Mike Hudack, the founder of Blip.tv, just landed a major set of deals to expand the distribution of his Web video network. The biggest deal is with YouTube, which for the first time will allow Blip.tv to place its own ads in the YouTube player on behalf of the Web video creators who use Blip. Hudack is also announcing distribution deals with NBC Local Media for regular TV starting in New York City, Vimeo, and Roku set-top boxes. It is also expanding existing deals to show Blip videos on Verizon FIOS, Tivos, and Sony TVs with Ethernet jacks.
About 50,000 different shows have been uploaded to Blip, where video creators can then spread them across the Web, iTunes and set-top boxes. According to the company, Blip is doing 72 million video streams a month to a worldwide audience of 22 million people. Only 4 percent of those views are on Blip.tv itself.
“I think we will double our audience with these deals,” says Hudack. He might be able to double his audience with just YouTube, which comScore estimates does 6.6 billion streams a month and reaches about 100 million people in the U.S. alone. It is not so much distributing videos on YouTube that is a big deal. It is being able to share in the advertising revenues and getting tracking data back. YouTube has gradually been making it easier for content partners to sell and place their own ads within YouTube, expanding from a few large media partners at the beginning of the year to about 50 today.
Now, YouTube is embracing smaller partners like Blip through a trial with a video ad network founded by ex-Googlers called FreeWheel, which allows Blip and others to serve their own ads inside YouTube. Blip still has to approve individual members before they can tap into those YouTube dollars, but once they pass muster they can use FreeWheel to set up their ads once to play on YouTube, Vimeo, Blip, iTunes, or wherever. FreeWheel takes care of the accounting and rev-shares, which gets complicated when the money gets split so many ways. Blip deos a 50/50 rev share with video creators after payments to third parties like YouTube and FreeWheel.
Along with the new distribution partnerships, Blip has completely redesigned its video management dashboard from the ground up. (See screen shots below). Web video auteurs can now see in one place how many views and dollars each episode of their videos is attracting. (TubeMogul is powering the analytics). The dashboard lets them batch edit and distribute their videos. They can drag and drop teh videos in teh episode list to reorder them, and the new order is automatically propagated to their RSS feed and all point so distribution. The embeddable Blip video player itself is also now much more customizable. .
All of these changes should help Hudack get Blip closer to his “stretch” goal of becoming profitable this year. He raised $5.2 million from Bain Capital Ventures last October, which helped it get through the worst of the advertising downturn. “What we found was that the first quarter sucked,” he says, ” but April started leading a resurgence of advertising dollars. Every month is a new record for us.” The average cost advertising rates Blip gets are between $10 and $20 per thousand views.
That YouTube deal should have the effect of increasing views while putting downward pressure on CPMs. But if views go up faster than prices go down, Blip will end up better off.
Good news, but new Dashboard not live though?
I love Blip, this is great news……proof read please.
From their blog: “this is being rolled out slowly, starting with about a hundred show creators”
I can’t wait to have these features. I love blip.tv
Some great features:
* upload your videos via ftp
* distribute on lots of networks including iTunes
* easily keep some videos hidden
* allow viewers to download your videos
Congrats to Mike, Dina, Eric and blip team
Andrew, we were one of the “hundred show creators” come by and check it out, pretty cool.
Blip.tv have solid distribution technology and poor ad sells but for heavens sake why would I need blip.tv to be on YouTube?
That’s what I’m wondering too. I think what this means is that you can cross post through the Blip interface and use the same ad buys on multiple platforms? The post doesn’t exactly make the point of this very clear.
“…which for the first time will allow Blip.tv to place its own ads in the YouTube player on behalf of the Web video creators who use Blip.”, sounds to me like an opportunity for content creators to get finally get paid for their youtube traffic, since it’s still absurdly difficult to get accepted as a youtube partner.
This is great news for Blip.TV, as well as the online video space in general.
Cool. Blip.tv has been one of my favorite video distributors, so I’d like to see them get profitable.
Broken spell checker?
I noticed that too. “Teh” and “deos” in back-to-back sentences = bad.
FreeWheel is an adServer not an ad network and they were founded by ex DoubleClicker’s not Googlers
Congrats to Blip. They are on to something.
This is big news for blip and the web television world. They really are becoming a backbone for content delivery and monetization. The fact that only 4% of the views they generate are done on site is remarkable.
Congrats to Mike and the Blip team.
Congrats Blippers!
go, go blip.tv. It’s good to see ones doing a great job get rewarded. blip.tv is a nice system.
Man and @robblatt: Yes, you can now check off a box on the blip.tv dashboard to send episodes of your show from blip.tv directly into your YouTube account. The idea is to simplify the process of sending shows to multiple destinations around the Web, and to the TV set. If you have any more questions please feel free to reach out directly to dinaATblip.tv or to supportATblip.tv and we’ll get right back to you. Thanks!
I love Blip.tv.
testando
E aí, Gisele?
Ops… olha o teste número “trocentos” =P
Great news for Blip.tv – I plan on putting my first video up there pretty soon!
sweet. Rock on Blip!
Sweet! Rock on Blip.tv!
lu, comentando pq o anterior sumiu
This reminds me of Tubemogul, but now the content producer can add ads and monetize their videos across multiple sites which is a cool feature. There is a big issue with their business model though from the perspective of the professional content producer-they take 50% of ad revenue.
This is a major issue because the content producer is required to be a content partner at You Tube before they can start having ads sold against their videos. They could have sold ads against their videos and dealt directly with YouTube, keeping 100% of their revenue rather than going through Blip.tv.
By example
Video A generates 100,000 views at $20CPM
YouTube=90,000 views ($1800 in ad revenue)
Blip.tv=4,000 views ($80 in ad revenue)
Vimeo=4000 views ($80 in ad revenue)
All Other=200 views ($40 in ad revenue)
Total Ad revenue=$2000 ($1000 to Blip and $1000 to content producer).
If you went direct with YouTube and used Blip for syndication to all other sites you would net $1900 vs. the $1000 if you go through Blip.tv.
If I was a major content producer, I would deal directly with YouTube, avoid sharing ad revenue with Blip for YouTube (but use their site for analytics and tracking). You are going to generate 90% of your total views and revenue from YouTube so why not try to keep as much of it as possible.
Pablo,
As one of the bigger content producers on Blip, I can tell you a few reasons to go through Blip.
1) We actually generate all of our traffic through our website, (Over 4 million visits a month and just shy of 15 million page views), and we’ve done this in less that a year.
2)The ads that Blip has gotten for us pay us far more than what we would get via Youtube.
3)The group @ blip give every producer their attention, and the support that they provide to us producers is vastly greater than any other service that we have tried.
With online video not every video producer(s) have become huge stars through Youtube, as there are many other ways to generate traffic. Make shows that appeal to a large audience, and the people will come.
Hey guys,
Just wanted to clarify the relationship with YouTube. Current YouTube partners will see no decrease in revenues from YouTube. They will continue receiving checks directly from YouTube.
Blip will from time to time serve ads into videos on YouTube (assuming you’ve opted into blip advertising, which is always a choice). In that case we will always make sure that the net to the show creator is greater than the net from YouTube sales.
Yours,
Mike Hudack
Co-founder & CEO, blip.tv
Прочитала статью и вспомнилось несколько крылатых фраз ” Время – наилучший учитель жизни.” Вот уж точно, ведь еще и полгода назад я и понятия не имела о многих “словечках” из этой статья, а сейчас уже подросла немного как блоггерша, можно и нос поднять кверху. И вообще порой время тянется так медленно, что кажется, что оно остановилось. В такие моменты я залезаю в интернет и времени просто не хватает+ да и у вас блог, должно быть отнимает уйму времени.
Весёлые посты у вас выходят, но они выходят очень не часто