Web-Based Syndication Expands To Video
Important Details: It’s clearly the season of the sequel. Call It “Would-Be-Viral Web Syndication, 2.0.”
Voxant and Clip Syndicate are the newest kids on the block, joining earlier entrant Mochila. Both recognize the ascendance of video as the web culture is YouTube-ified. Both aim to make self-service video syndication a reality, learning from such self-service successes as the Google and Yahoo contextual and key word ad matching systems.
Their goals are to enable the swift syndication of web video and text, accompanied by ads. The premise is that the best monetization content producers can achieve in an ad-driven world will come from advertising, not traditional licensing of content for American greenbacks.
At first glance, the offerings are fairly similar. Publishers can upload videos and text to the sites and set their licensing rules. Importantly, monetizing video clips via advertising — not via traditional licensing revenue — is emphasized. Publishers can supply their own ads to accompany their content (the leading model is a 10-second "pre-roll" ad that displays before the user watches the video content) or licensees can sell their own ads and pay for the video.
Voxant puts its au courant mash-up ability front and center. Websites licensing the video clips can then use a magic “n” (a symbol placed adjacent to each piece of syndicatable content, indicating mashability) to fit with its look and feel, as long as it maintains the editorial integrity of the content. It’s cool.
Voxant CEO Jeff Crigler differentiates his site from the others by pointing out that Voxant isn’t just a start-up. He says Voxant leverages longstanding relationships from its legacy business of providing text transcription for such companies as CNN and Reuters. Clearly, Clip Syndicate, too, will benefit from its own long-standing relationships of entrepreneurial CEO Sean Morgan, who is offering this new service as part of his Critical Mention broadcast monitoring business. Morgan, of course, was a founder of legendary Web 1.0 syndicator, Screaming Media.
Mochila, for its part, already recognized potential value of video syndication and its system should be well-positioned to incorporate it as well.
All these new arrivals are second-generation successors to the iSyndicates and Screaming Medias of our industry. They too offered easy and semi-viral web syndication but stumbled on limited market readiness, technology woes, staffing that got ahead of revenues, and a dab or two of hubris. The new entrants are all trying to simplify and speed the licensing/syndication business, using more contemporary web tools to do it. They have also learned that syndication often flounders on mistrust around redistribution, content tracking, payment accounting, embargoes, and the like, and have tried to build systems that anticipate those concerns, allowing business to be done online rather than in series of phone calls and contract drafts that can take months.
In Outsell’s Opinion: Outsell believes that the success of these new outfits will rise and fall on the usual time-to-market questions of building a new marketplace. The entrepreneurs’ new proposed business ecosystems make a lot of sense. In addition, there’s clearly an emerging market for moving content, text and video, much more quickly. Publishers, though, will be inclined to take a go-slow approach to these innovations, despite their great need for new revenue streams.
At the same time, video’s coming of age is plainly on the near horizon. Many companies are working on bettering web capacity and delivery, as noted in a story in the June 6, 2006 San Jose Mercury News. Video’s maturity underscores the urgency for broadcasters to get smart about the licensing game and get their clips in shape (categorized, formatted, sendable, etc.) to create new revenue streams. Publishers that Outsell has talked with are willing to try out the new services, but don’t expect substantial new business soon. The smart ones are testing.
Curiously, one of Voxant’s signed customers is NewsCom, the photo syndication arm of Tribune and Knight Ridder (soon McClatchy). NewsCom already has its own online exchange, hosting photos for sale to customers on subscription and one-off basis. NewsCom’s agreement with Voxant signals a concession that its “we-produce-it/we-sell-it” position is not enough. It needs new distribution channels to find new customers and new revenue, quickly. If other video and text producers follow suit, Voxant, ClipSyndicate, and Mochila will find that their timing is good.
Finally, these developments reinforce the notion that advertising is increasingly the way to monetize content. That’s a lesson all publishers need to keep on learning.