Wizzard Media, the podcast hosting and monetization giant, a couple of days ago released a letter to their shareholders that went towards explaining a bit of their corporate strategy:
In a very short time, Wizzard has surprised many people by becoming the largest distributor of digital media via RSS (podcasting). While many other companies took the route of launching online video websites and treating RSS distribution as nothing more than an add-on feature, Wizzard has focused its early efforts in this industry on dominating RSS delivery of media. Why you may ask? The quality of content and the reliability of podcasting publishers are head and shoulders above what you find on most video websites.
The letter goes on to list in great detail the numerous milestone achievements they’ve attained over the last year or so, some of which we’ve chronicled here at Mashable (you can find the full letter here).
Aside from the company’s achievements, they bring up an interesting question. In the world of online video, is RSS simply a feature or is it part of a central strategy. Personally, I’ve always viewed podcasting and RSS technology as central, but in the continuing production of Mashable’s ongoing video series, I’ve seen that validated as a matter of practice, as opposed to something to be thrown on as an afterthought.
We went through, in our search for a solid video platform, literally dozens of providers. Granted, due to our desire to monetize in specific ways from the onset, we had a much more demanding pattern of standards for what we’d accept, but it was amazing to us how many video hosting providers didn’t even offer anything close to conforming to RSS podcasting standards.
For instance, take Brightcove, the embedded video platform very widely used by media giants and tech pundits alike. It has probably one of the most customizable embedded video platforms I’ve ever worked with. The features in the player are second to none, and their ad serving capabilities are very impressive.
They don’t, unless it’s been recently added, have any ability to serve MP4 files via RSS though. For us at Mashable, we’ve found that this lack of ability can mean cutting out as much as 80% of your audience. Generally, we’ll receive hundreds and in some case thousands of video views of an episode through the website even when posted in off-peak hours, but very rare is it we’ll have less than a thousand downloads to a video we put out if it’s on the podcast feed.
Why is that? Well, part of it is that we’re generally fans of long-form content. A lot of our shows range upwards of twenty minutes, and rarely are shorter than ten minutes. Thus they aren’t the smoothest fit for someone who’s browsing through our site in search of a quick update on the news. They do have time to tag it as a download and watch it later or to throw the RSS feed on their iPod and subscribe to it.
When it comes to a corporate strategy, is it the best route though? I think if it’s coupled with a solid promotional strategy, the answer is yes. We view the web posts accompanying the episodes here at Mashable as your alert - that which lets you know that we have a new episode out (or that we have a series, depending on your level of awareness). Focusing on episodic content, though, very much improves the overall level of quality in the content - and if you need proof, look at YouTube’s new strategy.
A while back, when Robert Scoble was touting the fact that it was longform video that was inherently superior to shortform (and hence the reason why YouTube was raising the allowed length for YouTube videos), I put out a (shortform) video that talked about the quality level differences between episodic, targeted videos and the general UGC fare (at least on a commercial level).
Bottom line - if you’re working with video online: by all means have a web strategy, but if you don’t understand podcasts and RSS, be prepared to fight with one hand tied behind your back.
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