It’s no secret any more that as broadband becomes more prevalent in the home, the demand for video content has spiked. An interesting new service called ClipSyndicate, which launched in Beta in April, offers web publishers a way to edit and add video news clips to websites and email newsletters, and monetize them in two ways.
The leadership at ClipSyndicate’s creator, Critical Mention Inc., already has an impressive pedigree. The founder and CEO is Sean Morgan, who sold text news syndication service Screamingmedia to CBS Marketwatch for over $100 million a short time after it went public in August 2000.
Vice president of sales Jim Pavoldi promises that ClipSyndicate will do for video news syndication what Screamingmedia did for text news. Touting it as a “one stop shop” for publishers to search for and publish timely and relevant rich media from broadcasters like Bloomberg, Clear Channel Television, and MultiVu, as well as the four major network affiliates, the ClipSyndicate platform delivers a thumbnail, headline, and summary to client sites.
Aside from the large selection of syndicated content, the boon for this service will be its ease of use. Once signed up, webmasters search through the ClipSyndicate database on whatever topic (say “digital cable”) and a lineup of thumbnails appear with the text of the broadcast surrounding the search term.
The clips (1-5 minutes each) have been processed by ClipSyndicate’s voice-to-text search engine, so that the transcript of the clip is available. Publishers, as the new content owner, can cut the clip to any length and the text makes it findable by text search engines. The data stays on ClipSyndicate’s database so end-users cannot take it from your website and place it on theirs.
Monetizing The Clips
EMarketer projects that video advertising will nearly triple in 2007 to $640 million, reaching $1.5 billion by the end of the decade. The ClipSyndicate service gives marketers and webmasters two ways to attract a chunk of that video spending.
First, Website publishers keep 5-10% of revenue from Critical Mention’s content partners based on the number of clip views (CPM) driven from their web property. Secondly, the service allows publishers to work out third party deals with advertisers and insert banner ads on the media player and streaming video ads before clips.
Syndication satisfies the desire for content providers to increase their audience size, and web publishers can benefit from that need by becoming their own media outlet and monetizing content. ClipSyndicate acts as a media broker that brings the two together.
“As more and more video moves onto the Web, and proliferation of broadband access continues, advertisers hungry for new, more impactful ways of reaching key audiences will follow suit,” said Morgan. “We believe that as the business scales up, our emphasis on aggregating vertical sites will drive some of the highest CPMs for video advertising on the Internet.”
Pavoldi points to client sites like LucyTheWonderDog‘s Canine News Network, keeping dog lovers up to date with the latest in puppy love, and TMC.net, who recently added video three video channels focused on subject matters like VoIP and Call Centers.
“ClipSyndicate provides broadcasters with a huge opportunity to find new markets for their previously broadcast assets,” said Sean Morgan. “We are offering broadcasters the means to reach vertical markets, generate new revenue streams and extend their brand to the long tail of the Internet, previously inaccessible to them.”
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