About five years ago our parent company tried without success to launch a video-based website. This was in the days when only Macs could do the editing with much success, and production quality equipment cost an easy $30,000, even for what could pass as passable on the web. Then the cost of hosting such a project was itself more than the revenue potential. Today, YouTube has changed all that, and a Christopher Walken impersonation challenge is proving just that.
There have been a number of changes that have come along in the past five years that have allowed YouTube to blossom. Everyone has high speed connections, most of which exceed what we thought a high speed connection was back then, but more importantly, everyone has the equipment. Back then you'd need a digital video camera, a computer capable of video editing, and then the connection to actually upload it all. Now all you need is a video device, like a webcam, digital camera with video mode, or video capable cell phone. If you know what the internet is, you have access to a computer that can handle your video from there, so you're ready to upload and take your shot at fame.
A smaller, but still important aspect to bear in mind, is that the level of quality users expect has fallen sharply. Back then the expectation was that, if it was video, it better look like broadcast television. That's a potentially crippling degree of difficulty right there.
The Christopher Walken impersonation challenge that's sprung up embodies all the ways in which YouTube has changed the whole concept of video on the internet, even, if not especially, for webmasters on a budget.
A quick look at WalkenTheWalk.com will show you they have no budget. There's a poorly placed Google Ad off to one side, probably there more to track traffic than generate revenue, and at least as of going to print on this story, there are no other traditional ads. No banners, no buttons, nothing flashing at you, and nothing driving you crazy. So if there's no money, how can you build, promote and host a video competition website?
That's where the big-four benefits come in to play.
1 – YouTube hosts the videos. That means that the site doesn't have to pay for video hosting, but can still place all the videos on the site directly. Even a few videos viewed a few dozen times a day would easily burn through the full 20-gigs many hosting plans include. Not only does YouTube cover the cost, you have very little to worry about in terms of reliability, and nothing at all to worry about in hosting bandwidth overage costs.
2 – YouTube offers built-in marketing. If you have videos to post on your own site, by simply putting them on YouTube, you make them searchable in a sea of millions of other videos available every day to tens of millions of viewers. As long as your description is thorough and accurate, webmasters can enjoy free marketing to the furthest corners of the world. People will find your site who otherwise would not, and that's a huge benefit for any site.
3 – YouTube ratings are hard to corrupt. If you're going to use YouTube for a competition, like WalkenTheWalk.com has done, you'll get a built-in rating system that is difficult to corrupt. Competitions on small sites are routinely destroyed by the ease by which rating and voting systems are tricked into false results. Though the possibility still exists with YouTube, it's much less, and further still, it's out of your hands.
4 – YouTube comments are spam-moderated, if not spam-proof. Even on big websites, comment spam can crop up overnight and flood your site with useless, detrimental, false traffic designed entirely to promote somebody else's site. It frustrates your users and turns your site into a marketing machine for the neo-era spammers of the web.
The only thing wrong with YouTube at this point is that they have yet to come up with a way to pay the producers of quality content. Many webmasters work around this imperfectly by putting their video on YouTube for convenience and marketing purposes, but then post them to Revver.com to embed them on their actual site. This means that readers direct to your site will watch the same videos embedded from Revver, which will pay you, but still have the ability to find your site from YouTube.
So if you want to see the interesting twist in web video business that's come up over the past years, you can check out WalkenTheWalk.com and see how they're doing what they do, and recognize that their running a top notch competition on a budget just short of shoestring.
