Sam Barcroft, Founder, Barcroft TV (left); Charlie Muirhead, CEO, Rightster.
Rightster’s Charlie Muirhead started this pair of presentations by talking in detail about Rightster, which has existed for about three years. “As a business, our focus has been creating a partnership with content creators, traditional media businesses and new media businesses, allowing Rightster to be the one-stop shop for all the digital backend and monetisation,” said Muirhead.
The slogan is “upload once — commercialise everywhere.”
But Muirhead pointed out that the real challenge online is fragmentation. Between content owners, audience and online publishers, there’s a lot competing for the right to exist, the right to time.
“We break our content partners into 3 different categories: Traditional premium rights-holders, marketing purposes, and original programming for the online marketplace,” said Muirhead.
This way, it can offer a 360° solution. You upload your content, then push it to your own website, to the big platforms like YouTube, and to the publisher network. That’s the proposition to the content partner.
Sam Barcroft followed next.
“People tend to think that online video is just a depository to push content into. It’s not true. You have to promote it and get excited about it,” said Barcroft, whose company produces content, like clips and shows, with videos that have generated over 250,000 comments so far this year. A few examples include Cheetah Chases Impala (6m views), Flying Lion (31m views), and Snake Eats Crocodile (24m views).
“Barcroft are the content experts, incredible at picking out these stories,” said Muirhead. “Our job is to make sure all those experiences get shared across platforms.”
In terms of transmission across technology, desktop comprises 55% of views, followed by mobile at 44%, then TV at 1%.
In terms of stats, what’s heavily ranked (after video views) is dwell time. Rightster looks for different ways to optimise metadata and encourage people to stay longer and watch more videos.
And per Barcroft (the content experts!), communities with credit are the most desirable placement options: Videos on HuffPo and time are more likely to be shared, for example, because people know immediately they can trust those sources.
“We’re going to do over 1bn views this year,” Barcroft boasted. “Being able to track all that is very exciting. To come back to brands and show them the data across all different portals is the real USP, from a brand perspective. We just need content to hit audience hard and make them want to engage… then we need magicians in the background to make money out of it.”
That’s it for the MIP Digital Fronts! Full coverage — including YouTube, Dailymotion, VICE, Maker Studios & Chipotle’s groundbreaking sessions — here on MIPBlog; and full conference videos here. Thank you for following!
