How do you monetize a video sharing website?
videosift.com
videosift.com
Here's what happened to the three sites who made most from me last year. All three are names you'd recognize. [Edit for clarity: these are the CPMs paid Google. The sites probably get substantially less than 60% of these.]
Site A: Effective CPM has declined from $3.20 to $.80, spend declined 66%
Site B: Effective CPM has declined from $3.80 to $1.90, spend modestly increased (impressions obviously quite up)
Site C: Effective CPM has declined from $8.84 to $3.50, spend flat (impressions obviously quite up)
The kicker: I'm one of the few advertisers practically begging for traffic -- there are a few hundred bucks of slack in my budget, so if they've got it for sale I should be buying it. Its just the cratering CPM prices that are keeping my spend that low. My guess is this means that the other advertisers are sharply reducing spending, which means I win the "auction" easier and get the clicks for cheaper (thus decreasing effective CPMs).
Anyway excellent job.
I am not in this business, but i think i would go the flickr route for video sharing. As in, offer a paid account which you can opt to make private or just allow some people to see(like family videos). Make the payment terms easy(so yearly or per GB stored or something). Also, offer some kind of export mechanism to make customers feel more easy about their data in case something wrong happens. So aside from the digital export, offer a Blu-ray mailing option or something similar.
As for amateur remixes, i would offer affiliate links to content used(just like youtube did) and also offer a tip-if-you-like-this option which i will take a small part of.
So again, i am not in this business and monetizing video sharing websites without premium content like movies and video clips is difficult, but this is what i would do.
They don't pay for video bandwidth, so it's kind of weird how they have such high costs.
At first thought the lengths they have chosen make it seem more expensive than it is. There is something psychologically odd about the base 10 numbers chosen. 30 days/90 days/180 days feels better, I think.