Marketers and Viral Video

By Will Waugh

Happy New Year everyone.

Thanks to AdRants for bringing to my attention the insightful list of Top Ten Online-Video Predictions from the blog Will Video for Food.

Two of the Top Ten really stood out to me:

Select amateur video creators will begin to make a full-time living without “crossing over” to television. Metacafe’s CEO Arik Czerniak recently told me he anticipates his top amatuer creators will make six-figure incomes in 2007. I think he’s right. I’d also watch for people earning high revenue via Revver if the company rapidly expands its viewer base through affiliate/syndicate partnerships. Select amateur video creators will begin to make a full-time living without “crossing over” to television. Metacafe’s CEO Arik Czerniak recently told me he anticipates his top amatuer creators will make six-figure incomes in 2007. I think he’s right. I’d also watch for people earning high revenue via Revver if the company rapidly expands its viewer base through affiliate/syndicate partnerships.

Amateur video creation is a hobby of mine as it is with a number of my friends. Though none of us have aspirations of turning our hobbies into a six-figure income, it is nice to see the prognosticators still believe that quality creative product will always find ways of being monetized.

The second one relates to marketers and their use of viral video:

Marketers will get smarter about how they gain consumer mindshare through online video. The self-created viral videos will give way to more creative partnerships between brands and top video creators. These deals will be efficient for marketers, and highly profitable for video creators with low budgets. We’ll see increasingly fewer $250K viral video series created by agencies, and more low-budget, fun videos that were inspired by amateurs but get the media support of advertising budgets.

I think the author hits this one on the head. From what we are seeing at the ANA, marketers continue to experiment in this space and have gotten smarter for it. This will also provide a valuable avenue for engagement (mindshare) with the consumer.

Some disagree, as the first comment on this post states: You had me until 'Marketers will get smarter.' "Smart Marketers? Isn’t that like Army Intelligence or Jumbo Shrimp?

Let's see what happens in 2007, but we know a lot of smart marketers out there are active in this space and, as we have seen in the past, they will experiment with this medium until the well runs dry.

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