Regards,

The IV Team

Hi Everybody,

One single event that has occurred recently that has forced us to reconsider our position with respect to the ongoing development of the Infectious Videos website. Youtube’s decision to revenue share with its users significantly changes the video sharing landscape and pretty much removes the last point of leverage for smaller sites trying to gain traction in the market place without significant marketing expenditures.

It also removes our primary philosophic motivation for running this website – which was to play a part in driving the market toward revenue sharing models. We’ve always believed that this was the only equitable course for sites running off user generated content. With Youtube deciding to share their revenue – this effectively means that this market has now completely shifted toward that perspective. We certainly can’t claim that we had any specific influence in this regard (more likely Revver.com was on the forefront of Chad Hurley’s mind) – nevertheless, we’re still glad that it was our motivating belief.

It’s as such that we’ve decided to whack the for sale sign up on our site – to see if we might attract any interested parties. We wouldn’t do so if we didn’t think it a saleable asset. While it’s no longer the right development project for us (with our limited financial resources) – it may be for those interested in buying a position in the video sharing market. We believe that the acquisition of Infectious Videos would represent a significant discount when compared to the development of a video sharing site from scratch. With high premiums having been paid for various video sharing sites lately – Infectious Videos may indeed prove to be a valuable asset to those willing and able to provide the investment it needs.

Here’s a few stats to get us started:

Infectious Videos has had over 800,000 unique visitors in its 7 months of operation. You can think of that as brand exposure. The cost of this traffic was absolutely nothing. We spent nothing on advertising. We believe this to be a fairly powerful demonstration of the ease with which online video content can currently be marketed. It has had well over a million visits during the same period – which equates to 6 and a half million page views.

We averaged about three and a half thousand visits per day during January 07 – about 25,000 page views per day on average. In previous months we have near to double these figures. The decline in traffic is pretty much due to recent lack of motivation with respect to our marketing and SEO efforts. We believe such figures and more are achievable once again with someone dedicated to the task at the helm.

The front page has a Google page rank of 5 – of course the domain with it’s aged set of backlinks is part of the sale too.

Another thing worth noting:

While we chose the embedding/blogging model – IV has the backend required to handle hosting, should a new owner wish to choose that path (and they will almost certainly have to). The code is all there – it just has to be switched on. Of course – arrangements with an appropriate server hosting company that can handle that sort of traffic is the buyer’s own concern.

All interested parties should send an expression of interest to support@infectiousvideos.com – include your contact details so we can get in touch with you.

I should take a moment to thank our users and those that have supported the site thus far. We intend to sell it to someone that we believe will continue on in the same spirit as its inception – so hopefully none of your efforts in adding videos will be in vain. If we can’t find a suitable buyer we will review our position – but will at the very least keep it up and running so nothing will be lost.

As for us we plan to start a new project in a niche area that we feel is untapped. It’s a new concept that we’re pretty sure no one has catered for – so we’re quite excited. We’ll keep you informed once we’re ready to share more info.

That’s about it – thanks for reading. We’ll let you know how the sale goes – if it goes.

Regards,

The IV Team

Just a quick message to let you know that I've written up that tutorial on the tips n tricks behind ranking well in search engines. I'll probably expand on it in due course with some nice examples and explanatory pictures. But I wanted to get something up quickly and have been pressed for time.

You view the tutorial HERE

Regards,

The IV Team

Hope everyone had a happy christmas/new year and all that.

Not a huge amount to report given the holidays. We've done some work of late improving minor features of the sites design - elements that are important with respect of search engine optimisation. We've already seen some of the results which seem quite promising - but are waiting for google to do another deep crawl - as so far it has only really crawled about 3 or 4 pages deep. Our experiments have revealed quite interesting information that we think will be of interest to those video posters who want to see their videos rank well on search engines. So I'll be writing up a tutorial on that in the near future.

We have to give a shout out to Tyinquarter - a user over at Digitaljournal.com. He gave us an absolutely glowing review for which we are greatful. You can read the review here. Digital Journal is a revenue sharing site - and we love those. So we recommend you check it out.

Some bad news - it appears that Digg.com has added us to their banned urls list. This is somewhat perplexing. We haven't contacted them yet to find out why but will do so shortly. We have been aware of a small minority of Digg users that believe us to be a spam site - and would express so in comments on links to IV that made it to the front page of Digg. It seems that such a coterie can be influential in getting digg to ban urls - regardless of the realities of the situation. We'll see what we can do about it.

In terms of the accusation that we are a spam site - well, it's ridiculous. There seems to be a set of people out there that believe just because you stand to gain financially from distributing content across the web - this therefore makes it spam. The philosophical underpinning to this view seems to rest with the idea that distribution that occurs without financial remuneration is somehow more 'authentic'. Meanwhile - the venture capitalists and the big media conglomerates will continue to consolidate their position in the online media market place - helping themselves to the value produced by individual distributors and giving nothing back. Why there should be a grass roots movement that actually supports the corporations and fat cats in this aim is beyond me. But I suspect that many people have not yet made the link.

For a definition of what constitutes an act of spamming - see our tutorials section. I lay out the difference quite succinctly there.

It is almost a certainty that if revenue sharing sites can develop a sustainable business model - they will supersede those sites that do not revenue share, or force them toward such a business model. They key will be in the ability to develop efficient, low bandwidth sites that don't require a huge overhead - allowing for the revenue to be redistributed back to the users.

In anycase - revenue sharing sites will continue to proliferate across the web - and the idea that such sites are 'spam' sites will very soon become an anachronism.

That's all for now,

The IV Team.

Looks like Google is finally giving us the love as a result of their latest deep crawl. Traffic has increased - and hopefully your adsense income has too. There's still a lot more work to do, however, before we can consider our site as established in the market.

We've been concentrating on our ranking system. We want our key differentiator to be the quality of videos on our front page - that's why we've been putting a lot of effort on this aspect of our service. It's not the sort of thing you'll see immediate results development wise - but hopefully it'll have a long term positive effect. As always - your feedback is more than welcome. So let us know how you think we're going.

In other news it appears as though we made it onto the list of the hottest 100 betas in the webosphere as ranked by MOMB (The museum of modern betas). You can check them out here Let's hope we stay there!

Regards,

The IV Team

Just a couple of quick news tidbits. We've added another support tutorial containing some tips and tricks you can use to drive traffic to your videos. You'll notice we go to great lengths to get you to appreciate the difference between spam and marketing. So don't spam! It aint cool.

You can view the tutorial here.

The point of all this is that even if we were the biggest site in the world most of you would have to go to extra lengths to find your audience beyond just posting your videos to a variety of video sites. The reason for this is that even with a critical mass of viewers, there is just too much content - and everyone is just too time poor. Your video - no matter where it is, is likely to be quickly buried. But there is a lot you can do if your willing to put the time in - hence we made this tutorial. We're also always on the lookout for more marketing techniques (anything besides throwing a stack of money at a PR company).

On another matter - we've been experimenting with the ad formats of late to see if we can improve click through rates. No real luck yet - as our current format really does seem to be the most effective (beyond a total page re-design). This is as we suspected - but we'll continue to try new ideas as we learn of them.

Otherwise all is status-quo... We're noticing lots of new users on the site - so a big welcome goes out to all of you (some of whom have been quite successful in driving traffic to their videos).

Regards,

The IV Team

This is more of a blog entry than news on what's happening.

This article on smh.com reminded me of the reason why we started Infectious Videos. It was only a matter of time before the large web 2.0 sites became vehicles for marketing companies. This is the natural way of free markets.

Infectious Videos is a response to this. When the authentic channels of expression get taken over by the powers that be - you need somewhere else to go. We don't need another hosting service... there are plenty of those around. What we need is a community of vloggers willing to hunt down the good content and post it here. So the idea of the site is to become the showcase of the best that's out there.

To become that, of course - we need you. And to encourage your participation we included revenue sharing. This is an experiment. Will it encourage people toward posting quality? Or will it attract the opportunistic? We'll find out. We believe that the vlogger either which way deserves some return for their efforts.

Regards,

The IV Team

I'm here to give a big thanks to Micki from Revver who was kind enough to make mention of us on the Revver Blog.

We see Revver as a great place to host your videos and applaud their efforts to encourage the market toward revenue sharing. They also reward the distributors of online content. So if you sign up at Revver and post their videos to blogging services like ours, you'll get a cut of their advertising revenue too! We think it's a great system and wish them the best of luck.

Go on - give Revver a look!

Cheers,

The IV Team

We've managed to squeeze in time for more IV development. Most of the things at the moment you won't notice - backend stuff... adjustments to our ranking system etc.

One new feature you might find useful is the ability to add a digg widget to your videos. If you submit a link to digg, just cut and paste the digg page link into the field provided in the video edit page in your account panel. The widget will then appear on the video display page showing how many diggs the video has received. It's a great way to promote your content. If you want support for other sites send us an email to support@infectiousvideos.com and we'll see about adding them.

We've also added a FAQ and some tutorials for help using some of our features. We'll be adding to these as time goes on.

Next up we'll be returning to develop the vlogging feature. Stay Tuned!

Regards,

The IV Team

The problem with the adsense code has been fixed. However, those who have been affected will need to re-insert their adsense code, by cutting and pasting it in the usual fashion. For this inconvenience we sincerely apologise.

Alternatively, you're welcome to email us and ask us to do it for you. Just send the email to support@infectiousvideos.com

If you're not sure whether you were affected - we'll be sending out an email to those who were.

Regards,

The IV Team

We just wanted to take a moment to welcome the new users we're seeing on the site - great to have you here!

We hope you guys will form the core of a critical mass website that delivers you all substantial returns on your submissions. But gaining that critical mass for a website is of course incredibly difficult. It really depends on whether you guys enjoy your experience enough to spread the word in the various other online communities you inhabit. Of course, given that this is a revenue sharing website, the key factor you are all considering is the amount you earn. But here's the catch22 - without that solid critical mass, you're not likely to earn much - and if you don't earn much, you're unlikely to spread the word.

It'll take a core of dedicated believing users to work through lean times and drive traffic to break the cycle. We're hoping you're it! But you never know how these things will pan out - and we aint counting chickens.

We're hoping it works and catches on. We chose the revenue sharing model for a number of reasons. But essentially we want to be part of the process that drives the whole market toward revenue sharing. As far as we know hardly any big sites are doing it - if any at all - even if they are web 2.0 and have user contributed content. They're living off the fat of the land. I found it astonishing to hear Kevin Rose bag out Jason Calacanis for giving contributers some payback - when his only argument was that this was the big AOL trying to screw over the poor newstart. But digg is VC backed right? - so it's just more rich men (we love digg and think the idea of user determined content is fantastic - ultimately revenue sharing is just taking that philosophy to the next level). The aim should be to drop the barrier of entry for anyone wanting to make money on the internet. And we salute anyone working to that end. It shouldn't be just about the rich media companies controlling every thing like they have with other media up until now. If that is what happens - then what is the point of the new medium?

We chose the embedding/blogging model for a number of reasons - but the most important is that it accords to perfectly with our above aim of driving the market toward lowering the barrier of entry for the average joe. We don't want VC money (we don't think they'd touch us anyway) - and we don't want to have to deploy the huge array of capital that a bandwidth heavy site needs. Hence we work toward keeping the site lean - while learning techniques of database management that hopefully allow us to minimise the need for extra servers. We like the example set by Marcus Frind - the owner of plentyoffish.com - who runs a high traffic site without a massive bank of servers. We agree that this is the direction the market will eventually have to embrace. Those who can run lean - and give as much as possible back to their users will ultimately come out on top. If we can help that scenario come about by forcing the big sites into revenue sharing models - all the better. Our ultimate, long term survival actually comes second to this aim, and being a video blogging service - as opposed to a hosting service - allows us to avoid the VC funding that would force us to abandon that which we believe in. We really don't have anything to lose - the VC's, Murdoch and all the other fat, rich cats do.

This scenario - however - depends on people utlimately choosing the revenue sharing sites over the others... and that's we're you come in. We hope you enjoy you're stay at IV - and continue to support us. If there is anything you'd like us to do - drop us a line on our support email: support@infectiousvideos.com

njoy, The IV Team

We are putting a system in place and expect to have the problem solved shortly.

Regards,

The IV Team

Google has deemed our site in breach of its terms and conditions on account of it containing adult content. We are currently trying to work with Google to try to restore the service as quickly as possible, and the service should be back in place soon. We are also looking at other advertising partners in the hope of restoring our revenue sharing program as quickly as possible. But for the meantime we must announce with deep regret that we are unable to continue offering this service at this time. We apologise to those users that have put so much effort into their postings. We hope to restore the service as soon as possible.

We thank everyone for their patience and understanding.

Regards,

The IV Team