Barackface: Video Blogging For A Living

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Video Blogging For A Living

Google's Blogger was not around during Dean 2004. So the idea that you can have your own blog in text for free is kind of recent. The idea that you can have your own podcast for free is even more recent. Google came up with the video option, as have a few others like YouTube.

I moved to New York City this past summer. Why did I move? I needed a place I could call home, something crowded, and diverse, and noisy and a little on the dirty side. Career was a secondary concern. I thought I might cultivate a few business ideas. Instead I was doing the Nepal work days, nights, evenings, and weekends.

I dipped into the storm during the dot com mania, I have been to all 48 states, I have driven overnight through a hurricane, and I am hard core political. And bills have to be paid.

I believe I have found a business model that could work for me. Google Video has announced it will make pay per view possible. If I could produce a 30 minute clip per day and get watched by 100 people per clip on average, at 50 cents a clip you are looking at $1500 a month, still below poverty line, but enough to pay all my bills. At 1000 viewers, that is $15,000 a month though, and that is rich. At 200 viewers you are looking at 36K per year. At 400 viewers 72K, which is ambitious even by NYC standards. There are various permutations and combinations possible. And it does not have to be one loyal band of 500 viewers. It can be a revolving door. Some of my most watched videos for free are those people must have found using the search engine. (My Four Most Viewed Video Clips)

It can not be my Nepal blog (Activism And Entrepreneurship), it has to be my Americana blog. I need a potentially large audience. You do your own marketing. You post a blog entry, and go looking for blog posts on similar topics, read them, leave links to your article in their comments sections, and you get return hits. A few days back I left less than 10 comments, and I had 50 plus page hits the following day, a record for my blog that had 30 plus max on any other day prior. But then the day after it went up to 80 plus without any additional work. With 500 comments, I could possibly hit the magical 10,000 page hits mark. At that point you are really talking. I could be blogging on a daily basis.

The business model is as yet unproven, but the numbers look really good and achievable. And it is appealing so many other ways. This feels like a dot com. This is entrepreneurship. On the other hand, this is politics in a the future is now way, in a politics at the speed of thought way. Blogging dissolves boundaries. Between politics and business, between academia and politics. Heck, I might even write a novel and publish it the same way.

This business model will allow me to do a whole bunch of reading, something I look forward to greatly. Books, movies, music.

This really helps with my political work. I believe I am going to be much more focused on my blog and my MeetUp. My political career does not go through DFNYC. I am going to be much more selective in terms of the DFNYC events I attend. I can not be moving one meeting at a time. I have to move at speeds possible online. And with the online option, you don't meet the geographical bounds. If it were just offline politics, I would feel guilty at some level. What am I doing for my people? My allegiance lies with the Global South.

If you write a blog entry that gets read by 200 people, that is like addressing a 200 strong crowd. I am all set. I am excited.

I have not had to open up those envelopes yet, but if I need venture capital, it comes in the mail in the form of credit card offers, in case the business idea takes a few months longer to take off than I have thought. Now you are really talking dot com.

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Busiest day so far	20 February 2006
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21 February