The Internet video revolution has come, saw and conquered. What’s left to say?

Well, occasionally things happen that deserve attention.

Here are two big ones that jumped out at me while I was in the UK:

1. YouTube hits 1 billion video downloads a day

Holy smokes!  There are only about 1 billion Internet users. Does this mean that everyone on the Internet is watching an average of at least 1 video a day on YouTube?

I guess it does and then there are people who watch 50 or more a day. Me, for example. It’s not hard to do.

I don’t watch TV. Why bother when I can call up anything I want whenever I want? TV is doomed.

2. The Internet creams TV

Speaking of the UK, the amount of money spent by advertisers on Internet advertising in that country just exceeded the amount spent on TV advertising. The numbers are 1.75 billion for online advertising vs. 1.64 for TV advertising. More evidence that…TV is doomed.

And this is only the beginning.  Looks like the things I predicted when I started this blog four years ago are starting to come to pass.

Speaking of beginnings, I’ve been going over to the UK occasionally for years but something “clicked” for me on my latest trip and after tidying up some business here, I’m heading right back.

Next year, I’m planning on spending a few months there as I do in New Orleans ever year.

One of the reasons I’m going back to the UK so soon is that a bunch of my Internet marketing friends are attending the UFC fights in Manchester. System grad Lloyd Irvin has a team in the competition. To fill out an already busy week, I’m bringing New Orleans jazz poet Chuck Perkins over to do some gigs in that poetry and music loving city to help open the door for other New Orleans musicians looking for new markets to perform in.

Never a dull moment.

Interestingly, all the guys who are coming over for the fights and the seminar are heavy users of Internet video – that’d be Lloyd, me, Greg Davis and Ben Moskel.

Heavy users of video in our marketing – and we’re all doing well. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Ken

While it was cool to be able to buy a video camera for $29, being able to use it only once was not cool

That's where the hacker came in.

As I reported nearly three years ago, hackers were already at work to unlock the camera's "one use"
limitation so it could be used over and over again.

To its credit, the Pure Digital got a clue, raised the price on its cameras significantly and took over the market for super small, super cheap video cameras beating giants like Sony and Panasonic.

The result is they just sold their company to Cicso for $590 million dollars. Not bad considering all the gloom and doom these days.

What's the message? There are actually lots of them.

1. Listen to your customers – even people who are hacking your products

2. The right idea at the right time executed the right way trumps bad times and big companies

3. You really should be paying close attention to what we're up to at the System. We constantly catch meaningul trends and opportunities long before they appear on the radar screens of others.

They're still time to find out what we're doing at System 2009 this march 27 & 29 in Chicago:

http://www.thesystemseminar.com/inc.html

.

I could also add to that the word "diffident" which means "lacking in confidence" – something marketers who don't have a
clear target in mind eventually become.

The solution is another "diff" word: differentiate, one meaning of which is "to make specialized or distinct."

If you're aiming at a target, it helps a lot if there's one clear target and there's a big red bulls eye painted on it.

What does this have to do with monetizing web video?

A lot.

There
are many fascinating topics in the world, but unless you want to become
like "YouTube" what you're really looking for is not a topic, but a
clearly differentiated market.

One of the bells your advertising MUST ring in your prospect's mind if you want to be successful is the "This is for ME!" bell.

That's hard to do if you're trying to be all things to all people.

I see this mistake being made over and over again.

If
you're YouTube, maybe you can get away with it (though I'm not sure that YouTube with its tens of billions of views is doing that well. )

But if have e a one-person operation (or one that aspires to run "lean and mean" forever) you need tightly focused targets.

It's
true that one micro-market might not be enough to support you, but if
you target a micro-market you will get that business to its natural critical mass
much faster and you'll get a much better yield on the market you attract. Then,
once that enterprise is on solid ground, you can start another one.

What does all this have to so with marketing video on the web?

A lot.

Here's an example of someone who "gets" this.

If you're a jazz fan, you will LOVE it and will want to subscribe and tell all your fellow jazz fans about it.

If you're not, you should still study what this guy is doing. Simplicity can be deceiving.

http://www.jazzonthetube.com/page/16.html

Ken

Instead I spent my free time making and promoting videos.

(Hint: Making and promoting Internet videos pays better than blogging.)

Results: We crossed the 11,000,000 video view mark for 2008 yesterday. No one is more shocked than me.

Total costs to host, serve and promote?

Less than $100 for the year.

Net revenue (entirely from AdSense): a hair less than 1 cent per view. 

Total time spent: 15 to 20 minutes per day – every day.

If you do the math on the return on my time (assume 20 minutes a day and 1.2 cents per view), you will discover something interesting.

See? I told you Internet video was for real

It took me two and years of modest, steady effort to get it to this point. Note the word steady. This is not get rich quick. On the other hand, with constant tending, the revenue is virtually bullet proof – and it grows.

The tools I used: YouTube, aweber and a very simple web site. And that's it.

Later when realized what I was doing had promise, I created a custom page creation/content manager program to speed up the page creation process and allow me to track my stats easier.

I explained this unique video publishing system in detail at the Smart Beginners seminar in Chicago and at the UK Intensive in London. The people who attended those seminars were very smart indeed.

I will not be teaching it again in a public setting again until the fall of 2009 at the earliest. Watch this space for details.

Overnight, it became dead simple to copy and post video to the Internet and everyone started doing it.

Copyright owners wailed and gnashed their teeth. Can you blame them? Suddenly, it was easier to copy and repost their uber-expensive products than it was to make paper copies. (At least you have to pay to make photocopies.)

To get the ball rolling, Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube.  (That lawsuit is still pending I believe.)

In the meantime, someone got intelligent.

A company called Auditude ran the numbers…

It turns out that viewers upload 20 times number of clips that content producers do and viewership of viewer-uploaded videos is SIX times higher than the viewership of videos posted by content owners.

In short, unpaid volunteers were generating more viewers for content owners than the content owners were able to produce for themselves.

MySpace, working with Autitude's technology, can now identify clips produced by Viacom (MTV etc.)  uploaded by MySpace customers and automatically attach relevant ads to them.

How beautiful is this?

Viacom gets paid for its content. MySpace gets paid for access to its audience. Users get to go wild and do what they want to do which is repost video's they like.

Imagine being able to expand the distribution of your product SIXFOLD by just letting people do what they want to do.

For years, "viral marketing" has been the holy grail for marketers. With help from Autitude, Viacom is getting it instead of filing lawsuits to try to stop it.

We took an important subject that the media wants to ignore and put it – and kept it  – at the top of YouTube’s "New and Politics" charts.

As I write this, the video – "The Truth about Katrina" – is the #10 highest rated video in this category of this month. Amazing when you think about what we’re up against – McCain, Obama, Palin, Wall Street melt down, etc. etc. and the fact that the Katrina anniversary and Hurricane Gustav are long over.

The underdog – in this case the people of New Orleans and Southern Louisiana – can win…if the underdog has some Internet savvy.

Speaking of savvy, YouTube is adding so many cool "bells and whistles" that it’s hard for me to keep up.

Can anyone point us to a good online resource (maybe hidden somewhere on YouTubes’s site) that goes into the fine points of creating and customizing a YouTube channel and using all the other new stuff they’re offering (text annotation, automatic transfer to another video, click from video to a web site)

The speed of change in this medium has swamped my ability to keep up. If you’ve got anything to share on this point, I’m sure fellow SystemVideoBlog readers will appreciate it. I know I will.

(Please limit posts to this subject.)

Thanks.

Ken

The numbers are in for August.

We did it again PLUS 10%.

I’ll be revealing the formula I used to create this amazing traffic magnet at the London, UK System Intensive and the Chicago System Boot Camp.

Cash required to start: zero. My total time commitment: 15 minutes per day.

Revenue: Currently just a hair away from five figures net per month. And growing at 10% per month. Perfectly scalable. Could be ten times the size with no additional work required and the market has at least that much room to grow.

A friend asked if I could help promote a video I made for her group on YouTube.

"What category?" I asked.

"News and politics," she said.

"Let me get this straight. The Democrats are right in the middle of their convention. The Republicans are starting their own soon. All the TV news, all the newspaper headlines, all the blogs are focused on the conventions and you want to go up against that?"

(I mean, really. Can you imagine anything more impractical, more pie-in-the-sky, more unlikely to ever happen?)

Then she hit me with the zinger:

"It’s for New Orleans."

"Oh…OK…Let’s do it!"

24 hours ago, we had a zero ranking on YouTube. Now look at where we’re at…On the top line of the highest rated videos, right next to the Democrats and the Republicans.

Let’s see…the candidates have spent tens of millions of dollars to promote themselves. The news media threw in, what, maybe another $100 million worth of free exposure. They have thousands of minions and operatives at their beck and call.

And we’re right up there…for zero dollars…in our spare time…all from a lap top.

That’s Internet power baby. The System Way.

Can your guru do that?  Can they go up against the real world’s biggest media guns, call it, win it and do it in real time?

Sometime next week, I’ll explain how YOU can do this too – and you won’t have to touch your credit card to learn.

Meanwhile, here’s the video. Soon we’re going to get knocked down to the "Weekly" top rated instead of "Today’s" top rated so I’m still hustling for  traffic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wln_iq5bc8k

Check it out: Bottom right hand corner.  It’s called "The Katrina Myth."

Best placement money can buy – but we got it free.

A friend and I made this video from scratch – from concept, to script, to production, to being seen by thousands online – in just three weeks from start to finish.

All the footage was "found" on the Internet and it was a very part time effort for both of us.

I’d like you to click through to YouTube and rank it (with five stars), favorite it, and comment on it.

If readers of this blog generate at least 20,000 YouTube views, I’ll interview the guy who did the production and post it for you.

If you guys generate 50,000 or more visits, I’ll explain how I get 1 million plus visitors to a video site working just 15 minutes a day.

You have seven days to make your numbers. Good luck – and as you’ll see – this is for a good cause.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wln_iq5bc8k