Video Editors as a Service
Problem: Creators on YouTube & Streamers on Twitch miss out on significant views and revenue by not editing their content for other platforms and alternate video lengths.
Creators are great at making content but few make the time to edit the content to create punchier, shorter segments and to take advantage of other / new platforms.
Distributing the SAME video to multiple platforms means getting a multiple on the return for the same unit of work. The problem is the time/effort/skill required to edit and cross-post.
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The content creators and streamers have already done the hard work by becoming relevant to an audience. For example, being a streamer that is one of the best at Call of Duty or Fortnite — or being a professional athlete or a student athlete competing at a high level. Say what you will about the content, but these videos provide a whole new level of access to these stand-out people and give real insight into their lives (or at least the produced lives they present online).
A few examples:
Channel: Ryan Dengler - Ryan is a body builder that goes to Ohio State. I graduated from college in 2006 and I cannot imagine anyone filming a day in their life or WHY anyone would want to watch it. Maybe that says something about Wesleyan, but I think it just speaks to me being wrong and to the current state of the world in 2020. 126K subscribers on YouTube.
Channel: Michael and Kianna - Michael is a former USC Wide Receiver, now a NFL Wide Receiver for the Indianapolis Colts. The genius here seems to be his partner, Kianna, who is actually producing the channel and building the community. 193K subscribers.
Channel: Aculite - Aculite (real name Conner) is an incredibly good First Person Shooter streamer - currently focused on Call of Duty — previously PubG. Aculite streams on Twitch but then creates ~ 20 minute highlight videos for YouTube (think taking 4-8hrs of content streamed on Twitch down to 20 minutes). 1M subscribers
Channel: Matisse Thybulle - Thybulle is Philadelphia 76ers, and was first round pick in the 2019 NBA Draft. He is currently creating content related to the NBA bubble — giving a real, inside look at how the NBA is planning to play during COVID-19. 306K subscribers.
Why talk about this?
It’s big business! In the tech world private, paid communities (often newsletters) are all the rage. Stratechery is likely making >$2M per year and Ben Thompson appears to be running it by himself. Ben Evans has just taken his email list semi-private and if he converts ~10% of his current readers, he should be making $1M per year as a one person operation. Substack, where this newsletter is hosted, is being championed for how it empowers writers to monetize an audience (often an audience built on Twitter).
Opportunity - Streamers and content creators are leaving opportunity & money on the table - Remember from the 6/28/2020 issue - the Kardashians have a set posting schedule to their various social media accounts with multiple posts a day. Streamers and content creators have done the work of creating content and finding product market fit with an audience. They now need tools and services to leverage their work. This is the opportunity.
For professional athletes, building their own community seems like one of the few things they can create and fully own. I’m not big into watching sports but I’d say any athlete going pro in 2020 should have someone on their personal “team/entourage” focusing on building their community/fan base, creating and selling merch, engaging their fans with new content weekly and, if possible, daily.
Let me bring this back to Video Editors
YouTubers and Streamers create volumes of content
The bigger the fanbase, the bigger the paycheck (and influence)
Creators are missing out on growing an audience on Twitter, TikTok, SnapChat, Instagram, etc. The problem being they need to do the editing themselves and they don’t have the time or the skill.
Top creators have already hired Video Editors - their advantage being they have the $ or the talent management to invest in accelerating their growth.
Invert the problem, Video Editors should seek out up and coming content creators (i.e. smaller audiences) and strike revenue share deals.
Individual Video Editors are unlikely to be able to bear the risk of forgoing immediate payment in exchange for a revenue share on future video views and/or paid subscriber growth.
My take is this means there is an opportunity for a company to shoulder the risk, hire a team of human video editors, and develop software video editors to make the editing process faster, easier and less expensive. Remember the automatic highlights in sports from issue 11/17/2019 and the video game highlights from issue 9/29/2019 - both are examples of accelerating the editing process and the opportunity to proliferate content generation.
Today, management companies are signing top streamers — so in a sense, this is already happening — but the deals signed seem very light on value for the creators, mostly focusing on sponsorships — and do not include video editors or tools to enable a creator to significantly grow their views, their fan base, their paid subscribers nor their merch business. So, said again, the opportunity is to bring this all in-house and arm the creators with the tools and skills to become super-stars.
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Question - For paid subscribers is there lead generation tracking? E.g. if I help a streamer gain 100 paid subscribers, is that attributed to me (and hence can I take a cut?)
What’s possible with a HTML Canvas-based animation
Above is a 3 second GIF capture of the put.io site, visit the live site — it is a continuous animation, no jump, 100% smooth.
I had no clue this was possible in a canvas based animation — which means very fast load time as compared to a video or gif.
Live: http://www.put.io
Code: https://github.com/atesgoral/put.io.starry.night
Tidbits:
Come for the Network pay for the tool -> good read on next wave social networks, monetization of private communities and building for “smaller” or more targeted communities.
Everesting - Pick any hill, anywhere in the world and complete repeats of it in a single activity until you climb 8,848m – the equivalent height of Mt Everest. Alberto Contador set a new Everesting record in a time of 7 hours, 27 minutes and 20 seconds.