Megavideo Launches: Thoughts on Making Money with Online Video

One of the best ways to establish yourself against a top business in your niche is to compare and demonstrate how your company is in effect an underdog that is better than the industry leader.

New social video website Megavideo has taken that strategy by launching with a comparative branding scheme. Calling itself a video sharing website that ‘beats youtube‘, Megavideo is targeting current YouTube users and potential adopters of other video sites.

There are two main ways you can make money with videos on Megavideo and both of them require you to sign up for a premium membership that costs around US$10/mth or lesser for a long term plan. Upon signing up, you are eligible to earn money through their rewards program and Abrite in-video advertisements.

Megavideo’s rewards program pays you one reward point per video view and you’ll need 100,000 reward points to win a 1 year premium membership + US $100, with more points leading to greater money rewards. You can also display AdBrite’s in-video ads and earn 100% of the ad revenue from your video.


Is MegaVideo Worth Your Time?

Megavideo tries to lock you into a paid subscription model before letting you make money, which means that Megavideo is only worth your investment if you are going to actively use the service.

I don’t have any rough ideas of how much you can earn from the AdBrite in-video ads and it’ll be interesting to find out from those who have started to integrate them onto their video blogs or other social networking platforms.

Do note that you’ll need to spend a fair amount of time uploading videos as well because only uploaded videos will contain the Adbrite video ads.

A Look at Megavideo’s Business Model

Like its other sister websites, Megavideo monetizes through paid subscriptions and private deals with advertising companies like Adbrite. It’s main aim to is to lure users to try their service through the promise of monetary rewards.

In a sense, they are playing off the fact that video giants like YouTube hasn’t developed revenue sharing in full. While YouTube is already paying its top users through the sale of banner ads, it still hasn’t moved towards a complete revenue sharing model.

Other similar video hosts that pay include Metacafe, who offers a lucrative but limited producer rewards program and Flixya, which has recently gone 100% Adsense revenue sharing. I’ve covered several other paying video hosts on Dosh Dosh and most of them operate via the same revenue sharing model.

10 reasons why Megavideo claims to be better than Youtube:

Reputation Problems and Differentiation

Megavideo isn’t doing much to differentiate themselves from other video websites, although I did like their audacity in tackling YouTube head-on by proclaiming its own superiority.

Some commenters on Techcrunch’s article on Megavideo have suggested that a large amount of videos currently on Megavideo were scrapped and stolen from YouTube.

Many have lambasted their affiliation with Megaupload and Megarotic, both file hosting/sharing sites with overt copyright infringements, although that is primary a problem inherent within all major file hosting platforms.


Creating Niche Social Video Websites for Profit

I have seen several aspiring entrepreneurs create YouTube clones and scrape YouTube videos to be placed on their sites. Some of these sites were then subsequently listed in auctions within webmaster forums.

Surprisingly, these video clones do derive a fairly decent amount of search traffic with some revenue coming from display of contextual ads.

Copyright issues may cause these YouTube clones to be shut down and displaying Adsense on them may be more of a risk then a profitable move. Instead of creating a clone, it might be better to create a niche video site that targets a specific audience.

For example, a social video sharing website specifically on the topic of Yoga. One could liaise with Yoga equipment manufacturers, schools and blogs and work out exclusive ad, video and traffic-sharing partnerships.

This will work as a competitive advantage because major video websites have content that are conceptually dispersed, with no exclusivity or emphasis on a niche topic, nor any strong sense of community.

Excellent branding and a combination of paid advertising and internet marketing efforts would bring in a considerable amount of new users and will help build a community pretty rapidly.

Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to the blog feed for more money making tips.