Self Publishing 2.0

I was pretty active publishing videos on YouTube for a couple of years in the late 2000′s, in part as an experiment to show self publishers how easy it was to reach an audience through video. Typically, my least successful channel consists of the videos I put the most effort into, my talks on self publishing subjects, but my two experimental how-to channels have drawn well over three million views. Many of these were educational screen capture videos, such as, how to create an index in Word, which has drawn nearly 25,000 views and which probably took me around a half hour to practice and do a final take.

The problem with making a business from how-to or other videos on YouTube is that the only monetization option has been to add advertising, something I never did. In fact, after refusing Google’s invitations to add advertising a number of times, my video traffic mysteriously declined by half, but that could have been due to the general breakdown of Google as a search appliance. This week, rumors that Google is about to announce paid subscription channels for YouTube have spread as far as the New York Times, which means, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it,  there’s probably some there there.

My guess is that Google will initially roll out a subscription program by invitation, essentially rewarding those channels that earn the most through advertising with a chance to generate subscription revenue, with Google taking the same share that they do on the advertising. The reason Google will be willing to risk losing some advertising business to an experiment in subscription revenue is that by all accounts, advertising rates for YouTube videos are too low to generate sufficient revenue. I think this is due in part to the nature of YouTube, that video watchers see it as a place to watch video – they aren’t shopping and aren’t interested in being diverted to a website selling something.

Ironically, I spent the first half of last year trying to develop a paid video business model for training, under the brand MyVideoCourse.com. The idea was to create a subscription framework for YouTube that allowed video publishers to create training courses, complete with tests after every video, pre-requisite videos and courses, etc. I spent a couple months working with existing online learning platforms, such as Moodle, before deciding they were all too clunky, too difficult for the casual publisher to use even in a limited fashion. Next I tried to create a custom solution with WordPress programming and plug-ins, but after another couple months of effort, I gave up in disgust at the “not quite ready for prime time” aspect of the work. I just don’t have the heart for programming in my old age.

I believed then, as I believe now, that video will become the standard delivery mechanism for instructional nonfiction in the near future, at least for younger audiences. The difficulty of using a pure YouTube solution is that Google is ruthless about dumping “partners” when the the revenue projections for a business stall, like when they dumped on all the Indy bookstores who bought into Google as an eBook distributor. So if Google comes knocking on your door with an offer to upgrade your YouTube channel to paid subscriptions, or if they open the program  to everybody, I wouldn’t rush to invest serious resources in creating video courses unless you have a dual-use in mind.

One such dual-use is obviously branding and book promotion, something I didn’t notice  any benefit from, despite the 3.5 million views my videos have received. This speaks, I think, to the difficulty of converting video browsers into book and eBook buyers. But if your goal is to become a public speaker, run training seminars or start a reality TV show, any exposure (including full frontal) is likely to be a step in the right direction. Another use, if not prevented by the as-of-yet nonexistent Google agreement, would be bundling and then publishing the same videos as courses through Amazon Instant Video.

The truth is, I enjoy making videos that I think people will find useful, and I’m always surprised how many views they get for even the most obscure subjects, like creating your own graph paper in Microsoft Paint which has drawn some 18,000 views. But doing an entire course based on the work-arounds I use in both my professional and private life doesn’t seem like a hot business proposition. And it’s unclear whether subscribers would expect a constant flow of new videos, or whether they would be satisfied to pay for access to a completed course of videos for a single month at a price that would make it worthwhile for the publisher. I’m afraid that Google will pull out some one-size-fits-all pricing scheme, like $1.99/month, that would only make sense for major players with tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers.