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Insights Analysis of events, data, and trendsaffecting the information industry. |
Manta and Demand Media have been very agile in leveraging YouTube video channels and content to generate incremental revenue and reinforce their own brands. Both firms generate very high revenue per employee due to many similar partnerships, clear thinking and taking initiative overlaid with a daily eye on the metrics that measure what pays off and what does not. Important Details: The Demand Media content origination site, Demand Studios, is one of the largest producers of Internet-ready video. It is the largest single provider of video content to YouTube, reaching a milestone of regularly serving more than two million video streams per day on various YouTube channels. These are premium, made-for-internet videos originally created for Demand Media web sites such as eHow, LIVESTRONG.com, Expert Village and Golflink. What originally began as a marketing-driven syndication effort has now turned into a seven figure revenue stream for Demand Media through a variety of Google monetization programs. The YouTube-based videos are primarily found via search but are also collected into eHow, Expert Village, Golflink and LIVESTRONG YouTube channels. (See Demand Media: This Online Pied Piper Draws Large Audiences Using a Disruptive Publishing Model November 18, 2008 for a company profile.) Manta.com provides 45 million free business profiles for its core users who are analysts, investors, sales representatives, business owners and recruiters at small to midsize companies. Manta offers contextually on-target YouTube videos on topics for small and medium-sized businesses that Manta users find by using search or an index. Different than Demand Media, the videos are framed within a Manta site and the user stays on Manta. But as in Demand Media's YouTube channels, Google AdSense places revenue-generating contextually matched ads around the videos. AdSense serves up rotating standard Google text CPC ads or rich media display ads. See this Seth Godin video under the topic "Small Business Social Networking" in which he blasts "the kind of networking that is friending a lot of people on Facebook and telling me how many people follow you on Twitter" as "worthless. It was worthless in the real world and its worthless in the online world." (See ECNext's Manta: The Fastest Growing Business Site You've Never Heard Of, December 18, 2007 for a company profile.) Implications: Convergence is deadly when it concentrates multiple destructive forces, as in the Perfect Storm. But convergence is wonderful when you make it work for you, as Manta and Demand Media have done with their video products. They generate profitable incremental revenue by taking advantage of the convergence of:
These two firms have been very agile in leveraging the online access to large audiences who are both users and are also unsolicited and unpaid content creators (in the case of YouTube video contributors) powered by off-the-shelf monetization services from Google. Both firms generate very high revenue per employee due to many similar partnerships, clear thinking and taking initiative overlaid with a daily eye on the metrics that measure what pays off and what does not. Their abiltiy to turn the uber-competitor, Google, into a source of revenue, content, audience and brand reinforcement is an example worth following. |
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