User Generated Video

When will online video be the behemoth business everyone always crows about? Maybe when we quit treating its biggest strength as a weakness.

As marketers flock to user-generated content (UGC) as the latest road to riches, the increased traffic has created some potholes. Clumsy creatives, self-absorbed spots that stray from product benefits and overtly negative brand associations are landmines that all sensible marketers should avoid. But since a UGC campaign's goals are positive and promising, advertisers must develop a strategy to harness consumer communities' energy.

Victor Rook, an indy filmmaker who was once wrongly accused by Viacom of copyright violations, is happy a judge has reminded media companies to think twice before calling someone a pirate.

After years of regarding pirated video on YouTube as a threat, some major media companies are having a change of heart, treating it instead as an advertising opportunity.

If the $1 billion Web video advertising market is to reach the level of television's estimated $50 billion, it ironically won't be thanks to YouTube, the Internet's most popular spot for watching clips.

Brand display ads will be “the primary driver of monetization for video,” YouTube CEO Chad Hurley said tonight at a tech startup dinner in Palo Alto, but he went on to lay out an argument that there’s also a growing opportunity to make money from direct response affiliate deals.

Speaking at Supernova2008, a business-centric tech conference that kicked off this afternoon within shouting distance of San Francisco Bay, YouTube's Jordan Hoffner pointed out that many of today's advertisers aren't all that interested in the so-called fragmented audience.

Amazon said Monday that it has invested in The Talk Market, a user generated TV shopping channel. Terms of the investment, which closed in May, weren’t disclosed, but the move does make you go hmm.

At OMMA Video, we’ll hear from the pioneers and leaders in the online video world both on the buy side and the sell side about where the fast-moving online video market stands. After two years of dynamic change, are we any closer to moving beyond the pre-roll? Are advertisers and publishers creating workable models for monetizing the wealth of user-generated video content that is driving so much traffic? Are advertisers really embracing those clean, well-lit places the major media brands are erecting?