People, both amateur and professional, make videos for all sorts of reasons – more than 3,500 years of new video footage is created every single year, according to Trends magazine. It is my experience that the two primary ones, though, are fame and/or fortune. Lonelygirl15 proved both points true, not to mention ways to attain these goals.

If the goal is fame, online video should appear on a popular video Web site (Lonelygirl15 utilized YouTube and now, Revver) and as many as possible. This increases the total reach and raises the likelihood that the video would obtain the critical mass to spread virally.  

If the goal is fortune, there are a couple of different ways to attempt to reach it, but none of them are very good, unless you are incredibly clever and talented, like Lonelygirl15’s creators. A video creator could sell his video to consumers directly (very hard unless you can cut a deal with iTunes). Another option would be to sell directly to Web publishers who are interested in exclusive rights. The third option is to attempt to get it sponsored by advertising. Unless you are producing a single video that is not a high-end product (think network quality or better) you have very limited options when it comes to advertising support. As such, most video creators are left working with a video aggregator.

For fame achievement, YouTube certainly made Lonelygirl15 a winner, but for fortune purposes and as announced by MediaPost (registration required), Lonelygirl15’s “goings-on will now be chronicled on Revver, the video-sharing site that splits ad revenue 50-50 with the content owners.” As evidence by this second chapter of the Lonelygirl15 saga, fortune always wins over fame.

The creators of Lonelygirl15 posted last week that their show with the help of millions of online consumers birthed “a new art form” and one that could only be done through “the distribution power of the internet.” While I agree, Lonelygirl15 and its creators also proved that as the quality of content improves, the best video content providers will first try to actually make a business out of online video and not just give it away for free. They will do this by making their content available first to those aggregators that will pay them and second to those that don’t.

Today’s online video business models are based on advertising revenue splits, but these models need to evolve for Web publishers and content providers to succeed with online video. The reason why is the “associated revenue” of even the “most popular clips” online “would not support a typical TV or film budget, according to a September 2006 ThinkEquity Partners LLC report.

Lonelygirl15 was the “birth” of a new art form. Equally important though, the now known to be fictional videos began the quest of monetizing online video effectively and for that I thank Jessica Rose (a.ka. Lonelygirl15) and Miles Beckett, Mesh Flinders and Greg Goodfried (the creators).
 
-Daniel Todd, president and co-founder of Zango