ClipSyndicate Videos Now On Truveo, Bebo, Magnify, and Lingospot
Erick Schonfeld
22 comments »
Video clips from local TV news affiliates are making their way onto the Web through a service called ClipSyndicate that’s been in beta for more than a year. The service, which is owned by New York City startup Critical Media, has more than 200,000 archived news clips and adds about 1,000 a day from about 200 local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, along with video from Bloomberg TV, the AP, UPI, and the New York Times. About 350 niche Websites are participating in the beta—including Military.com, Construction.com, and PetHealthFocus.com—and they collectively serve up two million ClipSyndicate videos a month.
Now ClipSyndicate is spreading its API to video search sites like AOL’s Truveo and other services like Magnify (which we reported earlier) and Lingospot. For instance, ClipSyndicate videos come up in regular video searches in Truveo and play in an embedded ClipSyndicate player. On this Magnify page for Barack Obama, the “Obama News” videos come from ClipSyndicate. And Lingospot, which creates an in-text search bubble when you mouse over a linked term (see left), can show ClipSyndicate videos in its bubbles. You can even find ClipSyndicate videos on Bebo, although you have to look hard and there is no official deal yet with the social networking site.
To get a sense of the entertainment value of some of this stuff, here is a news clip from a local Oregon station about a man with blue skin who is moving to California in search of more tolerant neighbors:
ClipSyndicate serves ads with the videos and splits the proceeds as follows: 30 percent to the content producer (i.e., the local TV station), 20 percent to the API partner or Website where the video is seen, and 50 percent for itself. (Although the beta and APIs are available by invite only, the company plans to open up participation to all comers by the end of the first quarter). 
Critical Media CEO Sean Morgan tells me that he is getting $50 CPMs on the video ads sold through his salesforce compared to $8 to $12 CPMs from backfill video ad networks because the videos tend to appear on extremely targeted sites. Think Yummy Chummy ads on PetsHealthFocus. His sweet spots are mortgage, pets and animals, and health sites. He also claims that he is seeing close to three percent click-throughs on his graphical banner ads compared to quarter-point click-throughs on run-of-network ads.
What he is excited about, though, is marrying the brand advertising of video with the specificity of search. Truveo, for instance, passes the search terms through the API, so that can inform what types of ads are shown, in addition to the actual content of the video. As ClipSyndicate’s business model develops, we’ll see if it is actually possible to make money from the long tail of video (although note that this is still professional-quality video, and much higher up the curve than most of the audience-generated video on the Web).
Finally some, errr, respect for us Oregonians!
O wait, that video clip makes us look pretty dumb…..nevermind.
Hey, dudes, look this: here, in Brazil, Google and Microsoft are fighting very hard. All ’cause Orkut and Live Spaces war:
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/f.....1596.shtml
a hug from south america!
Bloggers have united to collectively hate on this so-called service, massive fail, you can only pick from the clips they make available to you, which mostly suck i.e. blue people, and all they are doing here is trying to monetize what YouTube already does for you, minus the choice of your own content.
Hmmm, less choice, more ads, I believe you call that FAIL.
Trust me, if you can find the clip on YouTube or even a Brightcove partner, they play and function much better, most TV stations have their own YouTube channel anyway, you would definitely use their clips way before this lame service.
This is very good…there’s a lot of “local” video content out there that just doesn’t get seen unless it makes the “national news”. I can’t wait until they open it up to other sites so sites like mine can add more video.
it’s a very cool tool
rc
trading tennis blog
Our experience with CilpSyndicate has been very positive. They were great to work with, responsive in tweaking the API, and provide access to content that we weren’t able to find on other services. Most importantly, they are focused on speed - because getting news clips while they are still newsworthy is the whole game here. As more and more places offer up different flavors of video - having a a site that delivers news material fast, and in a reliable way is a win for Magnify.net site creators. I’m not sure why anyone would wish them to fail - more sources and more content is good for curators who want more control over what they select and publish.
I think the real news here is the blue man.
My small environmental site uses ClipSyndicate and we are extremely excited. We joined them as they began to support single embeds which allow you to really build a site around the videos. We control the relationships, comments and tagging of videos using WordPress. Their earlier service which allows you to embed feeds was of limited value for us, however the usability of the feeds for the end user is the real win. I think the issue that bloggers take is simply the fact that now you have pro content coming online competing for eyeballs. This pro content can be in any space. Basically if a small entrepreneur sees a media niche he has a couple of choices. Become a content creator or aggregator of some flavor. If he wants editorial control you do a portal. If you don’t you make a niche digg clone.
One other thing about ClipSyndicate that I like is that they are one of the only providers which include Voxant and Mochila that do post rolls for single embeds. Preroll kills any utility of these videos in a blog or niche portal. It just drives the users away. I’ll be very excited when they begin to do contextual overlay in the single embed space.
Blue man … whatever … it’s hard to believe. Maybe he’s doing a sociology experiment/documentary that he’ll post on youtube or sell it.
Otherwise the Blue Man Group, maybe in need of stand in. Don’t digg me down - LoL
I am currently using Voxant (www.voxant.com) to provide clips on my site. http://www.electionu.com and http://www.electionunews.com. Can anyone point out the main differences between Voxant and ClipSyndicate. Or can you tell me which one you think is better?
I think this model might be working like fancast.
Gladiators in Rome have gone down in history as one of the first mass audience public fights. The Gladiator has also captured the audiences of filmgoers, with depictions of Roman Gladiators doing extremely well at the box office.