Sunday, February 15, 2009

Blip.tv Online Video Distribution Model Featured on USA Today

Blip.tv was the subject of a major news story this past week in a feature article, Blip.tv gives videomakers a chance to be a star, by Jefferson Graham in USATODAY.com. The article focused on Blip's successful business model for online video distribution. Graham has covered Blip in the past and last July he wrote an article, Why Blip is better than YouTube, which compared the two video sharing sites.

Blip.tv is the online video distribution platform for new "up-and-coming" independent shows where you can watch videos in higher quality and resolution. Like YouTube, producers can create a channel, post videos and syndicate content all for free. It's not the anything goes viral video site like YouTube but a more focused approach.

In a blog post reporting on the story, Blip.tv Demonstrates its Value, Jamison Tilsner of Tilzy.tv wrote,"In a feature article in USA Today, Blip.tv’s function in the ecosystem of video content (on and off the computer screen) is set straight. The company that, in early 2005, set out to build an organization that would exploit economies of scale to market, monetize and serve videos, giving creators the freedom to focus on their crafts, has become the standard-bearer of the new medium. Perhaps most importantly, the article shows that Blip.tv’s business model seems to have proven itself."

This video was featured in the story:



In the article Graham writes, "It's actually a video-distribution service. People upload their video shows to Blip, which syndicates them to video sites such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN and elsewhere on the Web. About 1 million "episodes" have been uploaded to Blip."

"We target anyone who wants to make quality content and doesn't want to pitch the show to a network TV exec," says Kaplan, Blip's chief operating officer. "There's a lot of great content a network exec might say no to that could be an excellent and profitable Web show."

For many online video publishers Blip is the main vehicle for content delivery and all the CDN costs are borned by Blip and not individual producers or web studios. The recognizable Blip player is seen on Beet.TV, web shows by For Your Imagination and "some 38,000 homegrown shows across the Web, which Blip splits ad revenue 50/50 with the producers."


Mike Hudak, Blip's CEO says on the Blip.tv blog that it's not that easy to make five figures on Blip and that it takes a lot work to get there,

"There are two quick notes I wanted to make about the USA Today piece. First, the story somewhat understates our traffic because it relies on the third-party measurement service Quantcast. Quantcast reports that we reach 13.2 million viewers and do about 32 million video views, but it only counts about half of our traffic so far (this is due to a number of factors, including the difficulty in tracking iTunes downloads). The actual numbers are roughly double that. We are working with audience measurement companies like Quantcast and ComScore to properly recognize that traffic.

Second, I think it’s easy to read the article and think that making money with blip is easy. It’s not. We’re very proud that DavidJr has pulled in almost $40,000 from us and that we sent a roughly $26,000 check to the folks at Nostalgia Critic. We’ve sent a lot of money to a lot of other people, too. All of it earned from advertisers in exchange for hard work, dedication and a little bit of luck."


Andy Plesser also published this story Beet.TV: Blip.tv Pays Emerging Video Producers Well in to Five Figures, USA Today. He says, "Here at Beet.TV, we use Blip.tv as our primary video publishing platform and as our non-exclusive advertising representative. Blip landed marquis sponsors for us including Adobe, Holiday Inn Express and Akamai. The Akamai program went live today. Through Blip's efforts, and keeping our costs low, Beet.TV is breaking even. Yeah!"

He also I've republished an interview with co-founder/COO Dina Kaplan from late last year.

In October 2008, Blip.tv secured its second institutional round of capital, led by Bain Capital Ventures. From the press release, "Blip.tv joins other exciting companies in Bain's venture portfolio, including LinkedIn, Thumbplay, The Find, Tokbox and LaLa Media. Blip.tv closed its first round of institutional funding in June 2007 with Ambient Sound Investments, the venture capital vehicle of the four founding engineers of Skype."

"In conjunction with this funding round, blip.tv announced that it served more than 51 million video views in September 2008, a more than 250% increase over September 2007. Blip.tv measures video views by counting only one view per IP address per video per session. 'Blip.tv is the leading distributor of niche video programming on the Web, and we're proud to add them to our portfolio,' said Jeffrey Glass, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures. 'Blip leads its industry in the number and quality of content creators, in video views and in monetization. We're thrilled to be joining the blip.tv team and we're looking forward to exciting growth and innovation in the future.'"

Congratulations to everyone at Blip for proving their business model and being a leader in the online video community.

About Blip
We've got a great service for great shows. A new class of entertainment is emerging that is being made by the people without the support of billion-dollar multinationals. Our mission is to support these people by taking care of all the problems a budding videoblogger, podcaster or Internet TV producer tends to run into. We'll take care of the servers, the software, the workflow, the advertising and the distribution. We leave you free to focus on creativity.

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