Videobomb not a blast for vloggers
Published by Graham Walker on 9 Feb 2006 at 12:02 am.
2 Comments.
Filed under Vlog News.
Looks like Videobomb is trying to be the Digg of videos. Trouble is that the service is not very vlogger friendly.
When you upload a video they ask for “The URL of the file itself, not a webpage.”. So if any vloggers gets “videobombed” they can look forward to people watching their video without really knowing where it came from.
True, there is a spot where you can include webpage info but a viewer would have to go digging to find it.
Holmes Wilson on 9 Feb 2006 at 10:38 am: 1
Hi Graham. Holmes Wilson here– I’m one of the folks who made Videobomb. This comment is going to be a really long one, but that’s because we care about all this stuff a lot, and we’ve been talking about it amongst ourselves for months now, so I’m psyched for the opportunity to air it all out publicly
First, we absolutely have to ask people to submit direct links because if people didn’t, we couldn’t make feeds that people could watch in aggregators like ANT, iTunes, or DTV. We don’t want to lock out people who use aggregators, because aggregators are great for staying up on a wide range of sources. And we think watching that way is the best way to participate– both for people who want to comb through a lot of videos and for those who want to share their own personal feed with friends.
But in spite of that restriction, our main goal in designing videobomb was to tie people into video makers in a more permanent way. That’s the cool thing about RSS: people who watch one video can become subscribers. And we’re serious about providing ways for people to find cool channels and get subscribed to them: long before Videobomb came out, we made the DTV Channel Guide so that everybody who used DTV would start exploring all the great sources out there.
So, right now we ask people to submit *three* links about the video: More info, RSS feed URL, and “Publisher Hookup link”.
The “Publisher Hookup Link” could be a link to buy a t-shirts or a DVD, make a donation, sign a petition– anything that would show appreciation for the video and make the publisher even more happy that a bunch of people watched it.
The RSS feed URL means that if somebody sees a video they like, they can subscribe to the feed it came from (say, the videoblog). One of the big weaknesses with digg.com is that people go to the linked page, read it, and leave, never to arrive again. According to this analysis of digg traffic (http://www.tech-recipes.com/blog217.php) from a webmaster’s perspective, linking to your webpage itself would do very little to involve people in your site. That’s why we’re collecting RSS feed URLs, so we can say “you like this video? subscribe to the feed it came from!”. That way, when a video gets “bombed” it brings people into a more long term relationship.
I honestly believe that once we iron out the kinks, Videobomb will be *better* at getting vloggers new, long-term subscribers than a site that just linked to somebody’s webpage.
You can see how “more info” and “publisher hookup” show up here. I appreciate the pun on digging (one could even say I dig it) but the links are pretty clear:
http://videobomb.com/posts/show/263
The video display page is still pretty poorly designed, to be sure, but we’ll be fixing that real soon to make those links stand out more. Over the long haul, we’ll be experimenting with different designs to see which ones work best at driving people to publishers’ sites.
There’s also this really unfortunate bug right now where those links don’t *work* (embarassing) but we’re gonna fix that first thing this afternoon. I think we broke it while fixing some other stuff.
Right now those extra URLs are optional, so not every submission has them, but as videobomb grows we’ll hopefully be able to place a slightly bigger burden on submitters, and we’ll make “Hookup” “RSS feed” and “More info” required fields.
Lastly, if you really don’t want to take part in this experiment, our FAQ explains how you can keep your stuff out of videobomb (just email us). But we hope that won’t be necessary. The only issue I haven’t mentioned is bandwidth (since you didn’t mention it) but we’re taking that challenge seriously too, and we’ll be using both software and community mores to make sure we don’t cause bandwidth problems.
If there are any other problems, please be in touch: hello AT videobomb dot com
Holmes Wilson on 10 Feb 2006 at 11:33 am: 2
We updated that single video page, BTW, to make the links back to the original publisher more prominent:
http://videobomb.com/posts/show/331