Making money is an
art and finding ways to make money is a talent. Today’s digital world provides huge
platforms for earning money in different ways. Increase in customer engagement
is what every business wants to witness. And deciding upon the source of
engaging the customers has become very crucial. Let us now look at one brilliant
source of making money: video streaming services. Video streaming
service sites provide continuous videos to the viewers without having them to
download and watch. It could be a cricket match; a live concert or a news
report, there is nothing which cannot be streamed online these days. And as if
this is not enough, we also have sites which live stream the videos, as and
when the events happen. So one need not worry about missing a football match
being played in a far-away country! We find many of them watching brand new
movies on video stream sites, rather than going to theatres and paying for the
tickets. Why waste your money when you can watch them for free?
Well, coming to the
point of maintaining video streaming services, why and how does one
maintain such sites? Do they provide video streams for free or do they get
anything in return? We might well not imagine, but the video streaming sites
make more money than we expect them to. Let us now see how they make it happen.
Advertisements: Website Ads and Video Ads
Advertisements are
one major source of income to the video streaming sites (many of you might have
even got vexed with various ads showing up). There are two kinds of ads through
which these sites make money – Website ads and the Video ads. Website ads are
the ones which appear once we open the video streaming sites. They might appear
immediately after opening the site, or might appear as pop-up boxes. Sometimes
we even witness links, which when clicked upon redirect us to some other pages.
As the businesses aim at reaching out to large number of audience at once, why
not choose the sources which provide them. For example, where else is it best
to endorse your sports shoes if it is not where the users are watching a
football match?
Video ads mostly
appear while the video stream is being played. The stream content is paused and
the video ads are played; this is an efficient way of advertising products as
the user will not be willing to forward the video stream just for a period of
1-2 minutes. Thus, awareness of one’s products improves among the viewers. The
video ads might also be played as soon as the user opens the site, grabbing the
attention of the user immediately. But one thing that has to be kept in mind
while including ads in a video streaming website is that you avoid spamming.
Spam ads will not
only create a bad impression on the advertiser but also would reduce the
customer engagement with the video streaming site.
Sponsorship
Another
source of making money through video streaming sites is sponsorship. It is
something similar to advertising and works in a way that a video or a part of
the video is sponsored by some business. We can see this showing up in the form
of a text or an audio message – ‘This video is sponsored by company X’. We
happen to see these messages less often these days as sponsorship has to be
practiced by the business on a long run to engage customers.
Cost Per View Model
Let us now learn
about the most popular video streaming site, YouTube. While we all know that
every person who has a YouTube account has access to his/her own YouTube
channel, where one can post videos and make money. But how does this work? Well
it’s quite a lengthy process, yet an effective process to earn. While most of
them think that the number of views for an ad determines the income, it is the
amount of people’s engagement with the ad which matters more. The income from
the number of views per ad, according to the study, is supposed to be around 1$
per 1000 views. Discussing about the people’s engagement with an ad which means
either clicking on or watching the ad for a proposed amount of time, there are
two models that are in practice. The first one being the Cost Per View (CPV),
where the advertiser pays the amount PER VIEW for his ad. And a view is
supposed to be viewing the ad for at least 30 seconds or at least half of the
ad. In this model, even if the viewer clicks on the ad for ‘n’ number of times,
it would charge nothing to the advertiser as it is a CPV model.
Cost Per Click
On the other hand,
the Cost Per Click (CPC) model charges the advertiser per click. And these ads
pop up in between the video or at the end of the video in the form of square
banners. The ads in YouTube are also categorized into three based on the way
how and when they appear: In-Search ads are surrounded by a yellow border and
come up in the search results, In-Display ads which appear in the ‘suggested
videos’ and Pre-Roll ads which stream right before the original video content
plays (the pre-roll ads can be skipped after 5 seconds of time).
Merchandizing
Merchandizing is also
one of the contributors for making money. It is better to show off your
merchandise during a video stream and make the viewers aware of your business,
and there are cases where merchandising brings in more income to a business
than advertising does.
Subscription Based Revenue Model
Coming to the most
important and popular source of income, let us now see how Subscription exactly
generates revenue. A subscription model is generally adopted by those video
makers who are confident about their video content being one of its kinds and
by those who believe they can attract audience effectively. These video stream
sites charge the viewers on per video or per month or per year basis, based on
the type of videos they broadcast. And if you can embed advertisements into
your video, you are making sure you increase the revenues of your site. One
might have to design a proper website/app by using a PHP video CMS
(Content Management System) or any other platform in order to make it eligible
for subscriptions. The best examples for such sites are Netflix and Amazon.
You create a website
first and then embed the videos into the website to increase the traffic to the
site. YouTube however doesn’t work this way. YouTube doesn’t consider the
number of subscriptions for a channel, as it focuses only on the CPV and CPC
models. But subscribing to a YouTube channel helps in filtering the content as
per the user preferences. The videos from the channel you subscribe appear
first when you open YouTube, lessening the burden to search for them. As a
matter of fact, subscriptions generate more revenue for the individual video
streaming services, while advertising generates more revenue for YouTube
channels.
To conclude, it is
important to make correct choices when you are considering maintaining a video
streaming sites. To create a video streaming site, try StreamNow, a popular
turnkey software which has been doing phenomenally exceptional service to its
clients. If you have any doubts or concerns, feel free to drop a line in the
comments section. I shall reply in a day or two. My best wishes are with you
and your video streaming site. Cheers!
