TubeMogul: Next New Networks is #1
By Tim on Wednesday, June 25th, 2008
We got a nice shot in the arm this week when TubeMogul published their first monthly list of the Top 40 publishers using TubeMogul, which put Next New Networks at #1 among great company like Tornante / Vuguru (#5), MyDamnChannel (#9), Ford Models (#10), CBS Interactive (#11) and HBO (#12). TubeMogul’s list ranks the performance in viewership of videos uploaded using TubeMogul’s service to super-distribute their content to various participating sites including YouTube, Veoh, Blip.tv, Yahoo, and many others. I’m sure it rewards prodigiousness of output, and certainly the performance of independent producers like Chris Pirillo (#2), iJustine (#7), Nalts (#8), and Rocketboom (#12) are testament to that fact — they’re giving new media companies like us and Tornante and major labels as big as CBS, Warner Brothers (#33), FOX (#34) and Sony (#40) a run for their money with a fraction of the investment.
Today, we also announced that we’ve added three new partnership deals with Yahoo!, Hulu, and Metacafe, making us the leading superdistribution network on the web, with over twenty signed partnership deals (the release includes a nice quote from Brett Wilson at TubeMogul about us having “risen to the top”). It’ll be fun to see how our stuff does on Hulu, where SNL and Family Guy clips are popular, which bodes well for some of our original stuff on Barely Political and Channel Frederator. I recently was on a panel at OMMA with Hulu’s Kevin McGurn and a few others and liked how he talked how they curate and program the site — it was hard not to spill the news we’d be partnering with them right there. And we already have had a few breakout hit episodes and a growing monthly audience on Metacafe and Yahoo, where we’ve been experimenting with distributing for a while — it’ll be exciting to be able to build sponsorship and advertising programs that can incorporate those audiences.
It’ll be interesting to see what the next year holds for superdistribution. We’ve already learned that it’s not enough just to put your content everywhere with syndication and distribution tools like TubeMogul and Blip.tv. There’s a lot more that we do, with the support of our partners: following all kinds of metrics, from video views to commenting and favoring to the ratio of on-site vs. off-site (e.g. embedded player) viewership; building editorial relationships with our partners; doing a lot of outreach to viewers, bloggers, and media to try to build repeat viewership and subscriptions. We’ve also pursued relationships with more specific destinations where our networks’ viewers might be, for example, Streetfire with our automotive networks, and Craft, Etsy and Threadless with ThreadBanger.
The next step, of course, is developing sponsorship and advertising models that put the power of the superdistribution network to good use. One sponsor that’s already along for the ride is Janome, which recently began a six month sponsorship of ThreadBanger, and who sees their sponsor integration ride across ThreadBanger’s many points of viewership across the web, from our website, iTunes and YouTube to our latest partners, with each one that we add increasing the value of their investment in us. We plan to have a lot more good news to share on similar fronts in the coming months.
