Competing With Free

If you don’t have a wealthy niche market will use your subscription model to turn a decent profit for Live Events, then you are like the remaining 99% of us. If you want to get your product out to the masses and grow your customer base you have to show your event for FREE.

I can hear the moans and groans about costs. “How on earth can I afford this?” There are many ways to start looking at it. The cost will be less than what you think these days.

As always I will give you some examples of what I have experienced in this space. We use to have a subscription model to show the races for the Indy Racing League and the Indianapolis 500. The subscription model was mediocre at best. It quickly dawned on me that you can’t grow your customer base if you charge them for it. Fans won’t be able to share, comment or tell others “Hey click on this link and watch this with me”. That viral communication was instrumental in giving us the success we have today. The following year I found a company that had an ad supported player so we could begin the process of showing this to our fans for free. We did some trials with the wonderful members at TrackForum (A racing forum). They helped us worked out some bugs and continue to give us help to this day. The results were incredible. I was more impressed with the number of racing fans watching that were outside of our current fan base. This was the objective but didn’t expect immediate results. We then allowed fans to discover our site and participate in various other 2.0 applications. Needless to say our traffic increased over 100%.

-- Try to gauge the size of what your online audience will be. Consultants tend to dramatically overestimate this number to drive the costs up. Try things live posting audio or video clips up on your site. Check your stats on how many times that clip was downloaded over the course of a week. This will give you a good basis. I have used this method for years and have been within 10% each time. Your number may range from a few 100 to 10,000. (If you are over 100,000 and aren’t showing your product for free call me as you are missing a huge opportunity for growth).

-- The costs of streaming has dropped significantly over the past few years and will continue to drop thanks to P2P development. There are numerous streaming companies in this space. I currently work with WhiteBlox, Akamai, Limelight and Abacast. All have great solutions depending on your needs.

-- Advertisement. Obviously the only way to keep it free is to have an ad supported model. Advertisers want to know who your audience is so gather as much information about them as you can. This will be critical when presenting it to potential advertisers. Your fans actually enjoy relevant online advertisement and will engage with the ad.

-- Sell your event by the minute. When you set up your charges use the Cost Per Viewer Minute Model. This model is best for the advertiser and they will thank you for not overselling your product which happens all to much in the traditional media world. Basically advertisers will purchase how many minutes they want to sponsor with the option of buying more minutes. So if a fan only watches 30 minutes of your show then the advertisers only pays to those minutes viewed and nothing more. If not all minutes are viewed it can be applied to your next show or they get a refund.

-- Video cameras. Depending on what type of show you are putting on (a tech seminar or the Indy 500) lighting is going to be the key. Your cameraman will give you the best advice on this.

-- Audio. Make sure you have a good audio source. I can’t you how important it is to have good audio as users will become quickly annoyed if they can barely make out your program.

We had a great 2007 season and 2008 will be even better.