Ask your audience to ‘You Tube’ you
Steve Safran August 9th, 2006
Too many media companies still see YouTube as the enemy instead of the terrific promotional tool that it is. Encourage your audience to put news stories of yours they think are interesting on YouTube. Have a contest. Promote it. You will empower the people who like your stories the most to spread the word. You will get them involved in the story-telling process, and you will build their loyalty.
26 Comments Add your own
1. thewashingtonchannel | August 9th, 2006 at 7:45 am
gotta be kidding.
2. thomas | August 9th, 2006 at 8:31 am
great idea, except for the fact that you will not make any ad revenue off video played on youtube while they are getting your hits.
3. Don | August 9th, 2006 at 8:35 am
Yeah, I try and be as progressive and open-minded as possible, but thomas is right — this is a quick way to lose our pre-roll revenue with no suitable replacement.
Would a good clip get played a TON on YouTube? Sure - but to a bunch of people out of market who don’t really matter in a station’s area of focus.
4. Safran | August 9th, 2006 at 8:35 am
Thomas & Don: We have to think beyond the ad revenue from any given clip to the revenue of the organization as a whole. The clip acts as a promotional vehicle for the station and the site. And the videos would get incremental added views. You are going to get views you would not have had in the first place. People are not going to forsake your site for YouTube - it is simply going to be another way to promote your organization. All of your video will not be going up there. Just a few stories. At most.
The more people that see and like your stuff on YouTube, the more likely they are to come to your site and watch more videos with ads. Let your best customers spread the word and be YOUR advertisers. Word of mouth is the best advertising and will build your audience and value.
5. Cory | August 9th, 2006 at 8:47 am
Ah, I love when Safran frags the LR audience with a bold idea.
My concern would be opening the floodgates. By encouraging people to post a few clips, they might just go ahead and post ALL your good clips, and you have no legal recourse to have YouTube pull them because you gave everyone a green light.
What if broadcasters themselves pick a few clips here and there and post them to YouTube? That way we can control how many clips are posted, and we retain legal precedence.
Meanwhile, we should by copying YouTube\’s functionality on our own sites ASAP.
6. thedetroitchannel | August 9th, 2006 at 9:02 am
safran proposing that local sites have stories that are relevant/valuable out of market?
“gotta be kidding”.
stations within the same station group rarely link to each other let alone giving away the store to upstarts.
why not try that first.
while i applaud mr. safran’s move in this direction (and think don will make a fine replacement for safran’s old position), didn’t we build our relationship on this exact point/counterpoint???
7. Nuno | August 9th, 2006 at 10:34 am
Maybe not every company should do this, but news or weather channels should definitively do this. They make their content, they just don’t broadcast it. So less problems with announcers.
On the other side, Internet users and mostly Internet power users eat the press more than TV screeners could do. It would be great to get a short 5-minute new catch-up in a RSS feed for example.
8. Howard Owens | August 9th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Revenue?
What about audience?
I can guarantee that all those objecting to this idea have sites with insufficient audience share numbers. They may think their audience share is OK, but it’s a rare local news site that is doing well, especially one not associated with a newspaper.
Post your video and tag it appropriately.
And do the reverse, pull a YouTube feed into your site of appropreiately tagged content.
9. Howard Owens | August 9th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Not only that — why wait for your audience to post your video to YouTube … post it yourself.
10. Steve Safran | August 9th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Howard - brilliant. Pull in relevant YouTube content and post on your site. Love it. Thanks for adding to the idea.
11. thomas | August 9th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
In my opinion, posting your content on youtube will bring negligible traffic to your site, if any. Not to contradict my earlier post but I feel that posting video on youtube will have very little affect on your sites traffic and ad revenues; and posting youtube video on your own site will also bring you marginal gain. The only benefit that I see in the immediate future for posting external content on your page would be to lengthen the time users spend on your page (viewing someone else’s content). Just my two cents.
12. Seth Gitner | August 9th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
EXACTLY! You got it right. we are using youtube to market our webcast — we now upload our outtakes and bloopers hoping to get youtube viewers over to our newspaper webcast at http://timescast.roanoke.com
check out the bloopers:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bf5dD2EqHcM
13. Nuno | August 10th, 2006 at 2:29 am
Steve: Pulling your content into YouTube is just like pulling it into Digg. It should be used wisely. While it could bring some exposure to your content, it doesn’t foster readers loyalty.
Thomas: YouTube gives exposure to your brand. For instance, take an brand, CakeTV. Incognito. The more you’ll see CakeTV.com cooking video classes, the more the brand is printing into your brain. And it’s done right, the next time you want to look for a cake recipe, you’ll jump on CakeTV.com.
14. Chris Rooney | August 10th, 2006 at 5:33 am
We’re covering a high-profile murder trial right now that had it’s venue changed to another market. The only video allowed in the courtroom was of the closings yesterday — but the judge declared that video cannot be used on the Internet!
So we’re not allowed to use it on our site. But my question is, what happens if Joe Beercan records it at home and throws it on YouTube?
15. Dave | August 10th, 2006 at 5:52 am
We’ve been looking into it for an upcoming promotional campaign but there’s a ton of LEGAL hoops to go through.
A great compromise is to put the video on your site, promote your site, and then load it on youtube (with a promotional / graphical element promoting your site over the video).
The key is… don’t promote youtube. Use youtube, milk it, but don’t mention it. Don’t tell your audience to go to youtube. If they know about it, they probably already go there looking for video and it’s a great way to try and bring people back to your site.
16. thedetroitchannel | August 10th, 2006 at 6:25 am
evidently dave’s approach is also jay’s new approach; anyone see the video clip last night of the kid taking batting practice with a bucket on his head?
never once mentioned “youknowtube”.
17. Steve Safran | August 10th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Seth: Outstanding! Feel free to send me the link any time you guys post stuff like that. My only objection? Don’t bleep out the swears. Stick it to the FCC!
Chris: What an odd ruling by the judge. If there is copy on the article, would you kindly forward it to me? steve@necn.com , as always. There’s just no way a judge could control people from posting a televised proceeding on the weeb. Naive.
Dave: I’m interested in hearing about the legal hoops. I like your compromise “use it but don’t say you’re using it” as a first step” plan
Thanks to everyone for the positive input.
18. Thaddaeus D Toppin-Holder | September 14th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
Hi guys im now discovering you tube,it seem’s interesting.You may send me any clips you wish,bye now.
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