Outsourcing Everything but the Company Name

"When companies embark upon the creation of a new brand name and image it is critical to dedicate sufficient research and messaging development at the outset," says Christina Daigneault, president and founder of Orchard Strategies, a full-service communications firm that focuses on branding and earned media strategies. "By investing in your brand up front, you will have an opportunity to craft a powerful image that will inspire and engage your customers and make a splash in your industry. The right name and brand image strengthens a company launch and serves as a tool to develop buzz over time."

Another extreme option is to not name your company at all. There are a lot of businesses popping up around domain name "squatting." This might sound "lowbrow" from the early days of the dot-com boom/bust, but there is a thriving business around capturing traffic from misspellings of commonly visited websites. There is a growing opportunity around building websites that are dynamically created for the visitors to the site depending on their origin and planned destination. If you were to use one of these strategies, you would never have to come up with a name for your company at all. Revenue from such a website could then be used to underwrite development and delivery of your video content.

Robertson Price, founder of MyVideoDaily, tells us that "Domainers, as they are called, buy hundreds or thousands of domain names that, for any number of reasons, enjoy a level of visitorship. The result is a small number of users who will visit each site every month due to a link they followed from a search engine. These users are often immediately subjected to advertising. If the owner of the domain is able to yield greater than $7 or $8 a year (the cost of the domain name), they consider their domain profitable. One $8 domain doesn’t make a business, but the aggregation of hundreds or thousands of moderately profitable domains can start to make some real money. These days you don’t need a company name to be happily profitable; you don’t even need a company identity or location."

The major difference between building a streaming media business in 1998 and in 2008 is the ability to outsource almost every piece of your business for free or for cheap today. What remains the same, though, is that if your content sucks, you won’t be in business for too long.

As you build your streaming media business, take into close consideration what you outsource and the impact it will have on your overall business. This article provides you with the technical tools for building or outsourcing the building of your business, but in the end you know your business and your customers better than anyone else. Listen to your audience and pay close attention to your budget and build out the best site you can.