2016 may go down as the year of Content Monetization as two more major companies announce big investment and innovation deals in the rapidly growing digital industry.
The term itself isn’t new, content monetization refers to turning digital content into revenue and has been around for the last couple years. However, the major gains the industry is currently making are very new, much to the pleasure of news outlets, businesses, bloggers, vloggers and the internet savvy.
The efforts to help content creators, marketers and advertisers turn unique digital content into money in many ways marks the end of the digital Wild West days when content was pirated, misappropriated and misused rampantly.
After years of struggling to build paywalls and roll-out monetization strategies, in mid-June Tribune Publishing, the company that owns the LA Times, renamed itself tronc, for Tribune Online Content. While the name change was minor, the new moniker denotes a conscious shift toward digital content and was solidified when tronc introduced their new content monetization engine, which, as they say, is designed to, “create more revenue…than you’ve ever seen.”
The new strategy hinges on video content and will work to enhance the stories already found on the LA Times website. “Right now we’re averaging about 16 percent of our article pages have the type of video player that we can monetize,” said Anne Vasquez, tronc’s Chief Digital Officer. “By 2017 we need to get to 50 percent of our article pages having a Brightcove video player attached to it.”
In early July, end-to-end video streaming and monetization platform Anvato was acquired by Google as part of the tech giant’s Google Cloud Platform team. Anvato’s proprietary software provides video processing solutions, encoding, editing, and publishing and distribution tools for various platforms.
Anvato has experienced profound success with their technology and boast a roster of clients that include NBCUniversal, MSNBC, CBS, Univision, HGTV, Bravo and Fox Sports. These large media corps use Anvato’s services to power live streams, edit videos directly in the cloud, and insert ads.
“The [Google] Cloud Platform and Anvato teams will work together to deliver cloud solutions that help businesses in the media and entertainment industry scale their video infrastructure efforts and deliver high-quality, live video and on-demand content to consumers on any device — be it their smartphone, tablet or connected television,” says Belwadi Srikanth, Google senior product manager.
Of course, content monetization isn’t only for media corporations and large companies — content monetization is also crucial for vloggers, podcasters, bloggers, digital authors and a host of other creators who use the digital space to share their work.
For individuals and small businesses, ConnectPal, the world’s first content marketplace, is a company that offers what is basically a digital mall where shoppers can purchase monthly subscriptions to their favourite accounts.
Through private ConnectPal pages, content creators are in control of who accesses their pages and how much to charge visitors to access this exclusive content.
Designed to be easy to use, ConnectPal users simply use the free sign up form to create their account and add their subscription price, while ConnectPal staff take care of monthly billing and the collection of billing information. This makes the process hassle free.
This business model works positively for both ConnectPal users, who are finally monetized for their digital content, and ConnectPal subscribers, who have access to high quality content unavailable anywhere else.
