Helmsley Media

I came across this video on JohnChow.com recently (I have embedded the video below), and thought that I would write a post about the business model surrounding the This Week In Tech podcast, but then I looked a little further into the video hosting platform that the video uses, and I got really excited. As I dug deeper into Livestream and the service that they are providing, I saw a future for online media that I really, really like.

While not necessary for all video online, there is a definite lacking of good live video content. For things like sports, or live events, having streaming video is important to a lot of viewers who won’t really care to watch after they know the outcome of the event. Livestream is an excellent service for hosting, and for mixing live video. Imagine being able to run your own cable tv channel without spending a quarter of a billion dollars! Your video can be made available on their website, or you can make it privately available only on your website where you could hide it behind a pay wall if you decided to do so. This means niche markets that were previously unservable do to their small size, can now be served profitably.

Within the video Leo Laporte talks about his experience in the traditional broadcast media world, working as a tv host for a number of different canceled shows, and channels. The point he makes that is the most important for all of this is the ability to target your audience so precisely with the tools available to us now. Previously you were paying $50CPM when only a small majority of that audience was who you really wanted to target, but now he charges a $70CPM and provides his advertisers with an absolutely laser targeted audience. Just imagine the number of different niche markets this could be applied to. I will admit that yes, creating a show that caters to tech enthusiasts is going to do very well online, but this could be repeated for several under served markets, just don’t expect to get $70CPM!

Twit.tv however does not use Livestream’s service, they use something called BitGravity, which from the looks of it provides a similar service, but does not give as much information on their website regarding how they work exactly. Livestream seems like it is geared towards a broader market with their free service, whereas BitGravity from what I can make of it, seems geared towards the higher end producers.

The next step necessary for online media is to start providing more high quality content. Of course silly YouTube videos are fun, and they get a lot of views, they don’t have the same power over users like high quality content about stuff their interested in does. If you are a badminton fan, like I am, you know that there is very little available for us. No cable channel, limited broadcast coverage (none if you live in the Americas), and not much online either. If someone were to produce half decent quality video content online for badminton fans, they would dominate the market. They would be able to aggregate all of the world’s badminton fans to their website, and not the people who just kinda like it, but the hardcore fans who will buy the stuff you try to sell them. Tools like Livestream has provided will make this so much easier for us content producers to start providing higher quality live and on-demand video.

There are of course some issues I’ve seen with Livestream. The most obvious is the quality of some of the streams. I was excited to see a tennis channel, but was immediately disappointed by both the streaming quality, and the production quality. These are issues that will be sorted out over time as bandwidth improves and as the producers learn how to create better quality productions, however something that really concerns me is the idea of relying so heavily in a start up company. If a company like Amazon, or Akamai was running this service, I wouldn’t be quite as hesitant to sign on, but with a new company like this the concern is that they won’t be around as long as you are, and then what are you going to do when you have built a business that relies on this service.

In spite of the aforementioned concerns, I would bet money on this service, and I probably will. The possibilities that are being presented to us with new services like this are very exciting. The clutter of new media is starting to take us in a direction that seems to be making some sense, and should make traditional media companies more and more nervous. Check out the video below, Leo Laporte is definitely something of a trailblazer in this new media world.

As I have studied email newsletter marketing further, and have learned about the concept of taking your time to develop a relationship with your readers, I have also begun to better understand the business models of several new media companies. Yesterday on the Facebook blog, Mark Zuckerberg announced that they have surpassed the 300 million user mark, and that they are now cash flow positive. In this story from Yahoo News, this cash flow positive metric does not include any cash from private investments, which means they are now proving their viability as a business model. For a long time there were criticisms that their business model would never reach this point, and that eventually it would all come crashing down around them. So what is their business model exactly? Are people really buying this many “gifts” for their friends?

A Look At The Facebook Layout

Taking a look at the Facebook home screen (I’ve removed personal information pertaining to my friends) you’ll notice that they actually do nothing that immediately makes them any money here. No advertisements whatsoever. Everything on this page is about making your connections within the site deeper. They want your online social life as it were, to be dominated by your Facebook interactions. The whole page is designed to get you clicking on links pertaining to your friends’ activities, the pictures and videos they post, and their status updates.

Advertising Placements

Further into the site we start seeing ads on the right hand side of the content. The same ad placement applies across most of the site, whether it is on profile pages, or photos/videos that you or your friends have posted on the site. You’ll notice in the image below that some of the ads are not in English, this is because I am currently in Denmark, and as a result I am being targeted as though I were living in Denmark.

Advertising Targeting

Advertising in a newspaper, or on a billboard we can get broad exposure, which is great for branding purposes (I suppose), but it’s not very effective at driving sales immediately. With Facebook and other social networking sites we have the ability to do some very specific targeting that traditional forms of media cannot. Let’s say for example that we ran an ecommerce store selling camping equipment and we wanted to drive more sales to our website. Using Facebook we can target people based on their geographic location, age, gender, and many more characteristics. In the picture below we have made a sample advertisement targeting people living in the United States, over the age of 21, who have listed “camping” as one of their interests. The result of this targeting is a pool of 1,725,280 Facebook users for us to target.

Advertising Pricing

After targeting our prospective customers, and receiving numbers as to how many there are on the network, we can get some approximate price quotes from Facebook. This is automated, and only an approximate. You will never pay more than your max bid, or max daily budget, but if people are clicking on your add more often then your per click cost will go down. You can also target based on number of exposures which is apparently a great way to keep your costs down if you know how to get your click thru rates up.

This model is quite similar to Google’s Adwords advertising service, but instead of targeting based on people’s search terms, you are targeting based on very specific demographics (including interests). In fact if you read up on Google’s development and their history it is strikingly similar to Facebook’s. They took quite some time to build up their Adwords service, and to get to the point where they are now. They are making money through long tail economics. Because it is so simple for them to make money on the narrowest of niche’s at essentially no extra cost, they can become a viable advertising tool for almost any business regardless of scale. What makes Google and Facebook so valuable is that they make other businesses lots of money, even though they don’t directly charge 99.99% of people who use their website and services. Give your users increasingly more reasons to stay on your site, and interact with the different elements within it, and you increase the lifetime value of each visitor/user/customer.