If you have watched a series of videos on YouTube recently about the challenges people on Vancouver's East Side have faced, you would have made a donation to Mission Possible Vancouver – and it wouldn't have cost you a dime.
VISO Give generates revenue for charities by embedding advertising in videos. By simply watching a video made by or for a non-profit organization, a viewer generates revenue, paid by the advertisers.
VISO Give is just one of nine online channels operated by Vancouver's BroadbandTV Corp.
Founded in 2007, BroadbandTV is now the sixth largest online video network in the world, and the company's founder and CEO, Shahrzad Rafati, has been racking up the honours recently, including being named to Fast Company's Top 100 list of the world's most creative people in 2011.
The 32-year-old entrepreneur built the company on the explosive growth of online video by coming up with a way to monetize and control pirated viral video. One of her first big clients was the National Basketball Association (NBA). Original content owners like the NBA don't want to alienate their fans but also don't like the fact that those fans often make clips and mash-ups of games broadcast on TV and then post them online.
Rafati designed tools that allow original content creators, like the NBA, to regain control of their own content as it's shared on the Internet and generate revenue through advertising.
"We started by being the peacemaker between the content creators and the users," Rafati said. "Then the business evolved because we saw there's this whole YouTube generation. We wanted to also help those content creators become successful by creating tools that help them optimize their assets and monetize their content."
BroadbandTV still works with major players like the NBA, but it's the explosion of small, independent video producers spawned by YouTube that presents the biggest potential market for video optimization, distribution and monetization.
Rafati said it's estimated that there will be 114 million original video content creators in the U.S. alone by the end of next year.
BroadbandTV tools help video makers optimize, distribute and monetize their videos using a revenue-sharing model. Advertisers pay to have their ads placed on videos, which then generate revenue for the content creator and BroadbandTV based on the number of views they get.
BroadbandTV works with 5,000 content creators and has 450 million viewers per month.
The company addresses one of the central problems with the growing trans-media and cross-media space, which will be the topic of the October 24 to 26 Merging Media conference in Vancouver. The explosion of web, mobile and social media is opening new frontiers for content creators across a multitude of platforms, but it also opens up huge legal concerns over the reuse of copyrighted material, said Christine Lim-Labossiere, founder and CEO of Merging Media Productions. •
