When you live in New York, you hear many times that it’s all about location. You can choose to have a big apartment far from the main area in the city, or a smaller apartment in the Village.
You can have a tiny restaurant in the Village, serving 1,000 people a day -- or a bigger place outside of the city, with less access to customers.
So location is everything for retail and
restaurants – but switching industries, let’s talk online video.
So what is the most important thing when building a video strategy?
Is it the number of
videos you have available on your site? 100, 1,000, 100,000?
Is it the CPM you can get when selling videos? $7, $15, $30, more?
Is it your SEO capabilities to drive organic audiences
from search to video pages?
Is it your relationship with advertisers?
Is it the video content management system you’re using? HTML5?
Is it the supporting iOS App you
have?
Is it the recommendation system you integrate on your site?
Is it your supporting YouTube channel? Number of subscribers?
When thinking about starting to build a video
business, it’s similar to choosing a place for your restaurant. Location is everything, and having people know you have food for them to eat can make or break your business.
If people
don’t know they can satisfy their hunger at your place, even if it’s a tiny restaurant in the Village, they will never get a chance to try your food. The size of your restaurant, the
quality of your service, or even the quality of your food -- all are important, but none of them matters as much on day 1 as getting people in the door.
No people = nothing to work with, slow
growth.
Some people = something to work with, still risky, a chance to succeed.
Video is going to be a big part of our future for at least two main reasons:
(1) Display is tanking -- it’s only responsible to build future CPM alternatives
(2) Web traffic is shifting to the mobile Web, and we need
all the help we can get to monetize that. High CPM video traffic can definitely help.
My advice is to start as early as you can to get a handle on your video strategy. Publishers who watch
their competition winning video while they don’t may face financial disadvantage that can affect their success.
Start by prioritizing tasks that can help educate your audience that
you’re a video business, even if it’s a little restaurant in the Village to start :)
Good luck !