Andrew Baron, Creator of Rocketboom
(Photo Credit: Wikipedia)

Despite eBay’s own issues with the auction, reports say Baron had concerns over potentially spammy prospectors using his account to bombard his now 1,700-plus followers with marketing messages. If you were keeping tabs on the auction, at the time of deletion the highest bid equated to a bit over a dollar per follower, all of whom would be likely to un-follow as soon as they found out they were being targeted.

Add to that whom he follows, though, and you have around 3,000 eyeballs, which makes a message the price of a stamp.

Though no one is certain how successful a spam campaign would be on Twitter anyway, it makes one wonder if a person’s followers are worth that dollar amount, and what Baron’s particular list would accomplish beyond what automated scripts other Twitterers appear to be using would.

Over the past few days, Baron tweeted plans to delete his auction listing before eBay called to inform him of their new digital product policies, which required him to move the listing to another part of the site. Some had wondered if the sale would be a violation of eBay’s terms of service. Craigslist, after all, had deleted a similar listing.

"There are only 8 documented cases of ‘I got a call from ebay’ on Google," Baron humorously tweets. Now there are nine, the second result from Baron’s Twitter account, which sort of raises a whole other issue surrounding Twitter’s value.

Other, more recent tweets are cryptic, suggesting perhaps there is another deal in the works to hammered out this weekend. The mystery and weirdness surrounding the issue have led critics to accuse Baron of staging a kind of publicity stunt. When WebProNews asked him, though, he denied it. "I would say it’s not at all a stunt," he said.

And that’ll run you about $3000 a pop. It raises to $5000 after September.

Baron also has set up a Rocketboom channel on YouTube, where you can make yourself with all that Joanne (and maybe some Amanda, too, but I didn’t look that far.)

What was most interesting about Baron’s blog post was a short history detailing how much the site struggled in the beginning and about how difficult it was to keep the show afloat.

He writes:

Just over a year ago, we ran out money for Rocketboom. We were not mature enough to consider investments and so I decided Rocketboom had to go forward with an E-bay auction….

I’ll never forget the fear of failure that buit up to 5 seconds before the auction ended a loser, followed by a final refresh click with just 2 seconds to go that suddenly showed a $40,000 winner. To this day, I had never publicized that $40,000 was actually our reserve, helping to set the high market value.

As such, the vlog that launched the career of Amanda Congdon is looking for other revenue streams, according to Market Watch‘s Frank Barnako.

Baron wowed the audience at the Podcast and Portable Media Expo last October, speaking about monetization strategies and announcing he’d just closed a deal for $80,000 for a week’s worth of ads.

But that was when Rocketboom was peaking at 300,000-plus downloads. In the past six months, downloads have dwindled to 200,000. That’s still a hefty audience, but as Baron mentions at Market Watch, advertisers are seeking millions, rather than hundreds of thousands.

If dealing in text, an audience the size of Lexington, KY may be more than enough to attract certain advertisers on traditional terms. The cost of online video, however, means higher ad prices to pay for it, and advertisers start wincing.

So now the pioneer in the industry is forced to redirect, focus on merchandizing and consider a subscription model. This is interesting mostly because of Baron’s openness – the world (well, the small world that’s paying attention) is watching as this young man struggles with a model.

In the meantime, Baron is taking consulting jobs and speaking gigs to fund his outfit.

"What he’s finding out is that it’s a new medium that advertisers are willing to experiment with but its not a standard practice in their marketing," said iEntry Inc. CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord.

"Metrics are difficult with online video. Marketers still aren’t using the Internet for branding, they’re using it for direct response."

Perhaps the issue here is tallying up the value of a 3-minute daily broadcast that is incredibly niche – but is also incredibly limited. What News Corp. is proving with MySpace, and what Google is proving with YouTube, is that the value is in community building.

A community, with its various topics, provides various audiences in their own niches. But their collective value will be stunning.

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Podcasting, vlogging, and other incarnations of the new e-business world cannot focus on the way things have been done since mass communication began – which is focus on general content for the lowest common denominator, controlled by advertisers.

Baron referred to LetsKnit2gether.com, a vlog focused on knitting, as a model for this type of niche production. True, there will be a smaller audience, but the audience is so targeted that advertisers should recognize the value of reaching it.

The point podcasters and others have missed, in his estimation is the value of niche content that we’ve learned from blogs like Engadget, the most popular blog: highly focused content serves the audience best, because it is findable by the audience that desires that content most.

Podcasting, then, should follow that model, targeting “very, very, very, very specific” groups, and find a way to engage the audience at a high level.

He said the biggest disadvantage most podcasters have is that the audience is so far away from the access point. Once they’ve downloaded the program to a portable device, which is kind of the point, they are away from their computers while consuming the content. Podcasters and vloggers need to find a way to bring them back to their computer seats.

One way he suggests to this is through the use of wikis. A wiki can be made to match the format of the site, and can have some pages where the public cannot edit them. But, if there are topics created that the audience may have sufficient knowledge about, like video cameras, for instance, then the audience becomes a key stakeholder in the content.

Plus, search engine spiders can find that content, and site operators can spend less time creating text.

“Think about it from the audience perspective,” he said.

For promotional reasons, Baron said not to be afraid to let users use your content and distribute it for you. “As long as people aren’t making money off it, allow it to go wherever it can.” Chasing it down and trying to control is, in his opinion, a waste of resources, as it is free promotion, and more could be done with money spent trying to leverage that control.

Baron said that Rocketboom’s approach to advertising was different than many might expect. When other video sites are including their advertising in a pre-roll situation, Rocketboom ads are post-roll. Andrew is sensitive to his viewers, and imagines them waiting to download and waiting through a 30-second spot just to get to the content they want. And in today’s hectic Internet world, that just won’t do. You don’t want your audience saying “I hate this commercial…I hate Mop and Glo.”

Though a post-roll advertisement may get fewer views, at least he can tell advertisers (though it is a harder sell) that this many people were definitely interested in the commercial.

Other ways to monetize:

Merchandizing

Premium subscriptions

Licensing

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Baron said a week’s worth of commercial space on the popular video blog Rocketboom, which reaches up to 350,000 fans daily, carries a price of $80,000, or about $55 CPM. But, and this is the big but, if the commercial is likeable, entertaining, and matches what he knows of the Rocketboom audience, the charge is only $60,000.

“Ads should be consistent with the interests of our audience,” he said. Traditionally advertisers have had power over content providers, deciding whether or not their products matched the demographic of a particular audience. Baron’s model would appear to give that power back to the content provider, and, to the audience.

“I’m only going to work with the advertisers I want to work with, and I’m only going to run ads I like,” he said.

One of the themes of the conference, as introduced by TWiT’s Leo Laporte on Friday morning, was that podcasting and vidcasting should steer itself away from the “bladdercasting” of traditional media, focusing on smaller, more loyal and engaged, niche markets. This gives the audience a stake in the content, and though the audience is smaller, the direct purchases could be much higher.

Baron continued that theme on Saturday morning with another crowd-husher. “Soon Disney is going to feel confident with an audience of 10,000 hard-core, dedicated fans focused on specific content,” he said.

He uses an example of Rocketboom’s t-shirt sales. Baron said he pulled in about $4,000 a month in t-shirt sales, a low number because the shirts can’t be found on the site (he seemed embarrassed about that); fans had to do a search in Google to find them. If they were findable on the site, he admits, he could pull in more fan-money.

Baron is also toying with the idea to expand Rocketboom’s content on a subscription model. Subscribers would gain access to longer features, outtakes, specials, and the like, for about $3.50. If just 10,000 viewers, about 3 percent, subscribed, that would rake in an extra $35,000 per month.

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Delivering Web Video The Rocketboom Way

Our men on the scene, Rich Ord and Mike McDonald, continue to feed us reports from the conference. These notes come from Baron’s industry perspective chat on The Implications for Media in a Global Internet Culture to attendees, which we’ve excerpted for presentation here.

VON organizer Jeff Pulver welcomed Baron to the conference, and effused on how much he enjoyed being around “a bunch of people who really get it. I want to thank all of you for making this really cool.”

Baron thanked Pulver for his welcome and opened his talk. (Readers: please note this is a raw cross-section of Baron’s talk; we’re giving it to you this way to give you a feel for the impression he makes. Any perceived deficiencies in the flow or content are the fault of your humble scribes, not Andrew. – David)

Quickly, Rocketboom is a 3 minute blog style program where Joanne … our host … does quirky stories. One of the things that made Rocketboom so popular (about 350000 views a day)… is because we were one of the first adopters. I took an approach that I didn’t have fear of people grabbing RocketBoom and redistributing it.

By letting this go these people are becoming aware of Rocketboom as a brand. I feel that people online are inclined to come to us at the home page if they liked the content. We don’t allow commercial use without something worked out, but for any other reason I have no problem with that. Essentially, Rocketboom is like a big catcher’s mitt. We don’t do press releases or PR.

I found that if people want it over here I think we should make Rocketboom available …. So, we have an obnoxious number of file types.

Another thing I noticed is that the mainstream media does a good job with mainstream entertainment. Then there is the other side, and that is more about information. The qualify of production and effort for those kinds of programs is somewhat incidental.

So I thought ‘why not put entertainment and information together?’

Another element of a successful web video site is the sense of belonging. At least 25 percent of the content comes from viewers. We also have barely filtered comments off of every video cast. If you are watching a video on your iPod or on TV you can’t comment.

If you noticed we kind of have a Google aesthetic to the site…. websites are like your house or office…. it is a space where you want people to feel comfortable to watch your content.

Over the next year I will probably become a real proponent for wikis. This allows my audience to come in and really belong, really take ownership of the site. So far we only have 24 articles in the wiki I just set up. I showed which camera I used, and what happened is that the audience came into my wiki and corrected spelling and formatting and sort of cleaned it up.

We recently posting a question in the wiki; one was ‘where were you on September 11, 2001?’ It was fascinating to watch and see how people are reacting to it.

Imagine you come onto someone’s website, suppose you are a fan of the show… oh here’s Steve Garfield in my wiki…. it is interesting that the audience can come in and mess with this …. the audience feels like it belongs. That’s really powerful and important.

Now lets jump into monetizing web video. I have a sense that monetization is what people are interested in …

So far over the last 2 years because we all know that the level of entry is so low, you don’t need to raise money or even have money, but what you need is time. So then, where am I going to make my money?

I say set that aside and focus on building your audience. If I have 200,000 people or 400,000 people viewing, anyone on Wall Street will say that there is value there.

We charge $60,000 for a weeks worth of ads. We aren’t yet selling many ads because I am selling them myself at this point. I’m good at making the sale but I don’t have any feeling for it. I’m sorry but that’s me.

We like to create ads for our advertisers because I feel I know our audience best, and I know what works and what doesn’t work.

Our advertisements increase in value over time. As an example we used a Guinness commercial at the end of a segment on a brewery called Brooklyn Beer. Now here it is a year later, and because Rocketboom has a good link value on Google, there are over 6 million links in. It is more likely if someone is searching for a brewery in this area Rocketboom will come up. I see this as value for the advertiser.

We have a larger audience than many TV shows.

Another way to monetize your content is a premium subscription. For the hardcore fans, we will give you extra content and our newsletter, and ask them to pay $3.50 a month. For 10,000 people that is $35,000 per month.

Another method of monetizing is merchandising. At CollegeHumor.com these guy were making $400,000 per month. It’s crazy. At Rocketboom we are lousy at this, but still make $3,000-$4,000 per month from our one T-shirt.

Later I may plug in other shows to my huge catcher’s mitt of Rocketboom.

Blogging is so important to Rocketboom. How does blogging translate to video blogging? The answer is making the videos compelling and interesting. If you can find bloggers with a lot of authority to talk about you, that prompts the thousands of other bloggers to comment and take action.

Then journalists who feel threatened by bloggers notice what bloggers are saying; their big megaphone talks about you.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.