19 (for an average 22-minute show). With that rate, you would only have to get 30,000 views per weekly video to reach the national average – much more sustainable.

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Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, the most popular YouTuber on the platform. Last years, Felix sparked a small controversy when the public negatively reacted to his $7 million years income.

This isn’t just about YouTubers making more money because their media peers in television and film earn more. I’m not writing this out of pity for the struggling YouTubers who can’t earn a living wage yet are spending all their time trying to grow their audience. The reason the $2 CPM needs to be increased is because it simply isn’t enough to allow YouTubers to grow and make the great content we all want to watch. Take Olga Kay, a YouTuber with around 1 million subscribers across her five channels. In an article written in the New York Times, Olga talked about her hectic work schedule and about how “If we [her friends] were coming to YouTube today, it would be too hard. We couldn’t do it.”

Olga said in the article that she has made $100,000 to $130,000 every year for the last three years, which is a good income; yet she is still constantly stressed about finances, as much of that $100,000 goes straight back into her channels to pay for editors, equipment, etc. Let’s be honest: no one making twenty videos a week, almost three per day, especially with 1 million subscribers, should be that worried about finances.

This is the first part in Fast Forward’s two-part series on the YouTube’s advertisement and monetization conundrum. Stay tuned for the second article in the series over the next few days!

Super Bowl Ads – A Cultural Phenomenon

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9 years
by in Recent Posts, TOTWs

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest TV events of the year, drawing 114 million viewers from all over the world (although mostly America). Originally, the Super Bowl was just an important game, but over time it has become much more than that — the best place to launch an ad campaign. An ad paradise, you could even call it. And whether or not the commercials are good, they still gain a gigantic amount of viewership, both on live TV and online before and after the game. Thus of course they cost a whole lot of cash.

The Numbers Behind Super Bowl Ads

To be exact, 4.5 million dollars for one 30 second commercial, a ridiculous amount of money. For an average Monday Night Football 30-second ad, it’s only around $390,000 (still a heck of a lot of money). But really, how much traction do these ads get? Well, it depends on the quality of the ad. It’s pretty much guaranteed at least 100 million viewers, a ton of people reached if you’re a growing business, or any business really. But to add to that, last year’s Budweiser’s classic Clydesdale “Puppy Love” commercial, the stand-out commercial of the year, has 55 million hits on Youtube and counting. And so, the rule pretty much is: if you can get within the top 3 standout commercials, the views on Youtube, social media and online journalism/media will also be significant.

NBC isn’t losing out on this commercial boom, either. With a $4.5 million, 30-second ad cost, it is expected that NBC has made somewhere around $360 million from their ads alone. To get to that incredible number, NBC had to do some serious business: over forty-five minutes of advertisements and endorsements. Note that the amount of time the players are actually throwing the ball around in play, when they’re actually playing, is only 11 minutes. 11?! That means that 114 million people gathered together all over the country, spending an estimated $12.4 billion, making NBC $360 million from companies, and wagered $115 million in Vegas alone. Seriously, what’s wrong with society?

Commercials Online

People are so excited for the ads, rather than the game, that Dish Network released a special feature for the game, a reverse of their useful AdHop feature. If you record a show on DVR, AdHop will skip all the commercials for you so you don’t have to skip them yourself. But, for the Super Bowl, AdHop was reversed, meaning people could skip the game, and just watch the ad! No company would release a feature like that unless they thought people would use it.

Even after the Super Bowl is over, the ads still get attention. Youtube has its own “Youtube Ad-Blitz”, where you can vote on your favourite ad currently running. USA Today takes it a step further, having around 7,000 ad experts voting on each ad, and coming out with the best, the worst, and many other interesting statistics in their “Ad Meter” section of their site. And I’m sure, that for months to come, people will be emailing each other the ads they like the most.

Super Bowl ad Clash of Clans

This Year’s Ads

There were a couple of surprises in this year’s Super Bowl ads, the first being the surprising number of ads for video games, especially mobile games. There was Clash Of Clans’ funny ad, featuring Liam Neeson, which actually was pretty good, and then Game Of War and a short ad for Heroes’ Charge, both of which were really, really bad. But hey, just the fact that mobile games have enough money to spend $4.5 million on marketing is good, if only the games being advertised were better games. Maybe something like Monument Valley. That would be great.

Lastly, every Super Bowl ad year has a theme. Last year it was cute/heartwarming, and this year, well, it was depressing. With ads such as #likeagirl, and Microsoft’s ad about a child amputee, Budweiser’s Clydesdales Lost Dog ad, and then Nationwide’s terribly depressing ad Make Safe Happen, about child accidents with the catchphrase “I would have ___, but I died.” Unfortunately, this led to a lot of depressing commercial breaks, but luckily a couple of humorous ads were thrown in as well, such as Clash Of Clans’, Avocados From Mexico, Fiat, Doritos, and others. Really, what people want are either funny or visually astounding commercials, a good example of those virtues being combined is Mophie’s ad this year, which you can watch below. Hopefully, big companies will catch on, but then again, we’ll just have to wait till next year’s big game to see find out.

statistics credit: www.statista.com/topics/1264/super-bowl 
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TOTW: World Cup Fever! The Best Star Studded World Cup Ads

0
10 years
by in Recent Posts, TOTWs

There is no denying that the World Cup is the biggest sporting event of all. After all, football(soccer) is the world’s most loved sport. Sorry all you American football and basketball fans, but the World Cup blows both the Super Bowl and the NCAA Final out of the water by a order of magnitude. And, when the most people are watching, that can only mean one thing: ads. And lots of them. The Super Bowl is known for it’s great ads, but the World Cup once again destroys it’s Americanized equivalent, with better, more viewed and more expensive ads. Many sports companies (and non-sport) make incredibly star-studded ads to increase it’s overall amazement factor. In some it worked, in some it looked like they just added in the stars for the fun of it.

Neymar, Chicharito, Robin Van Persie, Gotze, Jozy Altidore, Schweinsteiger, Fabregas, Suarez, Demarcus Beasley, Sturridge, Rio Ferdinand, Baracry Sanga, Thierry Henry, Cristiano Ronaldo, Rooney, Ibrahimovic, Higuain,  Eden Hazard, Pique, David Luiz, Iniesta, Pirlo, Tim Howard, Thibaut Courtois, Thiago Silva, Landon Donovan, Messi, Aguero, Ozil and more are featured in all these ads combined. Even Nicki Minaj, Dr. Dre, Lebron James and Michael Jordan are in some. If you know anything about soccer, you know that every single one of those players I just mentioned are in the top 50 players right now. So this must have cost a fortune. If they spent this big amount of money on one ad, you would think it would be amazing right? Well, some are and some aren’t, so I’ll let you decide. Here are the best of them:

Nike’s Last Game


Out of all the World Cup ads, this one is the best done. The animated short released by Nike depicts what would happen if clones of the best soccer players took the place of the original players because of their consistency. But, lead by the old Ronaldo, the original best 11 players from this world cup take on the clones. They really nailed the players personalities and bodies, creating a fun little short, promoting their new slogan, Risk Everything.

Beats’ The Game Before The Game


The newly acquired company Beats really went all out for this world cup. Their ad, chocked full of world-class players, is mainly featured by Neymar, and his father, who is saying dramatic and inspirational words of encouragement in between shots of the best players on the planet washing their socks and listening to Beats. A little overboard, but I have to say, the whole this is very dramatic.

EA’s Always In The Game

EA went for humor for their ad, and they nailed it. Perfectly. A a promotion for their World Cup version of Fifa 14, they had Landon Donovan, who made headlines for not being picked for the USA world cup squad, winning the world cup on Fifa. That’s funny, by itself, but they topped it off by Landon muttering under his breath, “I’m not going to brazil.” in the classic chant sung by fans. Well played EA, well played.

Nike’s Winner Stays


Another ad by Nike, but this time featuring a bunch of real, top-class players. Well, not at the start. The idea of this ad is that a group if 11 on 11 ametuer players, when they decide that the winner stays, can suddenly turn into players like Neymar and Pique whenever they feel like it. Handy. The camera work in this ad is great, having foreground people walk right in from of the camera so the young player can be switched out by Rooney or Eden Hazard. Very creative, and very well done.

McDonald’s Gol!


Like usual, McDonald’s made an ad that really had nothing to do with their chain of fast food resturants. Basically, a bunch of people were doing trick shots and fancy juggling in public. Sure, it may be fun and entertaining, but the only way you know it’s for McDonald’s is the big M logo at the end. Sigh.

Adidas’ The Dream


For some reason, Adidas decides that their commerical would be another star studded ad about Messi having an nighmare/dream thing about all the other players and whether he trained hard enough. Again, like Beats’ ad, it may be dramatic, but not a great way to depict the party attitude of the Brazilian stadiums and jumbotron gatherings.

 

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