Interview: Kevin Nalts of WillVideoforFood

 

KN: There is no rivaling YouTube. I tried uploading to a variety of sites for a long time, but I haven’t been able to find such an active, prolific audience beyond YouTube. YouTube probably represents about 90 percent of the views I get. 

 

I do upload to a site called TubeMogul, which is a free service that pushes out my videos to other sites. The YouTube audience are the people who are regularly engaged and checking content. So unless you are featured on the other sites, it’s really hard to develop a recurring audience. 

 

KN: It’s not the greatest video player. Initially, the ad-sharing was nonexistent. Now, they’ve begun to share some [revenue] with creators. There are limits to YouTube in terms of functionality and your ability to get paid. Some sites like Revver were like Visas of the space where they would facilitate the [revenue] sharing. 

YouTube is more of a destination site. It’s very hard to get people off of it. It’s not as easy, but it is getting better to pull videos off of there. Right now, about 60 percent of YouTube videos are looked at off of YouTube. It is improving.

 

For me, the initial reason I didn’t focus primarily on YouTube was because it didn’t offer me anything as a creator from a revenue perspective. They fixed that, and now they have managed to get a foothold. 

Most of my viewing audience is on YouTube. It’s a community. There are probably 10- or 20,000 people that live in YouTube. That’s why some of my videos won’t make sense to the average person. Sometimes I address my content to this core group of regular YouTubers that understand my inside jokes. Other times, I try to tailor my stuff to the common dominator that has applicability beyond YouTube. You need to speak to both audiences. If you’re doing common dominator content, you don’t look like you’re tending to the community. If you’re doing insular community content, it’s not going to have as broad of an appeal.

KN: Initially, I saw YouTube as just another outlet that maybe I would get some more views, maybe that will get me noticed by others. My goal was to bring them to a separate destination. At the time, YouTube was only paying out to professional content creators. When they opened up the Partners Program, that was attractive. They have been developing that program.   It’s not a life changer for most; it’s a nice side income. 

My initial model was “Get them to my blog or my own website” and then monetize it that way. That’s really hard to do.  It’s really difficult to pull traffic off the highway of YouTube, no matter how intriguing your rest stop is. No matter what your content is or the way you would like people to look at your videos, if you’re not posting them to YouTube, you’re missing a huge opportunity in a marketing channel.

 

 

KN: I didn’t worry until recently. A lot of videos that I uploaded to Revver initially, I’ve lost on crashed computer drives. I wonder if I should back them up. [chuckles]

The beautiful thing about online video is that it’s a perpetual, beautiful archive. We’ve all lost pieces of our lives from tapes that corrode, photos that are damaged, hard drives that crash. 

I like the fact that I can pull up from any computer any moment from the past two years of history and look at it, but you do raise a good point. Some of these guys – they do go belly up.

KN: It’s been such a slow industry to mature. It’s such a disappointment that websites like Revver and Metacafe, which are focused on getting content providers rewarded, don’t do nearly as well. I do think their time will come, but maybe they were a little early to the market. 

 

One of the reasons I like to upload to a dozen sites is because I am hedging my bets there, that hopefully some of these sites will be around. I don’t think Google and YouTube are going anywhere. I try to be destination-neutral. I try to backup. I’ve got literally 10 hard drives right now.