Infected
When Sanger Robinson and two friends arrived at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival with a camera and microphone, their chances of making a splash in online entertainment seemed remote indeed. They had to beg for interviews with stars like Matthew Broderick, which they hoped to stream at their just-launched Web site, Netbroadcaster.com. At the time, most of the online buzz at Sundance was about entertainment sites with deep pockets and big plans.
"We felt like schmucks," Robinson recalls. "We were sleeping on a friend’s floor."Now in 2001, most of those big-name sites — you know who they are — have either died very public deaths or burned through their coffers and gone quietly into the night. But Netbroadcaster, a compendium of streaming entertainment video, is thriving. In February, Jupiter Media Metrix reported that Netbroadcaster’s 3.5 million unique visitors made it the sixth-largest newcomer on the Internet.
In fact, says Robinson, Netbroadcaster is profitable, even though (or perhaps because) it never got a cent of venture capital. In December, in the thick of the dot-com die-off, Netbroadcaster’s 10 employees got a Christmas bonus. Now, the company may have to vacate its four rooms on West 7th Street in Los Angeles for something closer to Hollywood.
What did Netbroadcaster do right? For one thing, it made sure its content — which started as public-domain film clips and Robinson’s own celebrity sightings — got distributed as widely as possible. Here’s how: At the Netbroadcaster site, users get streams for free but have to register — a mechanism that gives the company valuable data about its customers; namely, their e-mail addresses. Netbroadcaster then promotes its offerings through an e-mail newsletter. At the bottom of every e-mail is a promotional tag line and a link to a streaming clip available only to Netbroadcaster members. In addition, a spate of good publicity for one of the company’s only original pieces of content — a parody called "Being Regis Philbin" — hasn’t hurt, either.
Netbroadcaster’s popularity curve rose in classic viral fashion, which is to say, steeply. It took the company 10 months — from January to October 2000 — to get 1 million users signed up for its e-mail newsletter, said Sean Costello, the company’s chief creative officer. By January 2001, that number had jumped to 2 million, and by mid-March, 3 million.
"We didn’t have any money to brand ourselves," says chief executive officer Robinson. "We saw the value of acquiring an audience first and the content later."With exclusive content and a mechanism to spread the message far and wide, Netbroadcaster is a case study in "viral marketing" — that buzzword and phenomenon that has spawned some of the Internet’s greatest success stories, like Hotmail, Napster and the Blair Witch Project.
| Infected Marketing directors have long tinkered in the Internet's petri dish in hopes of ...
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The premise of viral marketing, as its name suggests, is to spread a message on the Internet in much the same way that humans spread viruses — from one to many. Salespeople have long known the power of word-of-mouth as a sales technique. Apply the same principle to the giant worldwide conversation called the Internet, and you can have a marketer’s dream: a message spread across the world, instantly, exponentially, and for free. The trouble is activating the viral mechanism, something that remains a mystery even for veteran marketing directors. But when you add to the equation, streaming media — which has proven its worth in advertising click-through rates — you have a considerably more attractive platform for the viral mechanism.