SocialNext

Can a YouTube Competitor Land Perez Hilton?

Last December YouTube suspended popular gossip blogger Perez Hilton’s account. Perez had one of the most popular YouTube channels and participated in their “Partner Program”.

YouTube was slow to get a straight answer to Perez as to why his account was suspended and, justifiably, he was pretty darn mad. The result was Perez ditching YouTube for his own streaming video setup, PerezTV.

YouTube's lack of customer service (even for Partner participants!) is their Achilles Heel and resulted in a big fish getting away. The bottom line is this is a huge missed opportunity for a second-tier video site like Veoh, LiveVideo or Metacafe. They could have gained massive publicity from a pop culture trend setter and seen a huge jump in usage and accounts.

The opportunity is still there. Perez doesn’t seem to be monetizing PerezTV yet and if offered a sweetheart revenue sharing deal could still change over to a hosted platform.

Grouper Offering Revenue Sharing

Sony owned Grouper.com is offering revenue sharing to content producers in exchange to exclusive rights to stream their work. I don’t know if this offer is being extended to all producers on Grouper but my sketch comedy group got an invitation yesterday.

The payment structure looks like this:

             

Streams   (per Submission)	Incremental   Payments ($US)
50,000-100,000	150
100,000-149,999	150
150,000-199,999	150
200,000-299,999	200
300,000-399,999	200
Each 100,000   thereafter, up to 5 million	100

Note that the payments only kick in if an individual video reaches 50,000+ streams. Not the entire account of videos. Metacafe’s payment structure is similar.

If these sites are serious about gaining market share on YouTube they need to make the prospect of getting paid more attainable by offering account-wide payment benchmarks. They are asking producers to give up an awful lot of exposure by shunning YouTube, MySpace and others.

Google Results Integrate Video Thumbnails from Competitors

It appears that Google is integrating thumbnails of videos in its search results but not just from Google-owned properties like YouTube.

I was going through my traffic logs for my sketch comedy group and found Google supplied a thumbnail and direct link to one of our videos on MySpace.

Google could simply use this feature on YouTube videos giving them a huge clickthru advantage but they’re choosing not to. According to WebTVWire Google is also providing thumbnails for videos on Yahoo Video, MetaCafe, YouTube, Google Video, MySpace and Vimeo.

It’s a smart move, one that truly speaks to Google's mission of organizing the world’s information.

7 Ways to Challenge YouTube

Google-owned YouTube dominates the online video market. With YouTube now promising to pay content creators how can smaller video sites like Revver, Veoh, Metacafe and LiveVideo compete? Here are 7 ways smaller video sites can make inroads on YouTube.

1. Reach out to popular unsigned content creators and invite them to upload. Nothing new here. It's about acquiring great content. An unsigned group would be flattered to be noticed.

2. Now here's the key: Pay these creators to make their content exclusive to your site. The result here is two fold: you have has unique content users can't find anywhere else and the groups become evangelists for your service. Even if you couldn’t pay with video ads, you could create a payment structure based on views.

3. Offer a bulk upload tool: If the talent has a back catalog of videos uploading one by one takes forever.

4. Simplify the process for users to sign up and join the service so they can subscribe and leave comments.

5. Offer unique features YouTube lacks such as better tracking, allowing creators to pick the screen capture of their video and daily emails of views and comments on videos.

6. Feature the content creators: I’m not just talking about their videos but also customized homepages on the service, interviews and photos too.

7. Sign content deals with popular video and pop culture blogs such as VideoSift or Fark to feature your content. These sites drive a lot of traffic and can help boost adoption of your service.