The Revolving Door Of Video Distribution Sites

Blog by S. English

By the time this blog posts there will be another video site that has gone bust and yet another new one that has been called the greatest video site of the year. It never fails. Even with our expansive database of video distribution sites we see the list grow then deflate and grow again at a rate fast enough to need a designated employee to always keep up  on the list from week to week.

I loved Motionbox and I loved Clipser but they went the way of the Dodo so I turn to other sites  like Mr. Wong or perhaps some Ning group sites appropriate to our client’s needs. It’s the way of video distribution, so you need to be flexible and you need to always be on the lookout for what’s new and what’s dying.

This is where the benefit of a distribution team comes in. With over 350 distribution sites in our database someone needs to be on the lookout for what’s working and what’s not. We go in and make notes and check back to see if a particular site is just lapsed for a while or if it actually died and needs to be removed from the database into archive.  It’s a big job that has constant changes, but with vigilant team members on hand to let us know what works and what doesn’t we are able to keep our database on the rise.

Social Media in Review- eBaumsworld.com

This site is hit or miss, but we distribute to it especially if we have something that is humorous in nature. Viral videos do well here and the community is pretty active. There’s not a lot of marketing/commercial material that I’ve found overrunning the site like some we have distributed to in the past.

They don’t post who their target audience of viewers is or any other analytics, but my best guess would be that this site has a very similar audience to Break.com; primarily male 18-34. 

Given that, we get a lot of views on this site. The normal book video will get approximately 2000-3500 views per video. So it is a good site to use if you’re uploading book trailers.

Social Media Site in Review – Miro

Miro was created through open source and a group of volunteers and it has remained stable for a few years now. 

People can download the Miro player to their desktop computer and watch their programs like a TV if they like, or they can go to the site. You can create your own channel/profile, which is what we did and that is then offered up to the community and aggregated through Miro. We don’t get a lot of views through Miro, but we get steady views. 

We RSS to Miro from Blip.tv, which isn’t that difficult to do. That way we get the videos on Blip and Miro at the same time, which saves time. 

Tech support is not always reliable, but there’s a good-hearted group of people in the community that are willing to help each other.

Social Media in Review- Spike.com

We have a contract with Spike which is very important to us. Spike, at one point, took our profile down as being too commercial in nature. But, we wrote a letter and sent it snail mail to their corporate office giving them reasons why we thought we should be allowed on Spike TV. I really thought I’d never hear back from them. We’d done this with other sites and had not been successful. But, one day my phone rang and it was someone from Spike TV corporate. They had reviewed our letter and were in agreement that we belonged there! Imagine my surprise!

They gave us special producer rights so that our videos would always be accepted there and we didn’t have to worry about the profile or any of our videos being rejected or deleted.

Spike TV has a great audience and the site is very well managed. The site is incredibly professional, entertaining and engaging. It brings in a lot of people who want entertainment and that means more eyes on our videos. Spike is, of course, tied to Spike TV so there’s that cross over audience for broadcast as well. Since this is the direction COS wants to go having the internet/broadcast tie-in is very appealing to us. 


We get a decent number of views. Spike has a lot of different types of shows it offers online so we get a good variety of viewer types. I do find that if a book video has anything in it that is tied to a movie, television show, celebrity or current affairs it tends to do better.

Social Media in Review – Zoopy.com

Zoopy (www.zoopy.com) is relatively new for us, but we’ve been very happy with the results. Like many sites that came before it, Zoopy wasn’t sure what to do with us. They deleted our profile, then we contacted them, and they put the profile back up. And we all lived happily ever after. Okay, that’s not really the end of the story. 

Zoopy allows for 200mb upload limit which is double what most sites will allow. So our longer form videos and original shows are perfect for this site. We do send all of our videos to Zoopy and are considered “content providers” and professional producers. 

I love the stability Zoopy seems to have. They have a sizable staff, have grown over the years, offer mobile and TV options for videos and the site is well done. This is definitely one to watch in the coming years as it seems to constantly evolve itself to stay current with audience needs and wants.

Social Media in Review- Veoh

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Veoh. 


In the beginning I loved it. We even used Veoh players in our Reader’s Entertainment TV site (www.readersentertainment.tv). We could assign players, move the videos around at will within a player, it was amazing! I got to know the staff at Veoh and they were amazing too.

Then, things began to change. They got a lot of investment money and started re-working the site. I didn’t mind the additional advertising at all. They have to make a living and stay viable. But, some of the unique features, like the individual player channels changed into “groups” and we were not able to use the function as we did before. Okay, sometimes someone else’s progress doesn’t necessarily work best for you, but the problem I had with it was that they gave absolutely no warning about this change. Those of us using their service just woke up one day to find we had to change over to Blip or YouTube players. 

Sometime last year the site stopped working all together. There were press articles about how Veoh had not used their investment money wisely and though I don’t know if that’s true I do know that the site no longer worked. So, for a while we just gave up on it.

Then, more recently, I noticed it was working again and that the site had been updated. I didn’t get any emails about it from Veoh, though I’ve had my videos with them since the started. 

I like the new look and I’m hoping Veoh will survive. I don’t trust Veoh enough to use their players on our site again, at least not for a while. But, I noticed we have an ever-increasing number of video views coming from Veoh and that is a very nice surprise indeed!

Book Video Distribution

The technology side of book video includes several factors. Formatting, SEO and distribution are major concerns and hot topics for COS Productions' R&D team. Our research and development team is made up of internal employees as well as contracted specialists.

Last year our major concentration was in book video distribution. We worked on establishing relationships with booksellers and specialty sites, we submit our videos to over 300 booksellers and 5000 libraries. We submit to specialty sites such as Watch the Book, Preview the Book, DigiGirls Library, TerrorFeed, Dark Scribe Magazine, Romance Novel TV, and so on. Most recently we're working with BooksiRead and GoodReads. We're delving into more niche communities while continuing to reach out to additional booksellers and book clubs.

We have a definite plan for distribution in 2009 and we continue to grow in that direction. We've mastered the RSS feed and are able to do more with less time invested. We can even use RSS to get our blogs out to several areas and then monitor comments using Friend Feed.

Our big focus in R&D right now is video SEO. Now that technology has caught up with SEO opportunities for video we plan on taking full advantage of that. Our team is currently working on a tutorial video and guide for our network partners that will help our videos have greater SEO.

We have reached out to publishers who are now embracing social media and we're sharing our experience and resources with them. This also helps us get greater distribution since we can deliver client video to publishers in those areas online.

We are always asked about our list of distribution sites. And, since we have a list of over 400 sites that we can distribute to online we feel confident that we're on top of the book video distribution game for social media. We've showed the list to publishers who ask to see it, but we do not make it available to the public because it is proprietary.

But, I will share a list of sites that shows our most basic distribution. We have other distribution packages that are much larger than this one, but this is the least amount of distribution that a video, produced by COS, will get.

1) 5min (when applicable)

2) Addicting Clips

3) AOL

4) AtomUploads

5) Backflip

6) Blinklist

7) Blinx

8) Blip TV

9) Bluedot

10) Break

11) ClipBlast

12) Crackle

13) DailyMotion

14) Del.icio.us

15) Digg

16) Diigo

17) Flickr

18) Flurl

19) Folkd

20) Furl

21) GoFish

22) Google Video

23) Internet Archieve

24) iTunes

25) Lycos

26) Magnolia

27) Meebo

28) MeeVee

29) Mefeedia

30) Mixx

31) Myjeeves

32) MySPace

33) Pando

34) Photobucket

35) Propeller

36) PureVideo

37) Putfile

38) REAL

39) REC TV

40) REC TV Blog

41) Reddit

42) SearchforVideo

43) Sevenload

44) Spash Cast

45) Spurl

46) StumbleUpon

47) Sumo

48) Technoratti

49) TotalVid

50) Twitter

51) Veoh

52) Viddler

53) VidPow

54) Vimeo

55) VSocial

56) Yahoo Video

57) YouTube

58) Borders

59) BN.com

60) Powells.com

61) Southern Independent Bookseller’s Association- all bookstores

62) Watch the Book

63) Preview the Book

64) DigiGirls

65) Dark Scribe Magazine

66) TerrorFeed (Horror only)

67) Romance Novel TV (Romance only)

68) GoodReads

69) BooksiRead

70) Ebookisle

71) Night Owl Romance

72) Romance Designs Theater

73) COS Productions website and newsletter

74) Find Me an Author

75) Kim's Wonderful World of Books

76) OverDrive (sends to 5000 libraries)

As you can see there are some sites that are very specific to genre and we do try to match genres up to the best possible audience. So, if you have an Inspirational we won't send that to TerrorFeed, and so on.

To me that is an impressive list of distribution for a very low price. Our Cover Story videos ($250) and our Level 1 Mini Teasers ($750) get that distribution as part of the package when they purchase their video from us.

We have additional distribution such as Transit TV which is extremely inexpensive and gets your video 11 million impressions in one week. We can format for TV, movie theater and other out-of-home ads.

We now guarantee at least 50,000 impressions for our top distribution packages. That's new. This is a guarantee for impressions not views, I like to be clear on that. We now place ads on MySpace, Facebook and Bebo with our top distribution packages. The ads show the author and book name and sends people to see the video.

Recently I had one of our publisher clients look at our list of 400 sites. I told her to choose any 10 on the list. I told her that I would show her where COS has a presence on any of the 10 she chose. I've shared a generic list, one without our specific book sites on it, with the tech world and will discuss it with Robert Scoble in July on his show. Our next step is creating a software program that we input the 400 sites into. We then input specific details about each site. The final product will give us a software program that we input details about a video to and it will then tell us what the top sites are for that book and it will even tell us WHY those sites are good for the book. That will go live in 2009.

It's exciting to see book video on the same playing field as video game trailers and movie trailers. 2009 promises to be an exciting year for book video!