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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
There are a lot of Do-It-Yourself and How-To sites available online. If you are looking to distribute your book video to those sites you need to know the criteria for them.
Not all book video will be accepted by those sites even if the video is non-fiction, author interview or a DIY book. The secret to getting your video accepted is to offer something of value, something that will teach the viewer how to do something from beginning to end. It can’t be suggestions, opinions or even a video on what your DIY book is about. It needs to be a full DIY session that gives the viewer a lesson.
If you have a book that you think would be perfect for this type of site, ask yourself what your book is teaching someone. If you can break it down into several things, choose one representative lesson and give it away in order to sell the idea of the book. Give a beginning and end to the lesson in which someone actually learns how to do something.
Book videos can easily present as a commercial if the selling points of the book are greater than the entertainment value of the video. Give away a lesson. That’s the price of getting onto one of these sites.
Vimeo (www.vimeo.com), how do I love thee? LOL I do love this wonderful video upload site! It has everything. Great quality video, a way to socialize within the network and a way to promote your videos outside the network.
I have never had any problems with Vimeo. I will say that I pay for their “Vimeo Plus” membership so I can upload an unlimited number of videos and for a lot of other little “perks”. When Vimeo decided to do an awards program you had to pay $25 to submit, unless you had the membership and then it was only $5! Yep, f-i-v-e! Also, I’m able to upload via TubeMogul by using my Plus membership. Saves me a lot of time.
Vimeo has widgets you can use, good tech support and a customizable profile option.
How do book videos do on Vimeo? It’s not the best place for book videos. Perhaps if we were to do some advertising within the site it might build our audience and that’s something we are looking at for 2011.
We do get views and comments though. And we get a lot of visits to our actual profile page, so we’re getting a higher number of impressions per video.
This is a site I will continue to pay membership for. I feel the $60 a year I pay is money well spent.
