aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, June 03, 2007

Rocketboom & YouTube flip the ad model

Monday Rocketboom will be launching a new sponsorship model:

To our suprise...we learned that companies weren’t really interested in us having complete conviction in them anyway.  Ultimately, they really were big fans of Rocketboom and they wanted us (and our audience) to know that.  *They* had the conviction in *us*.

So that’s why we took that original model and flipped it. Our relationship to the sponsor now starts off with a sign of gratitude for their support.

In return, we have a great, critical audience that a sponsor can leverage to provide feedback and insight into their situation. While the system may not be right for many other environments, I think it will be extremely effective on Rocketboom. The entire program was designed to match Rocketboom as it already is.

I’m extremely proud to kick off this Monday with YouTube as our first sponsor. Regarding the broad topic of “video online”, in my personal opinion, there is not a single other group in the world that has done more to democratize the moving image. We finally got a Rocketboom YouTube account up and running as well. It’s amazing to think we have made it this far without any flash distributions. YouTube will make Rocketboom much easier to share, obviously.

This is terrific news! It’s not crystal clear to me how it will play out but I’m enthusiastic because both YouTube and Rocketboom understand that preroll ads don’t work for the format. They both want to find an ad model that does and I trust that if anyone can, they can.

Via NewTeeVee, “The show has made a number of groundbreaking distribution deals for TiVos and the like, but has done little to utilize the viral capabilities of web video.... With YouTube, Rocketboom will not only get in front of the biggest online video audience in existence, but also be much easier to share, embed, respond to, and subscribe to through the web browser.”