Blip.tv Expands Upon Its Winning Formula
As impressive as those statistics appear, the co-founders of blip.tv still believed that there was room for improvement and thus enhanced the website in May 2011 with a new facelift and fine-tuned vision plan for the future. “Until now there hasn’t been a single website dedicated to showcasing the most entertaining series on the web,” CEO Mike Hudack announced in a press release. “Today we are launching that site. We’re focused on helping people discover the best original series and allowing producers to build sustainable series for the long-term. The launch of this site helps us achieve both of these goals and marks a turning point for blip.tv and the emerging industry of original webseries.”
As Joshua Cohen at Tubefilter points out, the original blip.tv concept was adept at attracting webseries onto its website but had less success at showcasing them or making them easily accessible to viewers. The company thus commissioned a market research firm to suggest ways on how to enhance the blip.tv experience and discovered the need for a more systemized approach in the website’s design. “We asked people how they discover content,” Hudack explained. “And what we found out was chaos and algorithms don’t work very well. People want a curated experience. Their perception of web video is there’s a ton of it and they don’t know how to find the good stuff. The people we surveyed don’t want to be spoon fed their choices, but they want to be told what’s good.”
The relaunched blip.tv now has a Hulu feel to it, with the best content spotlighted on the main page as well as new categories to collect its webseries in a more organized fashion. Each webseries, meanwhile, has a homepage that is custom designed by the producer with artwork and key episodes for the newly initiated to explore. Blip.tv has also been more selective with its content, allowing only eighteen hundred of its fifty thousand shows to receive the enhanced treatment. According to Tubefilter, the decision on what webseries made the cut was determined by three factors—production values, consistent release schedule and having a cohesive brand—but viewership played a key role as well.
“Huge view counts are obviously hard to ignore,” Senior Director of Network Programming Eric Mortensen clarified. “But it’s really less about specific numbers and more about momentum. If we see a show on the move, we want to work with it, whether it’s currently getting five thousand views per month or five million.”
Mike Hudack considers this new “selectiveness” as beneficial to both the website as well as the webseries medium. “It’s the difference between the Android Market and Apple’s App Store,” he told Tubefilter. “Sure, you can find great stuff in the Android Market, but not all of it’s going to work.”
Collaborating with independent producers has been part of the blip.tv philosophy from the very beginning. In April 2010, co-founder Dina Kaplan told the Harvard Business Review that despite having built the best possible platform for blip.tv prior to its initial launch, when the website went live in May 2005 it attracted a mere two users during its first month. “We needed to clearly identify a market we wanted to serve, and then figure out who the thought leaders in that market were, and talk with them and listen to their needs,” she went on to explain. The blip.tv team thus idenitified five people in the still small webseries community and literally asked them, “What should we build for you?” Equipped with the answers, blip.tv was re-released a few months later and immediately added five hundred users while steadily increasing that number as time went on.
According to Kaplan, blip.tv combines three services for the independent webseries producers who utilize its site. “First, we host the videos, providing the player, the bandwidth, the servers, and the whole backend required for a successful online show,” she said. “Second, we help people distribute shows. Shows have what we call a ‘Total Potential Audience,’ and this will never be found on one site. Blip.tv makes it easy for content creators to syndicate shows everywhere from YouTube to Vimeo to iTunes and also to TV sets through Fios, TiVo, Sony Bravia TVs, LG Televisions, and other distribution outlets as well. The third leg is ad sales. We run advertisements on shows and do fifty-fifty revenue shares with content creators on all advertising revenue that comes into blip.tv.”
Mike Hudack told GigaOM that webseries creators received over a half million dollars in advertising revenue from blip.tv in 2010 and the company expects that number to top one million during 2011. “We have had advertising deals for shows with very small audiences that just happened to have the exact right combination of attributes that an ad buy was looking for, so it’s certainly true that the highest quality shows and the most popular shows do the best in terms of advertising, but there’s something for everyone,” Eric Mortensen explained of the monetary approach in a 2009 interview with MN VIDEO PRO. “Our goal, everything we do is help shows grow their audience to the point they can make money and therefore blip.tv can make money. It’s a nice situation to have all of our interests aligned.”
Part of the philosophy behind growing an audience for a particular webseries entails building a community around the shows themselves. Blip.tv thus offers the ability for a particular webseries to stream their blog onto their blip.tv homepage and enable viewers to post comments about a series there as well. “Our community has really developed in a different way than YouTube,” Mike Hudack told DVGuru in January 2007. “YouTube is focused on being a digital video repository, we’re focused on providing presence for shows.”
Not only have the co-founders of blip.tv built an effective website capable of showcasing the best webseries on the Internet, they have likewise developed an approach that offers a true partnership with the creators while keeping them engaged in the future of not only blip.tv but the webseries medium in general. Despite an increase in the number of quality shows being produced in recent years, that medium is still in its infant stages but blip.tv has done its part in both the progression of the fledgling industry and the community that has sprung up around it. The new design and features that blip.tv constructed in May 2011 should enhance the presence of the webseries as a legitimate narrative device, something that Mike Hudack, Dina Kaplan, Eric Mortensen and their fellow partners envisioned from the very start.
“Television is moving toward the Web and the Web is moving toward television,” Mortensen said in 2009. “There were broadcast networks that were very broad, then cable TV came around and it really opened things up and allowed people to do a wider variety of shows. It allowed people to spend less money on that wider variety of shows and I think the Internet, it’s the logical next step in opening things up for audiences and producers. So, providing that the viewing experience is familiar to the viewer, I think it’s pretty irrelevant from the audience side where the content is coming from, who’s making it. It’s just ‘is it good or is it bad’ and can I have a relatively convenient way to find and consume it?”
Thanks to blip.tv, that vision is starting to become reality.
Anthony Letizia (May 23, 2011)
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