CrossmediaTO: Web Video- How Are People Making Money From YouTube?

We’ve all uploaded videos to YouTube, perhaps with better content than what’s already on the Internet these days, but for one reason or another, it never caught momentum.

Maybe you decided to videotape your cat like a lot of people out there. Well, in 1955, according to the legendary Guy Kawasaki, people were doing that, so that’s really not too original, not to mention creepy.  

At CrossMediaTO hosted by Gavin McGarry and Jumpwire Media Wednesday night, Guy Gal and Corey Vidal showcased several unique ideas that caught fire—in particular Epic Meal Time and Vidal’s Star Wars’ capella tribute medley.

Gal, who runs a digital video agency known as BizMedia that manages Epic Meal Time, says that YouTube is a marathon in a sprint, and despite 33% of the online audience going to YouTube first to search for something online, most YouTube videos are in fact watched outside of YouTube.

Unlike most media companies, where they own the content that you produce for them, once you upload your video on to YouTube, you own the content. That has serious ramifications if your video becomes popular, and was actually one of the major reasons the much documented 24 year old Kai Nagata quit his job as Quebec City’s Bureau Chief at CTV.

With owned content, Epic Meal Time was able to creatively make money by licensing their content to Revision3, use affiliate advertising, integrate product brand placements, use in video ads, and sell merchandise among other creative ideas.

Vidal also sells merchandise, but says that he made additional money from his videos by working with entertainment companies to channel his traffic to other videos, since the Star Wars video is the second most watched video of all-time in Canada, among other means.

However, Vidal decided to start his own business called ApprenticeA Productions in January 2011, while living with his team in a house in the Toronto suburb of Burlington.

While Vidal admitted that what he did to vault his videos to fame probably wouldn’t work today as YouTube continues to change and gets harder to become successful at, Gal mentioned some future trends to look out for.

Among those future trends include e-commerce being built in, point of purchase, paid subscriptions, brands as broadcasters, companies investing further in popular content, and buying media to own existing media properties created by legendary YouTubers.

Sure, it’s easy to upload a video to YouTube- but it’s hard to make money- you only make around a thousand dollars per million views, unless you’re so popular- in that case YouTube might just give you a dirty deal.

Glassbox TV

As many of today’s online stars are Millenials like Corey Vidal,  Glassbox TV’s Simon Foster said that he’s throwing tons of responsibility at young people in managing his mid-sized media company which has already been moderately successful with video networks Bite (everything funny) , Aux (everything music) and Travel + Escape (everything travel).

His reason for starting Glassbox?

Foster saw that large media players had swallowed up much of the mid-sized competition, so he believed there was room for a mid-sized media company in Canada, and especially an online one.

It’s important that large media corporations don’t own everything. 

Last But Not Least- TabbleDabble

TabbleDabble has provided tablet-based marketing solutions at events for brands like FujiFilm, KFC, Canadian Tire, Adidas and more, to attract, connect and know your market.

At CrossmediaTO, we were subjected to a short survey using tablets which profiled the audience during a presentation by Tishan Mills and Ravin Shah. It allowed us to see that of the CrossmediaTO attendees, most were from the Motion industry, but also a high percentage from the Marketing industry, who was hiring, who owned an iPad versus a Blackberry Playbook, and so on and so forth.

Shah and Mills, the co-founders of the company, say that pricing varies for this to be done at your event, depending on how many people you’re surveying and how many tablets you need to use.

The company uses the Quicktap Survey app, that with the company’s brain trust, allows you to deliver an innovate survey solution at an event of importance to you.

Best of all, they want you to get “phygital”- which is the bridging of an audience from the physical world to the digital world.