At several meetups in December and January, I asked during the opening announcements if there were opinions one way or another about using ads to support the LA Drupal video channel at Blip.tv (which we use to post meetup presentations, podcast episodes, etc.).
There weren't any objections and in an experiment intended to offset costs and help make LA Drupal self-sustaining, pre-roll and post-roll ads were turned on.
In the last 30 days, LA Drupal has earned less than $5. This is less than the $8 a month that a "Pro" account costs (which is currently paid for by a sponsor *), which I upgraded it to last summer in order to get the necessary machine time to convert some of the longer videos, like the Git with Drupal workshop in June.
This brings us to today and I think it's a good time to check in. The only feedback I've seen so far was from @lauras on Twitter:
@LADrupal The prerolls on your blip.tv channel are a fracking nightmare, btw. No pause even. Hope they're lucrative at least.
To which my response was:
@lauras thanks! we polled our members last year about turning on ads and had no objections. now ads are on and we're soliciting feedback. ^C
So, what do you all think of the ads? Should we do away with them completely and ask sponsors to pay for things like this, or should we keep them as they are? Do you want overlay ads as well, which would potentially increase revenue?
Please discuss.
* As a disclaimer, the sponsor is Exaltation of Larks, where I am employed. I mention this to be transparent but I didn't include this information in the main post since I see it being irrelevant to the purpose of this inquiry. ^
Comments
ladrupal.blip.tv and ads: one month later
Good morning Christefano,
My opinion doesn't count for much as I haven't taken the time to watch the ads, but for $5 in revenue I would think that we would be doing a service to the community in turning them off.
$5 shouldn't be hard to cover by a sponsor. I would be happy to pitch in $5 at the next meeting to help keep our presentation a clean reference portal for the community.
Do you need machine time or other services donated to help out?
Matt
Re: Do you need machine time or other services
Blip.tv has been a good service for what we use it for. It does its own file conversions, submits videos to iTunes (and Miro!) and probably does even more stuff that I don't know about.
$8 a month for what Blip.tv offers is a pretty great deal. I'd like to continue using it rather than ask community members to pick up the slack.
What do other user groups do to pay for the plumbing?
Re: Do you need machine time or other services
The LUGs host their own services ;)
Matt
So far, lauras on Twitter,
So far, lauras on Twitter, LittleLion in the comments here and Surpee in #drupal-la on IRC are against ads. I don't like them either, so that makes it 4 against.
I'd feel differently if the ads were immensely profitable, but this has certainly not been the case.
It's two days until the next Westside meetup, so let's see if there are any more comments and then we'll decide what to do at the meetup. Sound good?
I'm against the ads too.
I'm against the ads too.
WizOne Solutions - https://wizone.solutions - Drupal module development, theme implementation, and more
FillPDF Service - https://fillpdf.io - Hosted solution for FillPDF
My vote is for what makes the volunteer job easiest
If ads reduce the time of local volunteers in dealing with distributing our videos, then I vote for ads. Why?
Ads to me is not a simple issue. LPBN.org was the very first public video broadcasting web site for open source. So, I have watched this video issue with interest and it has not changed much, the behind scenes volunteer time can be quite high.
As the volunteer(s) will change over time, a volunteer that must spend extra time to deal or not deal with ads, means we will have fewer videos to publish, then that would be bad.
Yes, I'm taking a long term view, not the view of what would be best for the viewer, but what is best for keeping the videos being published, year after year.
I'm looking at the organization infrastructure resources that must be spent, per video, to get it to the viewer. The fewer resources spent means more videos per year.
The biggest hurdle to publishing video is editing them. The length of the video in minutes is typically the amount of time needed to edit the video. Zero editing means long pauses at the front, and the rear. At the front impacts the viewer, as they can not fast forward, with ease, to the ideal point to start watching. Dead time at the end is a quirky issue. Some viewers hate it, other viewers go quickly elsewhere, but never know if they missed something. Removing sequences that are off topic can increase the signal to noise ratio, thus enhance the value to the viewer, a lot. But that takes a lot of time. The entire video must be watched, rewound, cut started, ended, and then the edit list must be used to write a new video to disk.
The next hurdle is conversion. Many web sites now take care of that.
The last hurdle, impacting the volunteer, is the volunteer must queue up the upload, and wait, which can take hours, even at DSL or broadband speeds, and it uses valuable bandwidth, the volunteer would otherwise have used for surfing, and development.
I vote for reducing that volunteer time, and if it means ads, I am fine with that.
Pete
Peter
LA's Open Source User Group Advocate - Volunteer at DrupalCamp LA and SCALE
@bvirtual: The
@bvirtual: The ladrupal.blip.tv account is already Premium, and so it has a certain amount of resources. Whether ads or sponsors pay for this, it will continue having that capability.
I don't think ads will reduce (or even affect) required volunteer editing time.
Disclaimer: I'm not an LA Drupal manager :)
WizOne Solutions - https://wizone.solutions - Drupal module development, theme implementation, and more
FillPDF Service - https://fillpdf.io - Hosted solution for FillPDF
+1 against ads
I see their potential value but its offset by the distraction factor. I mean, that's if the current sponsor wants to continue sponsoring the service or wants to open it up to other, potential sponsors so that Exaltations isn't paying for everything all the time. We're all grateful to the Larks, though. :)
Miguel Hernandez - www.migshouse.com
Founder & CEO - The OpenMindz Group
Writer- Linux Journal & TechZulu
The feedback so far has been
The feedback so far has been an emphatic no ads, please. The revenue brought in during the last week (since the original post) is $1.21, and the projected $4-5 a month in revenue is just too low to bother with. I've turned off the pre-roll ads and will leave the post-roll ads on for a while.
If the remaining question is whether to seek sponsorship to pay for this overhead or to use ads I think we should seek sponsorship. There is a sponsor already, so nothing needs to change for now.
As a side note, I find it interesting that the overall number of views did not go down significantly when ads were turned on in January.
a shared video service ? a shared LUG service?
why not find a video AND web platform host who you can buy from as a group ? leverage sponsorship ?
individually Drupal LUGs are small cheese, but combined are a BIG DEAL.
maybe some fractal model might work ? nested LUGS?
video hosting is expensive.
Has anyone tried self-hosting Kaltura and the Kaltura Drupal module in the Cloud ?
We've received group
We've received group discounted deals in the past (the Path Finder discount, for example) but I'm not sure I have the time and energy to do the research and negotiate with new video providers by myself. If you'd like to take this on (identifying video providers, comparing their offerings and prices with blip.tv, etc.) please do! That would be a really valuable resource for our community.
If Kaltura or another service can do what blip.tv does (huge file uploads from its desktop application, iTunes and Miro syndication, etc.) then I'd love to hear it. We could then present the pros and cons to the rest of the user group and decide what to do.
Vimeo
Vimeo's Pro accounts are $60/year which works out to $5/mo. You can lower your costs from $8 to $5 :) They also work very well with emfield if you want to embed them into a Drupal site somewhere. emfield + media:vimeo + colorbox = awesomesauce.
After all this, Blip.tv has
After all this, Blip.tv has decided that our videos are "low quality" and will be deleting them. Here's a discussion about what, if anything, we're doing about it:
https://groups.drupal.org/node/358663
Vimeo's pricing in 2011 looks a lot better than their pricing in 2013! Vimeo Plus accounts are now $10 a month (or $60 a year) and Pro accounts are about $16 a month (or $199 a year).
For the past few months, we've had a Vimeo Plus account, currently sponsored by Exaltation of Larks, so videos will be ad-free.
Edit: updating the above info with Vimeo's annual pricing.