The latest from TechCrunch
- Two Years After Launch, Howcast Is Streaming 25 Million How-To Videos A Month
- The iPad Will Make Apple's Acquisition Of Quattro Wireless Look Even Smarter
- Gowalla Opens Trips To All. A Simple Way To Organize Pub Crawls.
- Ustream Helps Give Your Live Broadcasts A Professional Feel With New Desktop Client
- The 6 Rules of Shopping For A HDTV This Super Bowl Season
| Two Years After Launch, Howcast Is Streaming 25 Million How-To Videos A Month | Top |
| Two years ago, former Googlers Jason Liebman, Daniel Blackman and Sanjay Rama launched Howcast , a site filled with originally-produced how-to videos on everything from “ How to Ice Skate ” to “ How To Deal With a Mean Boss .” Today, Howcast is streaming 25 million videos a month across its network, which includes its own site, popular channels on YouTube and Hulu , and an iPhone app ( iTunes link ) which has been downloaded more than one million times. A year ago, the startup was streaming about 10 million videos a month. To put this in perspective, YouTube streams more than 12 billion videos a month and the next nine video properties on the Web all stream north of 200 million videos a month. But Howcast’s growth is still very respectable for a niche video site. The niche Howcast is going after, however is a very broad one. Informational videos can be applied to practically any topic, are always in demand, and are search-engine friendly. Its YouTube channel alone is in the top 100 channels, with close to 100 million cumulative views so far and 111,000 subscribers. Now that Howcast’s videos are gaining traction, CEO Jason Liebman is focusing more on monetization. ”We’re on track to be profitable by the end of the year,” he tells me, although he won’t go into specific numbers on either profits or revenues. He just hired his first head of sales to sell ads directly. Howcast makes money two ways. It places clickable overlay ads on its videos from ad networks such as Google and ScanScout . Selling ads directly should increase its CPMs. The other way Howcast makes money is from so-called “branded entertainment.” These are how-to videos for hire: advertorials, product demos, customer support videos, social branding. Companies such as AT&T, Kodak, JetBlue, Twitter, and Boxee pay Howcast a fee to create these videos and then pay on top of that for each view. Some examples of these sponsored videos include “ How To Get Started With Boxee ” (embedded below), “ How To Use Twitter ,” and “ How To Use Your Cell Phone as A Wingman ” (AT&T). These aren’t ads per se, they are more instructional videos on how to use a product or attempts at social branding. Not only does Howcast produce the videos, it also distributes them through its site, and various other channels. Branded entertainment pays well. Although it account for only about 10 percent of the videos Howcast produces each month, it currently makes up a majority of Howcast’s revenues (that could shift back towards more traditional ads as total views and direct ad sales ramp up). How To Get Started With Boxee on Howcast Howcast produces all of its own videos through a network of freelance filmmakers. It provides them with the scripts, voiceovers, and graphics to streamline production. Using this method, Howcat is able to crank out about 1,000 how-to videos a month. It typically pays filmmakers about $50 for a 2 or 3 minute video. Like Demand Media, it uses all sort of data—from search trends to video views to editorial calendars—to figure out what topics to assign. Although Demand Media does it at a much larger scale. AOL, with its recent $36.5 million purchase of StudioNow , is also ramping up its online video efforts. Howcast still has a ways to go before it proves its model, but two years after launch, with 35 employees, it’s starting to hum. Just looking at Howcast.com alone, comScore Videometrix estimates the site is doing 1 million video stream a month (see table below), compared to 1.7 million for HowStuffWorks and 422,000 for eHow (which is owned by Demand Media, but isn’t primarily a video site). These numbers are not comparable to the 25 million above, which come directly from Howcast. Leibman says traffic to the site is doubling every quarter. comScore Video Metrix – Nov-09 Total Unique Viewers (000) Videos (000) Videos per Viewer Minutes per Viewer Total Internet : Total Audience 170,647 30,986,670 181.6 734.5 HOWCAST.COM 605 1,042 1.7 4.1 HOWSTUFFWORKS.COM 470 1,709 3.6 7.5 EHow Sites 367 422 1.1 1.8 CrunchBase Information Howcast HowStuffWorks Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| The iPad Will Make Apple's Acquisition Of Quattro Wireless Look Even Smarter | Top |
| Suddenly, Apple’s $275 million acquisition of mobile ad company Quattro Wireless makes even more sense than it already did when the deal was announced earlier this year. Early adopters who will be among the first to unbox and fire up an Apple iPad in a couple of months, will have nearly 140,000 applications readily available from the App Store right out the gate . That’s the approximate number of applications that are currently offered for free or for a fixed fee on the iPhone / iPod Touch App Store, which will soon be known only as the App Store (or under an entirely different moniker, though unlikely). This is, in my opinion at least, one of the key benefits of being one of those early adopters: they won’t have to wait for developers to get acquainted with an entirely new SDK first, nor will they have to wait for them to build and get Apple’s approval for the apps they want to publish. Just in case you forgot: more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store onto devices since its debut. Thriving, the platform is, as Yoda would put it. And as WSJ’s Walt Mossberg put it: it happens to be all about the software here. You’ll be able to run most iPhone apps on the iPad, either with pixel-for-pixel accuracy in a centered black box, or pixel-double running in full-screen. That also implies that in some cases you’ll be seeing mobile advertising units with pixel-for-pixel accuracy or pixel-double running in full-screen. Bigger ads that feel more ‘natural’ than on smaller-size screens, in other words, which undoubtedly means more revenue from in-app display advertising, not to mention an almost certain increase of in-app purchases in most cases. It also speaks volumes that former Quattro Wireless CEO Andy Miller was named VP of Mobile Advertising at Apple, an entirely new position for the company, and that in this new role he will be reporting directly to chief executive Steve Jobs. During the latest Apple earnings call , the company made it clear that they did not step into the mobile advertising game as an afterthought, and that they want developers to make money off their apps through advertising with a network they own and control, too. Meaning, Apple will not let Google / AdMob and third-party mobile advertising players run the show. Owning Quattro, Apple has picked up another moneymaker from the App Store goldrush it has itself unleased, and the iPad will only reinforce that situation. In my view, the purchase of Quattro Wireless was always about advancing the hit rate of in-app advertising rather than the monetization of websites viewed on the iPhone or iPad browser anyway. An estimated 75% to 80% of all apps published on the App Store are free and thus has its makers relying heavily on advertising and in-app purchases of premium apps in order to profit from their work. The same will likely be true on the iPad, but the extra screen real estate gives publishers and ad networks a lot more leverage. And conveniently, Apple is now in a position where it controls both the development environment, the hardware apps run on, the distribution and purchasing platform, as well as a powerful mobile advertising network developers can tap in order to grow their returns on development and marketing investments. Advertisers spent just $416 million on mobile ads in 2009, compared with $22 billion on Web sites, according to eMarketer, but mobile ad spending is expected to grow to $1.6 billion by 2013. Apple clearly wants a significant piece of that pie, and it already has a lot of what it takes to get just that in place. I’m convinced that in a few years, the purchase of Quattro Wireless will prove to be one of the key acquisitions Apple has made since its inception. | |
| Gowalla Opens Trips To All. A Simple Way To Organize Pub Crawls. | Top |
| One of the features highlighted on the location-based service Gowalla that I’ve never gotten into is Trips. The idea behind this feature is to give a list of spots to check-in at to complete a certain trip and earn its badge. For example, the Golden Gate Gallop contains 18 stops that you must hit to complete it. It’s a good idea from a game-perspective, the problem is that most of the trips don’t mirror my actual social life, and so I’d have to go out of my way to do them. That is, until today. Starting today, Gowalla is opening the ability to create trips to all users. Previously, it was only the Gowalla team and a select group of their friends that have made these. To make a trip, you simply have to visit the Gowalla webpage of a spot you want to add to a trip and click the “Add to Trip” button. From here you’ll be able to name your trip, give it a description, and add up to 19 more spots needed to complete your trip. In other words, this makes Gowalla the perfect app for creating your own pub crawl among friends. In their post on the new feature, Gowalla notes that they’ll be looking at the best user-created trips to feature on the service. The best ones will even get their own custom badge artwork (Gowalla is big on the artwork aspect). “ Featured trips will be promoted based on the quality and relevancy of the trip, the number of people who have completed the trip ,” they note. Users will be able to create up to 5 trips (again, each with up to 20 venues on the trip), but they note that you’ll be able to create even more in the future. Another limitation is that you’ll only be able to do trips that are featured or created by people you are friends with on the service. But that should open up more over time as well, they note. You can also easily find these new friend-created trips on the iPhone app by clicking the “Browse” button in the Trips area. Another new feature launching today is the ability to bookmark venues. This makes it easy to find your favorite places that you go to over and over again. You can add a bookmark on a venues’s Gowalla webpage by clicking on the “Bookmark” button under the map. Soon, you’ll be able to add them from the iPhone app as well. | |
| Ustream Helps Give Your Live Broadcasts A Professional Feel With New Desktop Client | Top |
| Looking to turn your PC into a live video production studio? Ustream has just launched a new desktop application to help make that happen. Today, the company is launching a new desktop client called Ustream Producer that boasts high video quality and editing tools that can help give your streams an added layer of polish. The application is available for both Mac and PC, and you can grab it here . Now, you’ve always been able to broadcast to Ustream via your web browser, which uses Flash to access you PC’s webcam. But Ustream says that the desktop client offers both increased video quality (you can stream in HD and H.264), and perhaps more importantly, it allows you to create broadcasts that can be far more complex than just a single stream from your webcam. The application includes support for Picture In Picture, which means you simultaneously show two streams at the same time. The premium version of the app lets you use multiple cameras from the same setup, while the free version lets you include additional Ustream streams that are being broadcast from other computers. You can also integrate previously recorded video, and share your desktop screen. Ustream is offering a free version of the producer, which includes more than enough features for casual broadcasters. But if you’re looking to make your broadcasts look more professional, complete with graphic overlays and multiple camera angles, you’ll want the premium version, which costs $199. This isn’t the only way to broadcast live video from your desktop, though. Competitor LiveStream has offered a similar production tool called Procaster since last April . And there are third party applications like Wirecast that allow you to stream to multiple livestreaming services, like Justin.tv, Livestream.com, and Ustream. If you’re looking to get a feel for what can be done with the new software, the company says that Trace Cyrus and Mason Musso will be using it to broadcast a new song from the Alice in Wonderland soundtrack tomorrow at 4PM here . CrunchBase Information Ustream Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| The 6 Rules of Shopping For A HDTV This Super Bowl Season | Top |
| Next weekend Peyton Manning will lead the Colts to a victory over the New Orleans Saints in Super Bowl XLIV. Hot new commercials will run and there will be remembrances a-plenty about Katrina. Retailers are hoping that you witness all this on a brand new HDTV. And you might want to think about it, too. After all, right now is the best time of year to buy a high definition TV -- as long as you follow these six rules. Don't pay the price on the tag This is an important time of year for retailers and most will bend over backwards to get a sales. Smart negotiation is your friend. Most of the time all you need to do is say "Will you match Sears's price? They said they would give it to me for $xxx." Keep the statement simple and free of any stipulations like "if I take it today" or "if I pay for delivery." | |
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