MORE EYEBALLS, MORE REVENUE:
A GUIDE TO VIDEO CONTENT SYNDICATION
AND DISTRIBUTION
You have great video content. But in today’s fragmented media landscape, it’s going to take a great
distribution plan to fully monetize that content. The key to any monetization plan, of course, is getting
that content out in front of as many viewers as possible. But how do you do in order to get the highest
value for your content? How do you do that without losing control of your intellectual property? And are
all viewers created equal?
This guide will help walk you through the difference between distribution and syndication, some of your
available platforms, and why bother in the first place. We’ll wrap it all up with a handy list of best practices
so you can get started today.
You’ve done the hard part, pulling together that content. Now find the easiest way to maximize its value
and grow your audience.
WHY DISTRIBUTE (BEYOND YOUR WEBSITE) AT ALL?
First, the obvious: putting your content in more places gives a wider audience a chance to encounter it.
If your videos only appear on your site, you’re limited to people who come to you directly and, if you’re lucky,
you rank well on search engines results. If you are extra lucky, your content goes viral and people share it with
friends. It’s important to make these scenarios as likely as possible. For example, if you were to add your
content to just four of the biggest platforms—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and DailyMotion—you could add a
potential 2.3 billion additional viewers.
But many content providers are concerned that distributing
their content to additional platforms will cannibalize their
audiences. It’s a valid concern, but it can be dealt with (and we’ll
talk about some best practices later). In the end, though, the
benefits can far outweigh the risks. If you structure your
distribution plan right, you should be creating a new source of
revenue. In addition, it can help you improve brand recognition,
which is key to increasing traffic to your own site—directly as
people follow links back and indirectly as they become more
familiar with your brand and seek you out independently.
Others worry about the impact on SEO, concerned that
“duplicate content” will cause them to be penalized by search
engines. Fortunately, Google has explicitly noted that they have
no problem with properly syndicated or distributed content.
Duplicated content is only a problem when it’s done deceptively
or to manipulate search rankings.
The main downside to distribution and syndication could be losing control of your content. You will want to
be able to track where the player is embedded, how much ad-revenue syndicated players are bringing in, and
which syndicators are working best for you. You will also want access to analytics to understand your
audience better. What devices are they using? When do they watch the content? Do they drop off when they
get a pre-roll? This data has tremendous value that could help you do a better job at creating and distributing
the content. So whatever way you choose to distribute, the key is not to lose control of your content.
So there are three key use cases.
USE CASES FOR DISTRIBUTION AND SYNDICATION
INCREASE
REVENUE
MORE EYEBALLS ON YOUR
CONTENT MEAN INCREASED
AD MONETIZATION.
INCREASE
MARKETING
REACH
MORE OF YOUR CONTENT ON
OTHER SITES MEANS GREATER
OVERALL BRAND RECOGNITION
AND GREATER REACH FOR YOUR
CLIPS AND SHORTENED VIDEOS.
INCREASE
SEO
MORE GOOD LINKS
TO YOUR SITE MEANS
HIGHER RANKINGS.
For all three of these use cases, increasing your social footprint by putting your content on social media sites
will dramatically increase the odds of people sharing the content and that content reaching new people.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DISTRIBUTION AND SYNDICATION?
The industry in general isn’t particularly good about differentiating between these two, and many people
even use the terms interchangeably. But there are different ways of putting your content on other
people’s websites, and advantages and disadvantages to both. So we talk about them as two different but
related ideas.
Distribution
When you distribute your content, you send just the content files themselves. The host plugs those files into
their own player.
Advantages:
• It’s simpler for you. You don’t have to worry about choosing and designing a player or selling advertising.
You send them content; they send you a license fee, a revenue share, or a combination of the two.
• Many potential hosts prefer this. It allows them to unify the look and feel of their site and sell ads shown
during your content. There are more potential places accepting distributed content.
• Distribution gets you on more devices, including connected TVs, where hosts like YouTube have native apps.
• Since you don’t pay to stream the content, distribution can involve fewer costs.
Disadvantages:
• The content is no longer in your control.
• You may put your IP at risk, if you’re not careful.
• You may not have the same range of analytics available, making it hard to tell how well your content
is performing at the kind of granular level necessary for strategic decisions.
• It becomes harder to tell where your content is being displayed.
• You have no way of controlling the look and feel of your content’s surroundings, including the player.
• If you want to delete or alter content, you may have to go to the host site to do so.
(If you distribute to YouTube from the Kaltura platform, you will be able to delete and update content
from the platform without having to go to YouTube directly.)
Example:
The standard YouTube use case is an example of this.
Technology required:
A good platform will have distribution connectors that will allow you to easily distribute your content from
your video platform.
Syndication
When you syndicate your content, you embed the entire thing as a package—the content itself and a video
player of your choosing.
Advantages:
• You decide the look and functions of the player itself.
• You can sell advertising yourself, deciding your own business rules and keeping all the profits.
• You can construct your own playlists, suggesting which videos a viewer can watch next.
• You have full control over your content from a centralized hub; delete a video from your feed and
it will disappear from all your players, anywhere.
Disadvantages:
• You will have to handle your own ad sales.
• Syndication involves greater costs, such as streaming costs.
• Fewer hosts are willing to accept syndication deals.
Examples:
• If you operate more than one site and want to deploy a video across multiple sites, syndication makes for a
streamlined workflow.
• Syndication feeds are great for supplying Roku, iTunes, or Amazon Fire channels. (Note: the look and feel of
the player and other plugin functionality may not be packaged for all of these environments.)
• If you want to build your own TV apps, syndication feeds are a good way to manage those as well.
Technology required:
Embed codes are one easy way to syndicate the player with its content. In addition, MRSS feeds are an easy
way to push video files out without having to deal with embed codes. These, too, should be easily accessible
from within your video platform.
WHY NOT JUST PUT EVERYTHING ON YOUTUBE OR FACEBOOK?
The obvious solution is to simply partner with YouTube and Facebook, putting your videos up on their site
and participating in their ad revenue sharing program. But if you choose to only distribute through YouTube
and Facebook, not only are you leaving money on the table, you’re putting your fate in someone else’s hands.
What’s the problem? YouTube’s business model is more mature, so let’s use them as an illustration.
Reduced revenue. A few years ago, YouTube made it extremely easy for anyone to monetize his or her video.
As a result, the already tough competition (with 500 hours of video uploaded every minute) has become even
fiercer. To this we should add the 45% cut that YouTube takes for every ad sale. Some YouTube producers
have been very vocal about YouTube’s aggressive revenue split. We find that YouTube’s average CPMs are well
below industry averages for premium content. Many Kaltura customers monetize on the order of $10-$40
CPM and are in direct control of distribution costs.
No control over advertising. Publishers have no control over what ads are displayed alongside their video.
Potentially, a competitor’s video could be shown before (pre-roll) or right next to your video (display) and you
will have no control over it.
Limited user engagement. As a publisher, your #1 goal is to get viewers to consume as many of your videos
as possible. However, YouTube’s algorithm and site design display a variety of content suggestions around and in
the video player. As a result, repeated viewing and user-engagement could be low within the YouTube environment.
Cat videos (and other competition). Yes, they're cute, but unless your brand is cats, they're distracting your
audience...along with all of the other content on YouTube that has nothing to do with you. The "related
videos" section on YouTube is a mixture of content based on previously viewed content and sponsored
content. Here, too, a competitor’s video can be displayed right next to yours. In fact, if YouTube’s algorithms
are working correctly to find similar content, this is pretty likely to happen.
Limited player customization. YouTube offers a set of tools to customize the player to your brand’s look and
feel. However, these options are quite limited and require development knowledge. One the other hand, a
Kaltura video player, for example, gives you dozens of templates as well as a site dedicated to easy player
customization and configuration.
Video format limitation. YouTube ingests only 9 video formats. In addition, live streaming capabilities are
currently blocked for small publishers.
Limited security. YouTube videos are public by default. You may assign a password to them but YouTube doesn’t
offer any content control tools or DRM protection. In fact, any video on YouTube is extremely easy to download
using free web services. Facebook’s video strategy, on the other hand, is in its infancy. While they are currently
pushing content producers to upload more content, it’s still not clear how this will work in the end.
Which is not to say that distributing to YouTube and Facebook is a bad plan—just that it shouldn’t be your only strategy.
BEST PRACTICES FOR DISTRIBUTION AND SYNDICATION
So now that you know why you should be distributing or syndicating your content, let’s talk about some
of the best ways to do so.
Combine strategies. Your optimal monetization strategy is probably a hybrid of your own site, a YouTube
channel, and other distribution channels.
Install distribution connectors.
If you have to manually go to host sites each time
you want to add a new video, you’ll never keep up.
Distribution connectors are an easy way to distribute
videos to host sites at the push of a button, directly
from your video platform. The video is exported to
the site of your choice, along with all the relevant
metadata.
Clip long videos. The goal of your distributed or syndicated videos should be driving traffic to your site, since
that is where you maximize your monetization and offer a unique brand experience. A good way to do that is
by clipping videos and then distributing those clips. In the video description, you should include a link to the
full video on your website to drive them back to the source.
Distribute clips and shortened versions.
You can find distribution connectors to platforms
like Hulu, Comcast, and AT&T. While you may not
supply content here, using distribution connectors
from your video platform is a convenient way to
manage marketing efforts like trailers. You can
push a promotional clip to YouTube, Facebook,
Hulu, and more all at the same time, track where
those videos are being published, and manage all
your videos from a single place. It streamlines
Marketing’s workflow while giving them more
control. When you syndicate trailers, you can even
control social sharing tools through the player for
an additional boost.
Use competitive keywords for better SEO. Since YouTube is the second most popular search engine on the
web, you want to make sure your titles, descriptions and tags are optimized for SEO. We recommend using
tools like Google’s Keyword Planner to analyze which words are the most searched and the most
competitive.
Customize titles and metadata per host site – Choose a video distribution platform that allows you to set
alternative metadata (title, description, tags) to best fit the different sites you plan to distribute content to.
Every site has its own culture— customize for each site for the best resonance.
Consider multiple YouTube channels – If you have a lot of different kinds of content, it makes sense to
create multiple YouTube channels to reflect the different types. Make sure your distribution platform
provides a governance model for YouTube. You should have central or delegated ownership of logins and
publishing approval at an enterprise grade if you want to scale up to large numbers of channels.
Track analytics – In order to track the incoming traffic from host sites to yours, you should use measurable
short links that can be generated by services like TinyURL and Goo.gl. By using unique links for each video,
you can assess which video is driving the most traffic and improve it by using similar keywords or videos.
Furthermore, Kaltura offers a Google Analytics player plugin, so if you are using services like YouTube and
goo.gl all the information will be accessible through the same Google Analytics account.
CONCLUSION
While the big social media platforms dominate the landscape, audiences can be found scattered across
an ever-greater number of sites across the web. The key to a successful monetization strategy today is to
re-aggregate your potential audience by spreading your content out to increase their chance of
stumbling on it and then sharing it, and ultimately coming to your site to find more.
Make sure you choose the video tools that will
make it easy and convenient to distribute or syndicate
your content to wherever your audience might be
found. Your content is your most valuable asset; make
sure to both take full advantage while protecting it.
Kaltura offers a flexible, modular platform that
supports a wide variety of business models and use
cases for both syndication and distribution across
many of the most popular platforms around.
Syndication
With Kaltura, you can configure your video player
business rules (ad network, analytics, brand colors,
etc.) once and then share on other sites using
embed codes and MRSS feeds. The player loads can
be dynamically updated with fresh content based
on preconfigured rules.
The content itself continues to be hosted on your Kaltura account with full support of platform capabilities
such as analytics and security.
In addition, you can use Kaltura’s syndication capabilities to post podcasts to iTunes and syndicate your video
streams to 3rd party platforms that consume video streams directly, while maintaining in-stream monetization
such as ad-stitching and stream analytics. Syndication feed creation, management, and execution is fully
controlled via the platform API.
Distribution
Kaltura’s powerful distribution services make it easy to reach your audience across the web – on destination
sites, search engines and set-top-boxes. With an all-in-one distribution module, it’s possible to distribute your
content across the web at the click of a button. Keep full control of when and where your content is presented,
sending full packages including metadata and controlling scheduling per video and distribution partner from
a single, centralized, user-friendly interface.
KALTURA’S DISTRIBUTION CONNECTORS
Kaltura offers a wide range of distribution and syndication tools as part of our online video platform.
Here are some of the places you can easily spread your content to via Kaltura:
For general accounts
For Premium Youtube accounts
MRSS feeds
By using the Kaltura distribution framework, customers can control their distribution endpoints through a
single content management system, letting Kaltura handle all the various distribution “hassles” – video
formats, metadata distribution, image resizing and management. Content can be distributed manually
through the Kaltura CMS, or by setting up workflow rules to schedule content distribution automatically as
its being ingested to the Kaltura system.
To learn more about Syndication and Distribution with Kaltura, contact us at
http://corp.kaltura.com/company/contact-us or visit
http://corp.kaltura.com/products/Features/Video-Distribution and
http://corp.kaltura.com/corp.kaltura.com/Products/Features/Video-Syndication-and-Sharing.
About Kaltura
Kaltura’s mission is to power any video experience. A recognized leader in the OTT TV (Over-the-top TV), OVP (Online Video Platform), EdVP
(Education Video Platform), and EVP (Enterprise Video Platform) markets, Kaltura has emerged as the fastest growing video platform, and as
the one with the widest use-case and appeal. Kaltura is deployed globally in thousands of enterprises, media companies, service providers,
and educational institutions and engages hundreds of millions of viewers at home, at work, and at school. The company is committed to its
core values of openness, flexibility, and collaboration, and is the initiator and backer of the world's leading open-source video-management
project, which is home to more than 100,000 community members. For more information visit www.kaltura.com.
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