Videosift is in a fairly unique position, in that it doesn't have to host the content of its website.

In my humble opinion, I think it would be best to make up some VS merchandise and use that as your revenue source. Ads will drive people away, no matter how small, and VS kit is the best way to promote yourself to people that may not be that internet savvy yet.

Either that, or asking for donations every once in a while, seems to work for alot of the alternative news sites that I have visited.

Ignoring my other skills in marketing and promotion (the hardcore capitalist growth path), I have to wonder what would be involved with registering you as a Canadian charity?

Ok first, get a freakin' paypal link for donations off of the main page. It won't pay the bills, but it can help reduce costs.

Second, I'm not sure what kind of cpu and memory requirements a page load takes, but I imagine you can save some resources with cached pages. I think the v2.2 might kill the website when you triple the visitors. So maybe cache a static version of the front page and update every ten minutes. (At least for non-logged in visitors, this may help)

Third, goggle ad-sense crap? I'm not a big fan of adwords, but you might be able to sneak some into the far right column at the bottom, or even on an actual videos page underneath the related videos.

Fourth, you could do secret marketing deals with say Sprite and sneak on some frontpage ads for them. heck, some user are probably getting paid to get frontpaged videos for xbox anyways, why not have VS benefit for it.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

We had adwords before we went to the 2.0 design. We've thought about putting them back in, but they haven't been super effective.

If we do so again, we'll probably hide them from registered users as we do with all ads. We really don't want to plaster the site with ads.

Although I would love a swank VS t-shirt, I can't imagine they would be a huge revenue earner.

Without going too much into the financial details - it's a bit of a riddle - we're growing at a rate that requires more resources (human and server) than we have available - but we need to grow even bigger to get the economies of scale that would support VS financially for that growth.

I think a lot of sites are part of a flotilla of different sites, each supporting the other (think gawker) VS is a bit different in that it's just us.

It's hard to put a pricetag on a website, always has been.
I help run a website called ACSSR (http://acssr.slowchop.com), and it has been a huge challenge to find a way to cover the costs of the server usage. So far google ads seem to bring in 2-3 USD a day. Sponsorship is few and far between, and the Paypal donate button hasn't generated much in the way of revenue (notably our users are a younger 10-20 crowd that are less likely to have credit cards).

The only kind of advertising that has worked on me, and made me go clicky click is ones for like Bustedtees.com etc that have *cough* hot ladies wearing funny shirts... so thats the basis of my suggestion. Sex sells.

It's not like you can actually charge for the content, or even membership. The only thing you could possibly do would be to throw in a video ad (10 seconds max) at the end of each vid played. I say the end because the ones at the start of videos reallllly annoy me so if you intend to keep your strong user base i'd recommend against that idea.

Anyways, thats my verbal diahorrea for the next few hours

Here's a good idea, the videos could have an email-this-video type link (which I hate those) AND/OR any email notifications can have a small text line talking about a sponsor.

If you had enough outgoing notification emails, that might be something you can pimp out for revenue.

The other way would be banners, sponsored videos that play before / after video (You got the AJAX working to support this)

Maybe siftbot can spam comments with semi related ads. ie. you could sell metrics that siftbot would plant relevant corporate text into a video comment portion.

I don't think any more tiers should be added to VS membership (donations for abilities etc) - but I think if a user donated then theyre account should be permanent (not sure if users are deleted after a couple months of no activity / log-ins or not). Ads for non-registered users would work well (as it's a revenue stream, although small - but persuades people to register). Or how about a mix of the above? As in, Ads (text/banner/video) for users that haven't donated to VideoSift? (and even more for those non-registered?)

Merchandise (FireFox style!) would work for the dedicated Golds etc. - but would be difficult to implement (with users spread throughout the globe - postage would be costly!) How about Blue Peter style Bronze/Silver/Gold badges for each user to reach that level...(joke!) But seriously; if VS did go down this route: I'd happily offer any printing (mouse mats / T-shirts etc) that I can, if needed?

dag,

an idea came to me which could potentially help VS reach the upper eschelons. since you have much of the framework in place now with channels... and obviously there is great interest in self-links and all the myspace & youtube personal videos.. and since it is so hard to find any good personal videos on youtube, other than a most viewed / most rated...

you could make a my.videosift.com which would be a venue for all that stuff. people could post all their self-made videos and upvote them to sift through the crap from the interesting stuff. You could get a lot of myspacers and the youtube folks who love that stuff. Their videos would get more views and whatever. And I think VS has a much better comment and sifting ability.

Now hopefully all of those videos would only appear on that 'channel' and this community would not see any of it. But it give you the ability to really tap into youtube users and grow the user base, as well as many people would also pop over to the main VS stuff. Also, you could put ad banners and google adwords on all that content. Almost like a permanent siftoff.

(Obviously you would have to have a different new user queue, or none for that.. and I'm not sure if it would be a problem with those users being able to post to main site) We're talking about only adding another checkbox that says "this is a self-link" or something like that.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

That's a really interesting idea, JD. I like the concept of a channel for self-links, if we could keep it separate from the main sift, with maybe a way to graduate to the main sift if enough people vote for it.

Maybe, we could even have it be part of the normal sift, but have that filter enabled by default. Meaning that if people want to see self-linkers they will need to manually filter it in by ticking in their profiles.

Then, if a self-linker is discovered you could just invoke the *my channel invocation to move it to that area. We would need to ensure that siftbot doesn't delete these from the queue. Hmmm, have to think about how that would work.

It's a bit of a radical departure from our blanket no self-link policy, but could be even more effective. Definitely worth considering.

One way to not break anything, would be to not have a queue for the my. stuff. So if you click the 'self-link' checkbox then it just goes over there. And if you invoke a *my it would just go out of queue and over there. (Acutally now that I think about it.. if it was a channel-tag that made it invisible by default in queue, and only visible in the my.videosift queue, then a *my invokation would just add the channel-tag and it would stay in queue like normal, just become 'invisible')

One problem I do foresee is admin-spam from siftbot doing things to my.videosift videos if that side of things grows huge. That is my next feature request, profile option to filter various siftbot messages. Or at the very least, filter out siftbot messages from the 'recent comments' (but sometimes they are useful.. I'm torn.


I also found some links from PlugIM.com another pligg site. So they might be useful for marketing links and ad revenue.
traffic
adsense revenue
something supposedly important that I don't understand
Lists of how to increase traffic

http://www.johnchow.com/index.php/google-adsense-on-a-blog-update/

I think with a paypal link, some begging to keep the servers running, like the occasion posting a bill reminder. And like the above link, putting some AdSense somewhere, maybe some text ads in the rss feed.. Should at least pay the bills. You've created a good website that is a unique offering, and I'm sure people will pay to hear my witty snarks and idiotic rantings.

Heck yesterday, I learned diet cola is worse (more fattening) for you than regular sugared cola. Who knew.

I don't know much about marketing or revenue generating, but I would gladly contribute via paypal.

If people donate, they should get a special icon (paying member) or something.

"If people donate, they should get a special icon (paying member) or something."

We were thinking about showing their user names in green. What if a donation of say a small amount around 5 dollars made it so that you wouldn't have to see advertising for the following 6 months. We did the math and that is about what we would make per user over a 6 month period. Also we would rather not show ads to people who understandably hate them.

What type of ads are these? Google's?

Yeah, with maybe a banner ad after say the 15th comment in long threads.

Ah, OK. Please no pop-ups, Flash, musical, etc.

oh lawd no. I could never support those or intersital ads, as they are clearly the progeny of the dark lord him self.

T-shirts: you can sell a shirt on GoodStorm for $15, and make $8... their base prices are much better than Cafepress. See my writeup.

Bottom line - I got shirts from CafePress and Goodstorm; they were both American Apparel with same print quality. As a seller you can make more with Goodstorm.

>Heck yesterday, I learned diet cola is worse (more fattening) for you than regular sugared cola.
>Who knew.

[Krupo looks at the cup of diet pepsi]

Aw nuts.

[Krupo wanders off to flag said video for later viewing.]
http://www.videosift.com/story.php?id=14104&where=index

Oh wait, this is the source of that wisdom, isn't it?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/06/13/health/webmd/main701408.shtml

Hmm... my pepsi is being consumed solely for the caffeine, not b/c I think it's a way to diet. Okay, so at least I'm not misguided. Now to just keep exercising in the winter months...

Good thing I hate diet sodas. I think VideoSift needs to drink more diet sodas if it wants grow. [grin]

I think what Ant has been doing is the best way of Promotion. I don't know if you guys knew but he's been submitting some of our videos to BluesNews, and almost everyday one of other videos is linked there.

It's how I found out about VideoSift. If we can find more websites that allow submissions, and each site is allocated to a member to submit videos to, we could get traffic that way as well.

I also post on my own site: http://aqfl.net and send links to friends. I would send VideoSift links to Digg, but people dislike the non-direct links.

"I would send VideoSift links to Digg"

not to mention the fact that the digg admin will pull links to videosift. Scared of a little competition. ;-)

I have a VS banner made somewhere, but i couldn't send it to dag. I'll try and get it sometime.

Also, for the SiftOff, or if my.videosift.com does get made, then what about a VS Video Viewer? Like youtube and google video, but in VS colours.

EDIT: I found the banner, but it has the old logos on. I'll reload Flash Pro 8 and create a new one. The problem is, what do i put on it? At the moment all i can create is a banner that changes its picture at intervals, and i can turn it into a link.

if you can make an HTML banner ... i'll pop it into my siggy on the forums i frequent!

Well I think VideoSift needs to focus on what it does best and that's sifting, we do offer alot of the good stuff you wouldn't find on your own searching on YouTube (well you would but you'd kill your week).

As such I think the sifting thing can be taken further, to personalized lists of sifts made by the community. Say we have a TOP 10 funniest videos, and the Top 50 submitters upvote the various videos to get a more cohesive list for everyone to enjoy. Top 10 Music Videos, Top 10 Art ones... but community based within VS not merely voting from people who visit.

well top 10 music videos is already available on the music channel. If we were to start an art channel it would be there as well. We have thought about personal playlists but are not sure if it would fracture the community.

I put this question to the guys at Yahoo! Answers. Heres the link:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AofwsCWZ1L0kptFfq7lww.QjzKIX?qid=20061004134904AA4plFu

I've suggested Videosift to someone (hey Melissa), and she loves it, spends her lunch-hour on the site. The difference is the community and the taste of the community.. I'd say VS vids are a bit smarter/more esoteric than YT. People want a site that amuses them without wasting their time...

I think the site could use a tag line (or does it have one?). See bookmooch.com for a simple clear message about what they do. Their tagline is "new life for old books".. simple. What sets VideoSift apart?

Hey, preview on SiftTalk, that was quick! Nice work