The Ultimate Guide to Creating Online Video Content That Works, Part 1

Super-Serving Your Fans vs. Attracting New Viewers
"Super-serve" is a buzzword of programming online video that frames many of the decisions being made about what content to bring online. "One of the things we like to say is we super-serve our audience," says MTV’s Clayman. "If you’re a music fan or a celebreality and culture fan and you’re on VH1, we’re going to super-serve you and give you all the content you’d want. Serving our current fanbase is incredibly important to us. And that has a very positive ancillary effect on bringing in more viewers."

The idea’s quite simple: Identify your audience, provide them with what they’re interested in, and, if you’re doing a good job, you’ll retain your current viewers and begin building a reputation as the go-to destination for that particular type of content.

But adding new content can also be an opportunity to attract new eyeballs. "You definitely want to serve the fans that are already on your site because they’re there and we’re trying to appeal to their needs," says Phillips. "But also it’s about trying to find those fans that we don’t have right now perhaps by adding coverage of under-served sports like cricket or rugby that may not be getting exposure on TV but that ESPN360 might be the right platform for."

Having a specific audience you’re targeting can help your videos tap into the social nature of online video viewing, especially if the content you have is exclusive to your site. "What’s attracting people is access to content and in many cases exclusivity of that content. If you know there’s a fanbase of Brazilian National League soccer fans and your site is the only place to get that video online, in this very defined community you can find thousands and thousands of users who will very virally find out about the service and then let their fellow fans know where and how to find it for themselves," says JumpTV president Nada Usina.

ESPN360 breaks down its programming efforts into three categories of content: "We look at the major U.S. sporting events like college basketball, football, NBA, NASCAR, tennis Grand Slams, and so on, which are going to drive eyeballs. Then you get into the passion sports like soccer and cricket, though not necessarily just international sports but also domestic ones like lacrosse. Those sports do extremely well in terms of time spent viewing. The last piece we focus on is what we call the wide world of sports, our eclectic programming, like the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, which really satisfies the curiosity factor for our viewers."

But deciding whether to focus on catering to your existing core audience versus trying to identify content that will attract new viewers can be a bit of a balancing act. "The problem is this: What got me on the radar on YouTube was my interacting with and serving a core audience of faithful viewers. [There are] probably about [20,000 to 50,000] community people, but the vast majority [of] viewers are there for one video and are then out. You can’t have a video go nuts on YouTube without feeding the latter, but you’ll languish if you don’t feed the former," says Nalts. "So sometimes I’ll have very insular videos for the community, and sometimes I’ll have videos that are more generally understood that could pop up anywhere and make sense."

What was interesting is that, other than the sports sites citing the benefits of exclusivity and niche audiences in terms of attracting large audiences, the sentiment seemed to be that it’s not so much content that drives success in online video as it is distribution and syndication. In other words, it’s not about getting the rights to high-profile content such as the Super Bowl; it’s more about creating content for an audience, using distribution through multiple channels to get that content out there for the audience to find, and then driving them back to your site. That’s not to say having high quality doesn’t matter, but it does stress the importance of pursuing robust, multifaceted distribution strategies with multiple partners when trying to build an online audience.

In Part 2 of this article next issue, we’ll look at the importance of video quality, short-form versus long-form content, and advice for major media companies and independent content creators alike.