It seems every day I read an article about how video sharings sites are losing money…how major name entertainment companies are struggling to monetize their videos…and how web video, for all it’s proliferation, still remains a largely unprofitable endeavor.
And you know what? For most people it is. Why? Gold fever…or at least that’s what I call it. Everyone thinks you can stick a video on a sharing site…or start a video sharing site…or post a video on your web site…and the masses will come running.
The key word there is masses. Everyone wants to produce a video or videos that attract the masses. Wrong idea. Instead, you want to bring video to the masses…meaning those markets that are begging for web video, but are almost completely ignored.
That may be hard to wrap your head around. So let me give you a real-life example. A market that you…yes you…could exploit right now. Are you ready? Here it is.
Athletic scholarships.
Every year, the top hundred or so high-school athletes in a given sport are heavily recruited by major colleges. Thing is, that leaves hundred of thousands of high-school athletes virtually invisible to colleges. Athletes who are looking for scholarships. Athletes who want their talents and skills to be seen by coaches.
Here’s where web video comes in. You see, there are already a handful of web sites that allow high-school athletes to market their talents to college’s. Sites like beRecruited.com, PrepChamps.com and TRUpreps.com.
Go ahead and take a look at those sites (I provided links to them). What do you notice? If you’re like me, it was how horrible the videos are for these athletes…if they even have video.
And that’s where you come in. It wouldn’t be hard to produce proper videos for these kids. It would be even easier to take the footage their parents give you and simply edit it into a professional product they can use. And it would be more lucrative yet, if you did all this and then set everything up in an individual web site for the athlete.
Think parents wouldn’t pay for this? Well, they already pay more for less…up to $5,000 to have a “scholarship consultant” market their kid’s to college coaches. After all, college is ridiculously expensive and $5,000 is small compared to what a scholarship can save them.
But how big is the market of high-school athletes who want to “get noticed” and earn college scholarships? I don’t know exactly…but over 300,000 student-athletes are registered at beRecruited.com. In other words, it’s more than enough to build a business. And I can’t think of a better way to market an athlete’s skills and talents than through video.
But the bigger point here, again, is not to try and attract masses to your videos…but rather bring video to a particular, starving mass (like high-school athletes). It doesn’t have to be in the form of a service, like I just mentioned. It could be as simple as a video-based product for a market where no video-based products exist (yet should).
That is where, in my opinion and experience, the money is and will continue to be for web video. Not in web video that people watch for free…but in web video that people will pay to see or have produced for them.