Online video offers magazine publishers significant opportunities to profit from the digital revolution, senior media execs agreed at a forum hosted by the Magazine Publishers of America Wednesday in
New York.
Video leverages the Internet's audiovisual capability, the execs said, thus differentiating magazines' online offerings from their print editions and allowing online
properties to grow and attract viewers without undermining legacy publications. What's more, online video can be produced cheaply, yet can provide publishers with a valuable revenue stream because
marketers are willing to pay a premium for quality video inventory.
ESPN Publishing's Senior Vice President and General Manager Keith Clinkscales said that after a sizable initial investment in
digital infrastructure, the cost of online content can be kept quite low, as viewers may simply be interested in "behind-the-scenes" footage that takes them inside the editorial process. "People who
make magazines think that people don't want to see what goes on behind the scenes, but the results have been very good," Clinkscales said, pointing to the popularity of "Deadline," an online
promotional feature that details the monthly scramble to produce ESPN The Magazine.
"Deadline" follows photographers to photo shoots, offering hints of that month's content, and is
released just before the magazine hits the newsstands. "Every episode ends with the cover of that month's magazine," Clinkscales said, noting that "80 percent of people who start the video watch it
all the way through."
National Geographic has taken a similar approach to a different subject, according to Senior Editor For New Media Valerie May, by simply equipping photographers with
video cameras they can use during their assignments. The footage they shoot becomes part of mini-documentaries that are posted on the magazine's Web site. National Geographic has also innovated
with live streaming video via satellite from remote areas of natural interest, including a heavily trafficked watering hole in the Serengeti during the dry season. The latter stream was "immensely
popular," May said, recalling that viewers sent "thousands of e-mails a day when it was taken down, so we had to actually show them the rain there, to say, 'it's over.'"
Video content need not
be entirely original, added Ira Becker, senior vice president and general manager of the 1UP Network, a multiplatform media company originally centered on magazines. Describing 1UP's online video
offerings, Becker said: "It's teasers, trailers, features, homegrown video, old commercials--all organized and searchable, as a search engine for all the video content around video games on the Web."
Simply by aggregating video from other sources, 1UP has transformed itself into a kind of gaming-related VOD emporium.
Dan Orum, publisher, president, and CEO of IDG Entertainment, which also
publishes a portfolio of gaming magazines and Web sites, explained that publishers can also easily draw on aggregated video to create semi-original content. As an example, he played a short video
called "Mario Bros.' Biggest Sell-Outs," which mocked various promotional uses of the venerable game over the last decade.
Cheapest of all, of course, is user-generated content, according to
1UP's Becker, who noted that "90 percent of our content is user-generated." Here, he said, YouTube has revolutionized the industry. He recalled that 1UP--which was in the process of developing its
site when YouTube first appeared--held off on launching its site to further study YouTube. "We delayed the launch of our game video site because there was a new site that had the technology for
getting videos online that was elegant and clean, and we had to react."