This is a thing people have been worried about lately. Blip says they’re going to trim the numbers and accounts have, apparently, already started to go. Personally, I’m pretty sure I’m doomed. My numbers are honestly not very good on Blip, they took away my cross promotion to Youtube already.
The thing is, I’ve been ready for Blip to drop me for over a year now. I’m pretty much ready for it. So here’s what I’ve learned in my preparation process.
Why are you doing this?
Presumably you’re reading this post because you’re worried about Blip dropping you and you want to know where to go afterwards. There are a ton of options, but the first thing to consider is why you are doing all of this. Why are you making your videos? Is it because it’s fun? Because you want to be famous? To make money?
Knowing this is going to help you a lot in what’s going to happen next. Everyone is going to come to a different conclusion about their goals and none of those goals are wrong or bad. Some might be unrealistic1 but none of them are necessarily wrong. The less it’s about the money, though, the less finding a new video hosting site is going to hurt. And if it is about money, you might have to be prepared to spend a little to make some and work a little harder.
Free Options – Potential Revenue
I suspect that a lot of people liked Blip because of the payouts. On the bright side, just about all the options I’ve looked at the past year now have potential revenue options.2 None of them are guaranteed in the same way Blip was, but there are options for anyone who want to try their luck. Just try not to be too disappointed if you don’t get in.
Youtube - I think everyone knows about the monetization that comes from the Partner Program, but there’s also the option of straight up monetization without the extra bells and whistles3 as well. I’ll make a case that Youtube is also a great place to build an audience, since it’s a lot easier for new people to stumble onto your videos by accident and subscribe. There is the issue of bots checking the content for copyright infringement, but they are bots. Bots can be tricked. Be creative about it, maybe do a bit more original content on your channel and you’ll be fine.
DailyMotion - There’s a new “MotionMaker” program that allows advertising that, again, you will have to apply for. Daily Motion doesn’t really have that great of a reputation and I have found quite a bit of soft core pornography and straight up copyright infringement on there. I don’t know how easy it is to get a MotionMaker account, though it seems like they are trying to focus on original content now. If anyone uses DailyMotion and has gotten one of these accounts, please tell me how it’s going.
Vimeo - They’ve introduced not an advertising service, but a tip jar and are putting in a pay to view option.4 This means that you would have to be putting out content and relying on your fanbase to support you rather than any sort of advertising. This is something that I know is really not going to work for a lot of you but, given that Vimeo is more of a place for video creators that make original content from scratch or the folks immersed in remix culture than content critics that use clips and media from other content creators, I’m not sure how many people would be heading here anyway.
Paid Option That Could Be Free-ish
I only looked into one, mostly because I was already familiar with the platform and I found out that there is a damn lot of customization that you can do with it and, if you have a little know how, you can do it completely free as well. But let’s break it down.
JWPlayer - This is just, straight up, a video player. You can put it on your site, set it up in the code and BAM! You have a video player. It is free, though there are people who have built extra plugins for it, such as analytics, embed codes and custom player skins, that sometimes ask for money to purchase these add ons. You can also, if you know what you’re doing, build all of these things yourself. You will also have to host the videos yourself on your own server, which you might have to pay for depending on your hosting. More on that in a bit.
Longtail Adsolution – They have an advertising branch. You can use this service for free to put ads on your video or, if you are so inclined, host your own ads. I was getting 1 cent per click, but I think you can also hook your Adsense account into it or, like I said before, run your own ads. If someone wants to sponsor your videos in exchange for running ads on them, you can do that.
Bits on the Run – Remember when I said you needed to host your own videos? For those of you who don’t realize, it costs money to host your videos on your server because you need to make sure there’s enough space for them. It also costs money for the bandwidth required to play said videos. It can get really expensive if you have a lot of videos or a lot of viewers and a hosting package that won’t compensate for that Given this, there’s Bits on the Run, which is a video hosting service that comes with a lot of great plugins for the video player already installed and a little bit of free space. After that, you can customize your payments for only how much you use and it will probably work out to less than bumping your hosting package up to the next pricing bracket. Plus you won’t have to fiddle with any of the code to make it work.
The Other Ones
Springboard - This one is like Blip, though it was doing the application process first. Word is that it will only accept shows that already have a good audience, but it has a much wider range of ads and works better in more countries. Still, they do have quality control in effect there as well.
Viddler - Did you know you have to pay for Viddler? I only found that one out today. Aside from knowing Nanowrimo uses it, that is about the only thing I know about Viddler.
Something Things to Remember
Blip doesn’t have anything against you. This is not some personal vendetta, this getting dropped thing. It’s strictly business and there are no hard feelings from them. Keeping you just isn’t that good for their business. They have servers to pay for and not as many people advertising on their networks to maintain that many accounts. Too many accounts are resulting in a negative return on their investment567and the best thing they can do at this point is get rid of them to cut down on their cost.
They can also use the smaller number of accounts that they think they can work with to appeal to more advertisers. This is a good thing for Blip and for those who put ads on their videos because it means we might stop getting the same damn ads over and over again.
I’m sure there’s also a few people who will point out that Youtube comments are awful and horrible. You know what? Get over it. You can turn those off. You can moderate them. You’ll get bad comments and good comments everywhere you go. You’ll get genuinely nice people who like your stuff and want to have a discussion and you’ll have people who want nothing more than to harass you off the internet. If you’re a female or a minority, you’ll probably get harassed worse. Get used to it. It’s not right, but you need a thick skin if you’re going to put yourself out there and Youtube comments are as good a way as any to learn to deal with that.
But I Still Want to Make Money
You’re going to have to start being creative, then. If you’ve switched to another video service and it won’t give you the revenue you want, or any revenue at all, then you need to start thinking about making money outside of just putting out your videos. That, however, is completely up to yo to do.
What I suggest is making good content that will get you a following. If you have a following, then try the Vimeo model of putting out a tip jar for people to donate if they like it. Give them an incentive to talk about you. Give them a reason to pass your name, site and content around. Give them content. Give them swag. Give them something to make them want to give you money in return.
If that’s not good enough and you just want to make videos and get revenue back and you can’t do that with anything I’ve listed, I don’t know what to tell you. Get better at making videos so Blip or Springboard will take you? Keep looking? And if you can’t find anything, maybe stop making videos and find something else to do.
Best of luck to us all.
- If you’re doing this to become famous, you’re probably shit outta luck, but you could do it to earn a steady income realistically. [↩]
- When I was first looking at them, only Youtube had that. How the times change. [↩]
- By which I mean some of the options [↩]
- In my opinion, a paywall around your content is always a terrible idea. [↩]
- By this I mean their bandwidth and hosting costs for the videos aren’t yielding enough ad revenue to pay for said costs. [↩]
- At least, I assume this is what they are saying in the meetings. [↩]
- This is also theory and speculation, but it’s the explanation I am going with for now. [↩]
@sheakoshan I’m not feeling as pessimistic as many others, but good advice all around.