On the heels of Comcast & Time Warner's murmurings about offering cable content free-of-charge to existing subscribers, CBS has nearly sold out $30 million in ad inventory for its upcoming March Madness on Demand.
Through MMOD, basketball junkies can stream all of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament games. MMOD even comes with a "boss button" that pops up a fake spreadsheet if at-work fans sense The Man approaching (sponsored by Comcast, of course).
If you're sitting on a niche content library with a faithful audience--be it entertainment, ministry-related, or otherwise--think about the implications of CBS' success for your online offerings. While you're at it, consider that other networks are capitalizing on tremendous demand for niche content through paid subscriptions for video on demand and live online events. In one previously unreported case of which I'm intimately aware, a Christian ministry netted thousands of subscriptions and a whopping profit from a recent live-streamed convention.
Whatever your model, if you've got a niche content library that's already generating interest, you're halfway there. Now you simply need to combine your content with an easy-to-use/easy-to-manage Internet TV platform.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Niche Online Video + Loyal Audience = Big Ad Dollars
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Social Networking That Pays the Bills - Ministry & Business Marketing and Media Blog
Check out this insight-packed interview with Albert Cheng, executive vice president of digital media for the Disney-ABC Television Group. Among his many worthy observations, Cheng asserts:
"Tying into Facebook and other social networks doesn't mean we can necessarily monetize our content, because open social activity is going to be more monetizable in our branded environments. What is most monetizable is the social activity around our branded content anywhere."
Translation: your branded environment, not YouTube or another mass market website, is the best place to encourage social networking around your brand. And be sure that folks can access your content in any place and on any device.
Too often brands deploy the right social networking tools but do so within the wrong context. That is, folks can add your content to their Facebook pages, comment & link to your goodies, reference them on Twitter and more, but not enough of this activity leads them to and occurs within your branded environment.
Encouraging social networking around your offerings is great. Using social networking to drive traffic to and spur interaction within your brand-centric setting is what pays the bills.
