Diluting Your Feed

Is your RSS feed powerful enough that you need to dilute it?

I didn't think so but lots of people are diluting their feeds by making other feeds available. I'm guilty of this and I'm not sure how to stop it.

Why does this matter you ask? Well I guess it matters only if you want the free promotion that Apple gives you on the iTunes Store in the podcasting directory and if you want to make money by controlling and selling your own advertising inventory.

It stands to reason that if you make your content available in as many formats as you can that more people will be able to choose what feed they want to subscribe to. Right? Okay, sure but when someone subscribes to your Windows Media feed they are not subscribing to your feed that is featured on the iTunes Store and they don't count as a subscription for the day that will bring you up in the iTunes rankings. What good does moving up in the iTunes ranking do me? Well if you have content that is emotionally compelling and can really build a large audience it means a lot. It took me over a month to get listed on the iTunes Store and once French Maid TV was featured as new and notable we shot up to number one in 3 days and pick up 20,000 subscribers overnight. Then we were mentioned in Wired Magazine and picked up another 20,000 subscribers. Your feed is very important because it allows you to reach a lot of viewers quickly and the iTunes Store is a great way to get new subscribers and be noticed by business development people and media buyers who are looking for "hot" properties.

Youtube has offered subscribing to their videos for a while but that's a separate feed from your own feed and now other sites like Revver are offering subscription buttons for feeds as well. That's all well and good but in the long run where does that get you? You don't control those feeds. Sure they are another way to get more viewers paying attention to your videos but if these "Partner Feeds" go away you lose all those subscribers.

The Apple iTunes Store doesn't control your feed, you do. You create your feed and then you tell Apple where it lives. You can tell Apple about multiple feeds that you have, say an iPod/iPhone feed, an audio only feed and an Apple TV feed but if you do that you are just diluting your feed and diluting your brand when it comes to your ranking at the iTunes Store.

Looking at my stats at Feedburner 43% of the French Maid TV RSS feed subscribers come from Windows iTunes, another 43% come from Mac iTunes and the rest are divided up by up by other readers including 3% that is Zune. (I didn't even know that Zune people could watch French Maid TV. I thought I had to deliver an M4V in oder for them to subscribe.) 86% of French Maid TV's subscribers come from iTunes. They bad part about my Feedburner feed is that I don't know who my subscribers are and the only way I can contact them is by dropping something down my feed and asking them to sign up for my mailing list.

Now at YouTube I only have 2434 subscribers but I can see their YouTube user name/profile and what videos they have uploaded and what videos are their favorites. This has the potential to be valuable but I've not really taken advantage of it yet. At Revver I can't tell how many subscribers I have nor can I tell anything about them.

Having as much information you can about your subscribers that you can share with potential advertisers is very important and moving forward I feel I need to figure out a way to get the kind of info that I have about my subscribers at YouTube on all my delivery channels but beyond that I feel the need to figure out how I can have one feed that I control that is viewable everywhere because I don't want to dilute my feed.

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this.

In the above video Brian Chappell offers a simple how to guide on setting up a basic meta refresh to enable tracking of RSS subscribers via google analytics, for sites that use services like feedburner. It is a great method to track where your sub's are coming from.

Right Recipe, Portion Size a Little Too Big.

Right now we are in an online video snack world and longer videos are a little too hard to digest. I’m certainly guilty of creating videos that are too long but I have to do what the client wants and I don’t have a creative director or executive producer looking over my shoulder to make those hard cuts because I am the executive producer.

Anyways, when making your videos you should make sure the production values are as high as possible without breaking your bank. Average Betty does a great job. Take a look at the attention to detail that went in to this Halloween episode about butternut squash soup. The orange background behind the witch, the night vision camera mode ala The Blair Witch Project, the scary music and sound FXs as well as the lighting of the food and the step by step instructions.

I think the Betty Witch Project is great except it may be just a little too long. I know from experience that when you are having this much fun creating something it’s hard to make those decisions and cut your babies.

Beyond the serving size Average Betty has done a great job building out their advertising inventory both in their video and on their website including text on the website that people will find when searching for Butternut Squash Soup. But most importantly they have a sexy witch with cleavage for the photo on their video thumbnail. This will get them more clicks than a photo of Butternut Squash Soup. Although, these clicks might bail when they don’t get to see a naked witch. But such is life on the Internet and Average Betty is off to a better than average start.

If you are looking for an example of what you should do to get started in online video take a close look at all the Average Betty episodes and make a list of what you like about each and every one. Then make sure you use those concepts when developing your own show. There’s no film school for online cooking shows yet so you’ll have to teach yourself by studying those who are already producing online viral video show.

PARIS IN JAIL Viral Video beats VH1's Best Rated Show by 2 Millon Views

According to CNN.com "Last October, 7.5 million people tuned in to the second-season finale of "Flavor of Love" to give VH1 its biggest audience ever and adding to the channel's ratings recovery after its overdose of the "Behind the Music" bio series." and according to Youtube.com the PARIS IN JAIL: The Music Video has over 10,019,709 views. Now it did take four months to get those views but Chris Crocker's LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! had 10 million views in just one week and that beats any VH1 Show. Leave Britney Alone now has over 11 million views.

What do media buyers pay to advertise on a VH1 show that only gets 7.5 million viewers? I don't know (please tell us if you know)but I bet it's a lot more than the creative team behind Paris in Jail got...but not for long.

As soon as online content producers are able to deliver millions of views on a consistent regular schedule and have a market place built where media buyers can find them, adverting dollars will pour in to the online video space.

If you can build your audience now and built out your advertising inventory that you control along with advertising that is a revenue share with a hosting company like Revver.com you will be ready to play ball when the Advertising Media buyers come a buying.