Video site Guba, one of the most interesting players in the space, has released an affiliate program that will pay you 25 cents for every new free (US based) account resulting from a clickthrough of an embedded video on your site. The video doesn’t have to be your own, it just has to be embedded on your web page or blog. Registering for an account lets users upload video, leave comments and subscribe to videos by tag. It’s an intriguing move because account signups themselves make Guba no money. The free video pages don’t have ads on them but are set up to drive people to the low cost premium videos for download to rent or buy.
Guba previously made the news for offering video downloads at a much lower price than competitors, creating a product that hunts copyrighted video online and landing some of the first online distribution deals with major movie studios.
Other startups paying users in the online video space include Revvr and Flixya, though both of those companies are offering 50/50 revenue splits of the AdSense revenue generated from their video pages. That model has its charm and could work well for sites with big stars (like some of the users on YouTube) but seems less appealing for most users and in Flixya it could encourage people to upload video they don’t own so they can profit from AdSense around it. In one sense I’m not sure how different this is than paying people for referrals via embedded video they don’t own (Guba), but that seems more legitimate than wrapping AdSense around someone else’s YouTube video on Flixya.
Guba’s move is a real gamble though. As long as there is no advertising on the video pages, free accounts will not directly generate any money. The site’s business model seems to be based on driving people to the premium downloads section of the site. One day rentals cost between 49 and 99 cents, purchase from five dollars to ten. Will the revenue generated from sales and rentals alone make up for the free accounts that Guba pays affiliates for? Is it a desperate move to generate publicity in the face of YouTube’s huge mindshare in the market?
I think it might work. I think people will display Guba videos and their viewers will sign up for free accounts. I think people want video on demand and a large enough number of them may well use their friendly new neighborhood free video site for premium access. I think this is a great use of startup money and is really ties together one of the smartest online video strategies out there. Now if there was only Mac support!
Why not also pay for every clickthrough from a user’s site embedding their videos that results in sale of a premium download or do they already do it as well?
Startups.in/India
(Nag .B)
With a popular site this could add up quickly. Big gamble.
GUBA is the nemesis of Blockbuster and Netflix… only needs more advertising…
Guba would be really great if it wasn’t for the small problems of:
- only internet explorer (no firefox)
- only windows (no mac, because of the media player), and even this is only windows XP
- only in U.S.
Let’s face it, if they could open up to the rest of the market they could have better chances of survival. Like it is, they are giving money but not exploring all the market they could get.
why give leads to guba if jotspot pays you 4 times for the same…
guba thoughts….
michael. sorry to say, i gotta disagree with you here…
we’ve seen this before (1996-98) i’ll pay you a small rev share to help drive traffic to my site.. gotta grab them eyeballs!!!!
let’s face it.. while putting up small video clips is fun/exciting for some, the amount of worthwhile video clips is probably pretty small. in other words, alot of this is pure garbage…
so why would someone who’s putting up ‘garbage’ as a small video clip want to sign up for a premium page!!!! the person wouldn’t.. the person would go to a site that gives the lowest common denomenator in terms of ease of use, ease of upload, etc…
the person who’s serious about trying to generate revenue from their video clips is already going to be looking at premium offerings from the video sites…
this is (for my $0.02 worth) a pure marketing play at best…
the sites that are going to really give ‘netflix/blockbuster’ a run for the video $$$ are sites that provide serious distribution, ease of use, as well as tying an easy/robust payment function… the site will essentially provide the plumbing to allow you to generate $$$ for your video, whether that’s from someone downloading your vid to burn on a CD, or someone looking as a pay-per-click purchase….
but who knows.. you just might be right…
peace..
How many people are really interested in watching a 2 hour movie on a computer monitor. When Netflix or Blockbuster flex their muscles to really offer home theater VOD, Guba and their ilk will quickly fall to the side.
Guba knows it and is trying to build up a user base so they actually have some value in the hopes of getting purchased instead of forgotten about and left to rot.
They don’t have any exclusive content or innovative application. They’re already circling the drain.
There are plenty of affiliate programs that pay you for free sign-ups.
Sam, I’m not clear on how you’re describing the situation. Just like people embed videos from YouTube, people can also embed videos from Guba. When they do, people who want to comment or otherwise interact with the vid will sign up for a free account in order to do so. When they go back to interact with their free account, the premium page of videos for download is right there to catch the eye. People want video downloads, and if they are already using Guba for viral/free videos then it will be easy for them to flip over to the premium page and download. Seems viable enough to me.
Chris has hit the nail on the head. After wasting a decent sum of its money paying users to send them free account registrations, they will soon realize that the market for people actually willing to spend money to go through the hassle of downloading and burning a movie to a DVD and then having to sit in front of a computer monitor to watch it is exceptionally small.
Another (practical) revenue stream is needed if this company wants to survive.
Paying people to view free content with no substancial per-view revenue streams?!? Sounds like NET1.0 all over again. What a joke.
More a joke is that Guba is loosing money (their admission) on a per-premium content purchase at those prices. So even worse: pay people to view free content that costs money to serve up in the hopes that they convert them into renting premium content at steep discounts so that loose money on a per-transaction basis.
I’m sure Guba just wants to get bought like Grouper. This is probably just a marketing ploy, but I think serious Execs who may be looking to acquire an online video play will just be rolling their eyes when they see this.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
At least they’re going down fighting. That’s commendable.
TechCrunch people: Give it up about Mac support! It’s not the end of the world if a startup doesn’t support the Mac. They will when they are good and ready.
If anyone wonders why I’m complaining, please see this:
http://www.goog...com+mac+support
Search for the word Windows and you’ll find we’ve used the word 5 times as much.
Marshall,
Searching for “windows” does return about five times as many results as opposed to “mac support”. However, when you search for “mac”, it does not. Similarly, if you search for “windows support”, it does not return five times as many results as “mac support”.
>> “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
I smell it too. death.
I choose not to comment very often, as much of what I have to say is voiced eventually on TechCrunch. One of the many reasons why I like it so much compared to the competition, is that Michael and Marshall do such a great job of staying impartial and do not show platform/OS bias in their actual reviews. This is a perfect example of how things end up twisted into something else entirely.
I ran the queries, and this is what I found…
Mac: 1,387,804 pages w/ 20 results per page
Windows: 2,964,831 pages w/ 20 results per page
Mac Support: 444,311 pages w/ 20 results per page
Windows Support: 974,084 pages w/ 20 results per page
Is there really anything here to validate wasting our time spewing your senseless and petty angst against Mac users? Or TechCrunch reporting the news as it comes out? Apple does continue to expand it’s target demographics (fact). Most of what is out there is still built for, and run on PC’s/windows (fact). As Apple continues to grow, and Mac users grow with them, they will need support (fact). TechCrunch simply address the issues at hand (fact).
The post could be alternately titled “User takes a Gamble: Gives Guba their SIN”
No thanks.
My point in linking to the Google query was not to start a pointless comparison of how many times particular words appear on this blog, but rather to show how many times the lack of Mac support is listed as a complaint in a TechCrunch post. Searching for “windows” or “windows support” is meaningless because nearly everything supports Windows.
To connect the dots more explicitly, here are some products that TechCrunch has complained don’t support the Mac well or at all:
- Soonr
- Picasa
- Webaroo
- Live Shopping
- SkypeCast
- Windows Live Writer (hello?)
- Zoho Show
- eSnips (in a comment from Mike)
- PalTalk
I love how Chris Gear assumes that I hate Macs when the opposite is true. Nor do I hate TechCrunch; I find it extremely informative.
I just don’t think it’s necessary to harp on the lack of Mac support over and over again, particularly for these tiny startups just trying to get off the ground. Imagine you are an investor in one of these companies: Would you want their three engineers to work on shipping v1.0 of their Windows product or on building a Mac alpha from scratch? This is not platform bias; this is reality.
Truth is, I use a Mac and thus would like to see Mac support for services I’d like to use. Shameful, I know…
I’d like to have Mac support, but Apple’s DRM called “Fair Play” is actually closed to companies like Guba. Only Apple can use Fair Play. Studios require DRM and Windows Media’s DRM is open. If you don’t like that (we certainlly don’t), please complain to Apple.
With regards to business model, Guba is 8 years old, grew organically, never took any venture capital, and is profitable. If you don’t think we know what we’re doing, you’re really underestimating us (which I generally prefer, it gives us an advantage). Just because we’re not running ads today, doesn’t mean we won’t run ad supported content tomorrow. It’s early in the game.
–Tom
CEO, Guba
Marshall: Ah, I see — using your position of power to get more products to support the Mac. I suppose it’s not *that* shameful.
In any case, you understand what I was getting at. Keep up the great posts — I’ll be reading.
I come from a part of the web where people call this lead generation. There’s loss-leader generation, Guba falls into that, and paid lead generation where entry costs a bit to cover the cost of generating each lead.
.25 cents is a great price in many niches for delivering a lead, except in Guba’s example they don’t have ANYTHING until that click turns into a free account holder, right?
That’s where I see the risk.
Either way there are huge costs involved in driving traffic when you want to drive big traffic fast.
I bet there’s a plan, as Tom states above. I am just happy to see people trying new models and stretching past the norm!
Working for an affiliate company I would like to back up what BO said above. Paying for a free sign-up is fairly common practice and the 25 cent offering is toward the low end. In the UK free sign-up programmes typically run 40-60p per new member (~US$1).
@Thomas McInerney: Personally, I don’t think advertisers are particularly interested in user-generated content. Really bad signal-to-noise ratio in terms of content quality. Several companies have tried this in the Net1.0 past and never gotten video advertisers to sign up. Maybe it’s different now, but probably not.
jonny103
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