Someone else gets my excitement about video advertisements. Chris Pirillo talks in this post about in-video advertising, and why it’s the next hot thing. I have to agree with him. Once in-video advertising gets to the point where it’s economically viable for those with larger audiences to carry advertising within their videos, it’s game over, I’ll probably convert fully over to video and never look back.

It’s a no-brainer. If I can get 100 businesses to invest $100 in improving their business with proven tactics, giving it away free in video format would earn me much more revenue for less work if I could actually monetize the videos. I’d barely have to market - if it’s information they want? I just have to hook into the conversation stream around it and they’ll find me.

I got really turned on about this at my other site when I first heard the AdSense video announcement, thinking they meant to have advertising IN videos, not AS videos on regular sites.

Even though I was wrong about that, if Chris is right, companies are catching on to the fact that this is what video publishers want, you know, besides effective tracking of video statistics. That’s why, if you’re planning on truly cashing in on this video trend, you have to start learning about video and how to mass produce it, now. Particularly if you have a quality infoproduct line, this could be the answer to the prayers of so many smaller online publishers. It’s not about driving traffic with free video as an end unto itself.

It’s about the fact that it is seriously not hard to get someone to watch a video about a topic they are interested in, especially if it’s short. Getting 100 people to watch a video, if exposed in the right market, you can probably do in your sleep. If I can get 100 views of a screencast video that essentially showed the first shadings of Google Universal search results for video, then please.

You could get 1000 views for a five minute video about, say, how to talk dirty to your girlfriend/boyfriend.

The time to grow your video audience and build your video brand is right now, this second. Because then, once it’s built, by the time the video ad market is established and speciality market prices start to go up, you’ll be sitting ever so pretty. If there’s an equivalent of DoubleClick for video, it’s not going to be $5 per thousand - not to speciality markets, and not to people who can generate 1000, 10K, or 100K views a day.

I’ll tell it to you from a buyer’s perspective. I would s#!t if someone said I was going to pay $20 per thousand page views, for exposure on most websites in my market, even if each view represented a unique daily visitor.

Why?

Because I can go to Google or Yahoo and even at a buck a click, if conversion rates for each targeted market were at 1%, I’d get the leads for half the price. I can generate fairly decent leads myself for free.

But I’ve gladly paid $25 to be interviewed in a podcast that I knew had a consistent audience and an archive, though it was quite a small audience, from what I knew. Because I know if someone is going to sit and listen to me yammer for 30 minutes to an hour, they are really focused on that topic and fixin to spend some money. (Lots of times, people don’t even want you to pay, they need content like anyone else. Or you can broker a deal where they get a cut from a special sale. But that’s a topic for another day.) It’s especially sweet if I’m teaching them something for free, so they can test out whether my methods work.

And …

I have much more of their attention. If you’re listening to someone talk, it’s possible that you can multi-task, but it’s not like when you’re surfing the web, where distraction is just a link away. You might be listening to a seminar and slicing onions, or listening to a seminar and playing solitaire, but the part of your brain that absorbs information is fully engaged in the task at hand, if it’s something you’re interested in, you’re engrossed.

My favorite podcast/interviews/teleseminars are when you teach something for free. Expose one small part of your plan, and help people who either can’t afford you yet, or just want to try you out. You get them 100 visitors to their site overnight and they’ll for damn sure pay to learn how to get 1000, at least that’s how it works in business to business.

Now, moving on with our discussion, if it works that great with audio, think about how great this would be with video.

Either you’re watching or you’re not paying attention. There’s no ying/yang about it, no half way - if you’re watching TV and doing something else, you aren’t really watching, (with the exception of watching porn during sex, of course :) ).

And the beautiful thing? You can pretty much choose any content you like that has a market. Do a self help show. Do a romance reality show. Do an internet dating how-to. You don’t have to worry about getting an audience of millions the way networks do. At the prices I’m thinking of, you could make a living just from a trickle of visitors.

There are thousands of small businesses you could pitch the idea of advertising to, who would jump at the opportunity, at prices that would make all parties happy. There are lots of nationwide brands already buying web ads in online presentations of network TV shows. And if a mortgage company would pay $100K for a premium slot in a primetime demographic that isn’t really narrowed, how much do you think they’d pay for a access to a smaller market of people who are all interested in buying a second home?

Maybe it would only be ten thousand people, but even at ten cents per unique view, it’s $1000 per ad, per show. What if you had 25 shows a month and sold them all the units?

But, enough fantasizing about all the yummy moolah - after all, I’m not an advertising executive. I can only speak as an entrepreneur who likes to recklessly fantasize aloud and gossip.

Some smart company with more financial resources/backers than I have is going to figure this out and smarten up the existing model, and make a ton of sick, ridiculous money. I really believe we’re not going to be talking $5 per thousand views or even $25. The entrepreneur with 100 shows that each have about 100-1000 steady viewers each (or one show with 100K to 1M viewers) is the one who is going to profit on this trend, you heard it here second.

[tags]web video, video advertising, in video advertising, video ads, video revenue models, video, online video[/tags]