Take for example http://www.infectiousvideos.com which is a specialised video blogging service which has a 50-50 revenue sharing system. Video bloggers can use a service like this to gain a greater distribution net - and find new audiences.

“Viewer numbers and ad impressions are impossible to quantify absolutely, but it appears to me that each show is getting downloaded through verifiable channels between 150 and 200 thousand times.”

It appears? Verifiable channels? How did you come to this exact range? Where’s the numbers? I have not found them in the linked Ms. Green’s article — she uses the equally vague and even more suspicious argument of “It turns out” — as Bill Hicks used to say, turns out suggests authority without actually saying anything specific.

Thanks to people like the author of this article, each day I become more and more paranoid.

“The point is that a computer or a tivo or a phone requesting a file from a server doesn’t really mean anyone’s watching it. Especially when rocketboom comes pre-subscribed on many devices and clients, and autoplay=on for all their webpages.

“You’re (very dishonestly) comparing two different metrics in your headline. Ze’s show gets downloaded ~150k/day. Rocketboom (with auto play and unasked for subscriptions) gets downloaded ~300k/day. Ze Frank’s gets watched (where the client is still there at the end of the video they CHOSE to start playing) ~30k/day. That’s on top of people who subscribe to it (by choice again).”

Precisely. And it’s JENEANE Sessum, not Jeane.

thx!

Especially when rocketboom comes pre-subscribed on many devices and clients, and autoplay=on for all their webpages.

You’re (very dishonestly) comparing two different metrics in your headline. Ze’s show gets downloaded ~150k/day. Rocketboom (with auto play and unasked for subscriptions) gets downloaded ~300k/day. Ze Frank’s gets watched (where the client is still there at the end of the video they CHOSE to start playing) ~30k/day. That’s on top of people who subscribe to it (by choice again).

So if you’re going to misrepresent the story in the headline, at least use comparable stats. 150k vs. 300k. 30k vs. 300k shows either blatant incompetence at reading comprehension or dishonesty.

Rocketboom doesn’t provide the stats of how many people are still around at the end of their show (and my guess is it wouldn’t be nearly the % of the original audience that Ze maintains). Ze’s audience all intended to watch it, they’re sticking around. A sizable chunk of Rocketboom’s audience just loaded the page and had the video “downloaded” before they even knew what they were looking at, or just haven’t realized that they can unsubscribe from a podcast that came preloaded on their client. And then you throw in the fact that not many people can actually stomach a full episode of rocketboom… my impression is that 30k would be a very generous estimate as to how many people actually watch an entire rocketboom.

~BS