New Approach To Monetizing Your Video

Since Web 2.0 is all about people and content they create I'm sure soon all users will expect to be able to earn money by creating content. Instead of uploading an interesting video to YouTube or other video sharing website and promote it on Digg - thus generating additional traffic to the community (which definitely means earning money to websites' owners) - and discuss possibilities for some revenue sharing with creators of the most popular videos users will soon be sure to expect possibilities of generating revenue with their content.

I think this is the philosophy that inspired Monetize Media - a new platform to create and monetize your own branded Intenet TV channel. Content owners and creators will be able to host and manage their videos here for free and monetize it via downloads, subscriptions, advertising or syndication. At that advertisers have an opportunity to target viewers with appealing contextually relevant rich media ads.

After you create your account you will be able to configure your branded TV channel: upload your company's logo, choose interactivity tools your audience will have with your TV channel (ratings, reviews, alerts, etc.). Later on you will be able to upload all the videos you want to be included in your channel, manage videos and track your revenue, viewers and subscribers stats.

The website provides you with a number of video tutorials on how to create your channel, customize it, upload and manage your content so you won't feel lost even if it is your very first own TV channel. Besides, the website provides you with full control of the video: you can select the price for your subscriptions or payment per video, you can even restrict Internet users from certain countries from viewing your content (this seems like a wise move given the recent YouTube - Taiwan scandal). The only disadvantage I've seen is that currently only IE 7 is supported which can limit the number of potential content creators.

As a summary I can tell that it is really easy to create and control your own TV channel with Monetize Media but when it comes to monetization there is a serious issue of bringing users and making them actually pay for your content when there are tons of free services offering free video. So it will definitely take your own promotional and marketing efforts to start actually earning revenue. I'm sure it will work for some famous personalities and owners of unique content but for the majority of small content creators it won't be that easy. On the contrary, for Monetize Media it means that they won't even have to implement PR or advertising campaigns - owners of the channels will do the work for them. For example, smaller content creators could create their channels here and upload shorter versions of their videos (or introductions) to YouTube, Brightcove or other similar website and send those viewers who are interested to pay for full versions on Monetize Media. I'm not sure how it will actually work but I will definitely keep an eye on this platform at least to get to know if this business model proves to be a success.