See What’s Out There

Lee Gomes from the Wall Street Journal did some digging (scraping, actually) into YouTube and came up with some stats about how sick huge this thing is. For example, there are 6.1 million videos on YouTube, 20% more than last month. There have been nearly 1.7 billion video views. They spend several million dollars in bandwidth per month based on the amount of data. And they are finding a way to make money, but my guess is not enough yet to pay for all that bandwidth. I will let you see the punch line for yourself, which is the amount of total time people have spent watching YouTube. Take a read here.

DoGooderTV (DGTV), a video and social networking website serving the nonprofit community, seeks a Director of Business Development. DGTV is an initiative of See3 Communications, the leading provider of video production and distribution services to the nonprofit sector.

DGTV uniquely combines social networking functions with the video assets of nonprofit organizations to create an online community organized around nonprofit issues. DGTV is part of See3’s commitment to educate and provide products and services to the nonprofit sector that take advantage of the emerging broadband internet.

The Director of Business Development must have a strong background in internet business and marketing as well as a deep familiarity with social networking and video sharing websites. While the position is not technical, an understanding of how video is used online, including Flash streaming and compression technologies is helpful. The ideal candidate will also have worked in the nonprofit sector or as a consultant or vendor to nonprofits.

The Director of Business Development will be the leading evangelist for DGTV, helping educate nonprofits about the site and the opportunity it presents. In addition, this position requires working with business partners on joint marketing projects. The Director of Business Development will also be the liaison between management and the technical team on the site’s functionality and look/feel as it continues to evolve. Some travel will be necessary.

This job is located in Chicago, IL.

Salary commensurate with experience.

Please send resume, cover letter, and salary history to jobs(at)dogooder(dot)tv

The NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) is running an online advocacy campaign to save the Artic Wildlife Refuge from oil and gas drilling. The core of the campaign is a video of Robert Redford, hosted on YouTube, but available on their action pages.

I just had a conversation about this with Madeline Stanionis. Madline wrote THE BOOK on online fundraising. She is an amazing mix of someone very creative, but with a hard-nosed focus on outcomes. Her main question is, does it work? Of course the answer is in defining “work.” It would be easy to test conversation ratios with or without video, or compare amounts donated, with or without video – or with different types of video. (NRDC says 50,000 people have passed this video onto their friends.) On the other hand, the issues of branding, exposure, cultural change, and sowing the seeds of future supporters, are much harder to measure, and a big part of what video is doing online.

While all the numbers aren’t in on direct response video, what we do know right now is that video is increasingly important to have for many other reasons. Just like a website without decent photos would not be OK for an organization today, a nonprofit website without video will not be OK a year from now, when people have the expectation to see and hear what you do.

Email is great for a lot of different communications tasks. Sometimes, I wonder – maybe I should just call that guy. But there are some things we know email is NOT good for and we really don’t have to think about it. I think we can all agree that firing someone by email, for example, is not a good idea. Right? Well… not to the management of RadioShack, which just used email to fire 400 employees.

“The work force reduction notification is currently in progress. Unfortunately your position is one that has been eliminated.”

Those who got this email had a half-hour to clear out.

More on this here. (registration might be required)

The New York Times yesterday had has a story about a rock version of Pachelbel’s Canon, a song that drives me a little nuts because it is so cliché at this point. The story talked about a guitar arrangement and a kid who copied it, filmed himself doing it, and how this has become an online sensation, having been viewed more than 7 million times. The guy behind the piece calls himself “funtwo.”

Like a celebrity sex tape or a Virgin Mary sighting, the video drew hordes of seekers with diverse interests and attitudes. Guitar sites, MySpace pages and a Polish video site called Smog linked to it, and viewers thundered to YouTube to watch it. If individual viewings were shipped records, “guitar” would have gone gold almost instantly. Now, with nearly 7.35 million views — and a spot in the site’s 10 most-viewed videos of all time — funtwo’s performance would be platinum many times over. From the perch it’s occupied for months on YouTube’s “most discussed” list, it generates a seemingly endless stream of praise (riveting, sick, better than Hendrix), exegesis, criticism, footnotes, skepticism, anger and awe.

You can see why the movie and record industries are paying attention to online distribution. And you can see why we are encouraging nonprofits to create a lot more video and multimedia material – get one thing at this level (millions of online views and a pick-up in the Times) and you have done more for your organizational communications than a lifetime of press releases.

You can watch this piece right here.

This week’s Newsweek magazine has a story about OR Live, a website that shows live surgery. This, I think, is a good example of the long tail, the niche market potential that the internet makes possible by aggregating users with narrow interests where together they rival much larger markets.

The OR Live site was originally designed to help doctors with their technique for particular surgery. Now, you have preoperative patients and their families using the site to become familiar with specific surgeries. What makes this work, and will make it grow, is that you have a highly desirable audience for a specific set of advertisers. Hospitals want to showcase their talents and will, therefore, underwrite this kind of production when they are included. Device makers and Big Pharma will use every opportunity to showcase their products in front of doctors and patients, and we know they have deep pockets.

Newsweek make this story into something of a medical story, but it fits squarely within what we have been talking about in terms of niche broadband TV. The concept is similar to sail.tv and any other number of niche broadband channels where you have an established base of people interested in the subject.

My wife and I had the good fortune of spending a few days in the country. We were at a bed and breakfast literally in the midst of a corn, alfalfa and soy bean fields in rural Wisconsin.

We had an interaction with three nonprofits that I want to tell you about.

Thursday night we went to the American Players Theater in Spring Green Wisconsin, which by the way has this kick-ass general store. The theater is a first class outdoor ensemble theater. We saw Thorton Wilder’s The Matchmaker and it was a lot of fun. If you don’t know the play, it is about finding love, taking risks, and adventure. It is a laugh-out-loud comedy that is as timely today as it was when it was written. The cast, the direction and the set design were excellent.

What I noticed was how the theater did everything they could to make sure people had a good time. In their pre-theater picnic area, not only did they have dozens of picnic tables and plenty of room, they had gas grills parked next to each area. Next to the theater itself they had a bug spray station – it is outdoors after all and nothing would ruin your night out as much as getting eaten by mosquitoes. They sold interesting beers, had a wood carved structure that honored donors and fit the outdoor setting. All around well done.

Our next nonprofit interaction was at Taliesin. This is Frank Loyd Wright’s former home and a bunch of other buildings he built in rural Wisconsin, where he grew up. I was struck by two things. First, the cost of a two-hour tour was $45 per person. Wow! That’s like Disney prices. This just seemed like gouging before we went on the tour. Once on the tour we could see with our own eyes the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to restore the place, much of which they aren’t doing because they don’t have the money. So once we saw that, the price didn’t seem crazy. And they did have a 1-hour tour for $16. The second thing I noticed was that they said there were no accessible bathrooms during the tours. And they had 3-hour and 4-hour tours. Not a situation I would really enjoy being in. (I should make a t-shirt that says “I peed on Taliesin”)

The final nonprofit interaction was while we were at the B&B. The owners are involved in their church and they were building a new church building. What was interesting was listening to them talk about how the community was building it themselves. People were coming in from all over, for a day or two or longer, to help. This group is good at drywall, those folks will be working on the floors. That’s the kind of experience that can really bring a community together. (In my community it would be a bill for the building fund and the bonding experience would be complaining about it.) What a great thing to document and build into the fabric of their historical record. We can only hope they took a lot of pictures and shot some video.

There was a mega deal signed this week between Google and NewsCorp. This deal centered around… what else… MySpace.com, the NewsCorp social networking behemoth. NewsCorp, which paid about $600 million for MySpace maybe a year ago, did a deal with Google, where Google will run all the ads across the 90 million+ member pages on the site. Google is guaranteeing NewsCorp $900 million in payments. So… not only did Murdoch pay for his MySpace acquisition with a single deal, he paid for 2/3 of all his Internet acquisitions with a single deal. Give that guy a raise.

Google will be running their signature text advertisements within MySpace’s pages. But this one deal makes Google a huge player in banner ad marketing, an area where they haven’t done much to date. MySapce has tens of millions of pages for banner ads as well. Google beat out Yahoo and Microsoft in this and here is a lesson of where technology can make a big difference. Google was able to offer NewsCorp more money because their ad serving software results in better matching of ads to viewers (increasing click-through rates). So Google’s calculation of how much they could pay and still make money was higher than their competitors.

We run Google AdWords and Yahoo ads for clients and we see this every day in the results. Google is more expensive. More clicks, higher click costs and bigger budgets on Google.

Lets hope Google ads make MySpace pages look better.