The people behind Common Craft are masters at explaining complex new media topics like Wikis, RSS, Social Media, etc. in plain English. One of their videos explaining Twitter has so far been viewed over 1.7 million times on YouTube while the one on Google Docs has been viewed over 2.7 million times.
Common Craft had an interesting business model. They would upload all their videos to YouTube and allowed other sites to embed them for free.
If anyone wants to download a high-resolution version of the video for offline presentations or for intranets, they can buy a license per video from Common Craft. Some of their illustrations also available as Kindle books.
Now you’ll have to pay to Embed Videos
The good old YouTube days are over as Common Craft has created a new “web license” for their videos that would require bloggers and websites to pay a monthly subscription fee for embedding videos on their site. And this is not a small amount.
For instance, if you plan to embed a video on a website that gets moderate traffic, your monthly bill for embedding that video can be around $104. And if the embedded video gets played more than 1,200 times on your site during that same month, you’ll have to pay an additional 8¢ per play.
The video will still be hosted on Common Craft web servers and you’ll be given a unique embed code that you can add to your website for serving the video.
I am huge fan of the entire Common Craft series and admire the fact that they have come up with such a unique business model to distribute their “high value” content online. At the same time, stories published on blogs, unlike the newswires, stay forever so the cost of embedding a single video could easily run into a few thousand dollars over time and that may not make lot of business sense.
For instance, if a popular site like BoingBoing or TechCrunch decides to embed one video from Common Craft, their annual fee could be more than $4,000. I don’t know if the writer salaries and advertising revenues in the $20-30 CPM range will be enough to offset that cost.
Common Craft Video Collection on YouTube
Find this article at: http://labnol.org/?p=13022
Reader Comments
Hi Amit,
Thanks for the post and your continued support of our work over the last couple of years – much appreciated. You’re right, this is a new model and we’ll be interested to see how it’s used now that we’ve made it public.
I’d like to reframe how your looking at the use case. You’re right, from a blogger perspective, the pricing may not be affordable. However, we’re not targeting bloggers or people who just want to share our latest video.
We’ve learned that our videos can be used as valuable business tools for organizations who are looking for high quality content to attract, engage and educate visitors, and potentially turn them into customers. The same is true for internal use – the videos are often used to educate employees. In our blog post about the new license and relationship with Wistia we say:
“This means a technology company can educate visitors on the basics of wikis, or cloud computing. A financial institution can educate potential customers on the stock market or borrowing money. A service organization can educate citizens about preparing an emergency kit.”
These are the customers we’re targeting – *organizations* that will put the videos to work. We believe that the model makes sense for organizations because the videos can contribute to organizational goals. Plus, these same organizations want the hassle-free nature of embeddable videos that also come with Wistia’s analytics. This is very different from marketing the videos to bloggers.
I hope that this helps clear up our goals with the new licensing. Thanks again for being a fan!
Written by Lee LeFever on 03.11.10
And how does Common Craft plans to manage piracy of its videos? As in reuploading the video to another video hosting site.
Written by Varun on 03.11.10
Gotta agree with Mike Masnick on this one:
“Either way, it’s difficult to see this working out. I’m sure some companies will pay, but on the whole, it seems to break the value chain here…The thing is, if you want your video to be viral, you can’t also charge for it.”
link
Written by Mark Murphy on 03.12.10