Three Web Video Boogeymen Worth Debunking - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBloggers

It's almost Halloween. A time to face scary demons and put a stake in their heart. So I thought I'd use this time to scare up some frightening video "Boogeymen" and see if we can bury them once and for all.

When I talk to website owners about video, they generally have three reasons that they haven't embraced video. I hear them every day; too expensive, too hard to manage user-content, and web content is too low quality.

- Video Content is too expensive to make at scale.

- User-Created Content will damage my brand.

- Sorting and filtering web-wide content is too much work.

The issues are pretty simple: can I get an ROI on my investment? And can I leverage my niche and my visitors so that I can embrace outside sources but protect my brand?

And, is all this effort around video worth it?

Well, there's good news to share in regards to these three questions, and in particular there's new data and new solutions that make the ROI on video less murky overall.

So, let's dig in to the three big misconceptions about web video - and see if we offer some clarity and a way forward for brands, ecommerce companies, and retailers.

Boogeyman #1:Video Content is too expensive to be made at scale.

This is one of those understandable old wives tales; "In order to have search engines find my collection, I'll need to create a large number of clips each week. Even if I invest in a team of video creators and build a set and a format, I'm going to spend thousands of dollars a clip to make what should be tens or hundreds of videos a week. This is a budget busting scenario that sends my CFO and me both running for the exits."

That thinking is right, as far as it goes. But try thinking of your created content in a new way. If the videos you make are the standard-bearers of your brand or site experience, the big upfront statements that set the tone and the message, then you don't need to make hundreds or even tens of videos a week. Instead, you could make a handful of videos a month, dramatically reducing costs and allowing content creation to be a minor rather than major budget item. Using the power of the web to Aggregate and Curate content, and you are able to provide visitors with a rich and deep experience around content, and you're not exposed to the same costs of high-cost content creation.

Boogeyman #2:User-Created Content will damage my brand.

In part because of YouTube's "Everyone Can Upload Anything" open platform, it's easy for brands to think that opening up a channel that allows user-submission will create a Wikipedia style environment that is out of their control. This couldn't be farther from the truth. YouTube's brand promise is "Publish Anything", but for ecommerce companies, brands, and packaged goods companies, keeping their brand in a 'clean well-lit space' and inviting and curating user-contributions so that only brand appropriate videos are published is critical.

So - brand marketers - let's bust this myth. Just because you invite user-contributions doesn't mean you have publish everything. In fact, as long as you are transparent with visitors about what kind of video your site accepts, you can filter submissions and only post what works for you and your brand.

Boogeyman #3:Sorting and filtering web-wide content is too much work.

At some point, sites have grabbed an embed code and put it in a blog post. Maybe you've even done that a few times - it's a pain. So the idea of doing that 10, 20, 50 times a day is mind-boggling. Scouring the web for content that is appropriate for your brand isn't something you want to do by hand.

So for many branded sites, while the idea of Aggregating and Curating web content that is brand-safe seems interesting, the actual looming effort scares them off.

As video sharing sites have proliferated, the "Embed Ecosystem" has grown to support the syndication of content from central sites to contextual pages. Now, with automated tools that can search, approve, and publish videos to your pages - the effort is minimal, and the impact is significant.

Now - on to the future of video with those Boogeymen appropriately dispatched!

Happy Halloween.

Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO and Co-Founder of Magnify.net - a fast-growing video publishing platform that powers more than 50,000 web sites, media companies, and content entrepreneurs to aggregate and curate web video from a wide variety of web sources. Currently Magnify.net publishes over 50,000 channels of Curated-Consumer Video, and is working closely with a wide variety of media makers, communities, and publishers in evolving their content offerings to include content created by, sorted and reviewed by community members. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, and well known innovator in the field of user-generated media production. Rosenbaum Directed and Executive Produced the critically acclaimed 7 Days In September, and his MTV Series Unfiltered is widely regarding as the first commercial use of Consumer Generated Video in US mass media. Steve can be contacted at steve@magnify.net Follow Steve Rosenbaum on Twitter: www.twitter.com/magnify

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