Streaming Media East 2007: For The New York Times, Video Now Just as Important as Print
"Recommendations from other users—including bloggers—are very important to determining what hits or what flops," he said.
Monetizing Video Journalism
Partnerships for videos will also be announced with key websites, said Nisenholtz, to allow joint experimentation with traffic, syndication, and business monetization models.
"Our partnership with TiVo is in search of the ‘living room iPod’," said Nisenholtz. "And the traffic growth of the TiVo partnership has been successful, introducing an audience to our digital content that may not have otherwise been willing to view it. With the advent of Apple TV, however, we’re curious to see how much ‘rawness’ of video that’s acceptable on a website will continue to be acceptable when the content moves back on to the TV."
The Times website has more than 26 million unique visitors per month worldwide, up from 1 million unique visitors per month in 1997, and Nisenholtz provided a quick analysis of monetizing video content that showed that a target of 1% of the video advertising space isn’t an impossible goal based on current visitors, although he failed to say how many of today’s current unique visitors can be converted to watch video.
"Even with a scaleable production model, making money is going to be hard," said Nisenholtz. "At one percent of the total expected growth, or $60 million, we would need 45 million streams based on a $60 CPM, which is a quite high CPM charge. More realistically, a 60 million stream per-month target would be required, as we don’t see ourselves doing a video subscription model to reach that target."
When asked about types of advertising that worked, Nisenholtz noted the general dissatisfaction with lengthy pre-roll videos, as well as NBC Universal’s move to ban pre-rolls of longer than 15 seconds. He also said that long form video advertising—creating entertaining experiences around the advertiser’s product, akin to the way BMW Films created a buzz in the late 1990s using the carmaker’s products as key story elements—could work through some form of a "video lounge" that separates this type of content from the news content.
"We think brands serve as a beacon, and we feel our brand is strong enough to differentiate us," said Nisenholtz. "We have begun to think of ourselves as programmers, and feel the brand requires us to focus on quality content for our viewers and utility for our advertisers. While there’s compelling amateur content out there, we’ll put our money on the quality we produce. But since the ‘new big’ is smaller than the ‘old big’ we also think there’s plenty of room for smaller sites to generate revenue if they effectively marry video and print together."