Monetising your videos

It is possible to make money from having your videos online, but not a lot of money. Here is how you can monetize your videos:

Sell your videos

If you have content people want and are prepared to pay for then simply sell the clips. Mindfor Web can design a website that allows you to charge in many different ways:

1. "So much" per view
2. Some taster videos are free in the public area of your site and then the main videos are behind a subscription or purchase system
   
3. Pay to access the videos for a certain period of time
4. Buy and download straight away.
   

This is the most likely strategy for actually making money.

Advertise around your videos

Mindfor Web can create advertising positions around your videos. You can then sell banner advertising in those spaces, or use Adwords. Adwords now allows you to run a combination of their and your advertisements together.  Typical returns are in the $1 - $2 per thousand views range.

Advertise in your videos

This is a much more effective technique - you can put a pre-roll into your video and sell that advertising. Remember once a video is out there you cant change it without losing all your views, comments etc Therefore you need to pick the advertiser carefully - don't use something that will date or your video itself will appear dated. You must understand it is a once per clip per lifetime deal. Also YouTube are not fond of this device, so a short "sponsored by" message will work, an actual commercial will get the clip rejected. Remember YouTube also shows a commercial before your video, they dont like competition (which is fine as they are paying the bandwidth) and you dont want your viewers to get too much advertising or they wont wait around.

Product placements are also big in internet video, however that is hard for most people to organise in the context of their videos, which are not normally mini-tv shows but some hobby or interest-based footage. It is also hard to get money out of sponsors in advance without a track record.

Advertise yourself

Far and away the best use for web video. Use the annotation feature to put a "buy this product from www.mywebsite.com now" type message periodically in your video. Remember to also put a link to your website in the video description.

Become a YouTube partner

Mindfor is a YouTube partner. We receive a percentage of the advertising YouTube shows in our videos. While this information is confidential it is in the single figures per thousand views. Only a handful of video producers are able to actually make a living from this.

Niche Market

The more niche your market, the better chance you have of attracting website advertising. Niche sites typically charge $20/1000 views and some sites are over $100/1000 views. Ask yourself - what do you bring to the market? If the answer is "nothing that isn't already being done" then your investment in getting a result will rise exponentially.