How to make less than a fiver from 10,000 video views

Photo by Bitboy

Hello loyal readers and viewers of Yorkshire Telly. We’ve been hearing rumblings about the advertising on the website recently. Rumblings along the lines of “you must be making some serious cash from those adverts playing around the artist videos”, “Isn’t that a little unfair on the artist if they are not getting any of it”, “You must be making a fortune!”.

In short, for the duration of time the ads have been running we’ve made less than a fiver.

As the producer of Yorkshire Telly Live and one that takes care of these sorts of things, I feel I should lay this out clearly for anyone with any concerns.

This entire venture started out as a labour of love and continues so. We don’t charge the artists to film a video for them, we built the website for nothing, pay all the hosting costs and provide exposure, willingly and happily for those wanting a video. It is a platform for exposing the talent in the region to a global audience outside the mainstream broadcasters.

There are no official sponsors of the website, we hold 100% editorial control over the content we produce and these adverts are inserted automatically based on the content. The advertising all started when we switched systems from Vimeo to Blip. Both very good services but I chose Blip because they provide better RSS and playlist functionality for free. They also give you the option to insert adverts which we decided to trial.

So since making that switch, Blip has recorded just shy of 10,000 views across all our videos and the ads have generated $6.58 as you can see below. Thats dollars, so lets convert that to pounds, thats £4.19 before a fee for currency conversion! You begin to see that we really aren’t making the thousands that some believe us to be. In fact, we have just left it in the account. It’s quite a rubbish system really, I mean for 10,000 views we get less than a fiver, it’s a cruel world in online video and we’re still learning about it.

So when you see some global brand promoting their latest shaving products we haven’t struck a big deal for thousands of pounds for that to be there, it’s an automated process that if you click through we get a couple of peanuts in the post by pigeon mail.

In light of people’s concerns and the ridiculously poor payouts we have decided to turn the ads off for now. This doesn’t mean that we are closing the door to advertising at all. In fact quite the opposite. This boat isn’t going to float on its own forever and taking a labour of love to the next level and turning it into a business that is sustainable and profitable inevitably means that we will be selling advertising space on the site and sometimes in the video. But in the future this will most likely be far more relative to individual videos and more apparent in the live show.

As with most startups we are constantly working things out as we go along, including how to cover costs and pay ourselves for the time put in. The last thing we want to do is exploit those contributing their talents to the site and I hope that this post explains where we are coming from and clears the air for those with concerns.

On a future note, we have some exciting plans for 2012. Lots more artists to come, a new season of live shows, new venue and broadcasting platforms all of which will be revealed very soon.

Stay tuned and thanks for watching.