Why I do long videos and tell mass audiences to go elsewhere

Where’s the link to the long video of Thomas?

Sean: here: http://scobleizer.com/2006/11/03/trouble-in-the-pumpkin-patch-photowalking-3-now-totally-uploaded/

Actually, as someone known near and narrow for making the best punkin’ pies ever, I’m FAR more interested in the pumpkins

Robert – not true, your assumption that only camera buffs will be interested in your walking photo/video blogs.

I don’t care about cameras (although I have a number of them) or making videos (although I have made some) – I watch because the human interaction interests me, and I occasionally learn something – and I generally enjoy the accompanying photos on Flickr (or wherever)

Rob

Hi Robert,

I hope that my post didn’t come across as any sort of disrespect to your video work. It certainly wasn’t intended that way.

I’ve watched many of your videos but, to be honest, some have been a bit too long for the time I could reasonably allocate to them (i.e. working hours, family time). Fact is, I love your open, friendly, engaging style with the people you meet, and if I weren’t such a damn introvert, I’d be more successful in emulating your style.

I am also guilty of lengthy video interviews. Check out this one at http://www.zbiz.tv/category/accolade-prep-crick-houston/
if you would like to see an example of my own 39 minute interview.

I’ve been told by a number of people that my interviews are too long for the average attention span on the net. When I point to your site as an example of another interview blog, they reply that they don’t watch yours either. I guess I’m not talking to my audience.

If one’s long term objective is to attract and retain sponsors, it’s better to have more audience than what you and I share. I’m not Robert Scoble, so it ain’t going to be easy for me to attract a Seagate who wishes to support my work by offering a healthy sponsorship. So unless I ever get to that level of notoriety, I’m going to have to have solid numbers and some sort of qualitative information about my audience before I can attract a good sponsor.

That’s where I was coming from on that piece. The nerd wars, as you have pointed out on this blog, is really all about ad dollars when you boil it down to its essence, so that’s what it was about.

If you were Joe Schmoe doing the same interviews, would Seagate have come knocking on your door? I don’t think so.

Well, I’m Joe Schmoe, and they certainly haven’t knocked on mine. So I am wrestling with how to capture the essence of the entrepreneurs and businesses I profile without overwhelming my audience and taking up too much of their time.

Beet.TV does a hell of a job taking what is probably 20 minutes or more worth of conversation (I don’t know that for a fact, but you might) and boiling it down to the best 5 minutes. That’s why Plesser’s audience is greater than a multiple of yours and mine combined.

BTW, I’m going to be in your neck of the woods next Wednesday. I’m attending the Art of the Start event followed by the Launch event that SVASE is putting on. If you are going to be in Mountain View, I’d love to cut away so we could grab a lunch together.

Again, my apologies if you were offended. It certainly wasn’t my intent.

Take care,

Andy

On the topic of passionate users/participants, here is a good post from today on the Creating Passionate Users blog.

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/11/two_simple_word.html

Knowing your audience is key!

Is anyone Making Money Blogging?
If so how much?
So far 96 cents,and I spent over 700 dallars on Stupid Domain Names I can’t give away!!!

Andrew: on Channel 9 we got to 4.3 million unique visitors a month and I ran long videos there too.

As to traffic, the metrics you pointed to don’t show my true traffic levels. Alexa is highly inaccurate.

But, once I get an editor I’ll work on shorter shows and we’ll see if your theory comes true.

I think longevity matters in audience, which is one reason Rocketboom has more audience than ZeFrank. Also, Beet.TV covers news that’s more topical and up to date than I have so far. Being part of the conversation matters a lot more than anything else, which is why my blog is still up there.

The Rqtect: I know some bloggers making thousands of dollars per month. But, it’s not easy to make that kind of money.

we do short videos on MAKE, and distribute PDFs along with the videos so folks can build the projects / learn more…

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/11/make_podcast_we_1.html

edit.edit. then edit.

You know you could post long videos of Thomas shooting half naked models

Don’t know about that divorce, but it sure would get some audience…

Robert, for goodness sakes, I’m not kicking your ass!

The Alexa numbers Borland charts are for page views for Beet.TV on Typepad, not views of videos. The views of video clips are counted by Google Video, publisher of my Flash video. As best I can figure, of the visitors to Beet.TV, only about 25% view the video clips.

Frankly, I am suprised that such a small number actually view clips. I provide a lot of text and links so maybe folks don’t need to view the video. I’m not sure, this is a work in progress.

Andy

“Surfing porn shootout: Firefox 2 vs. IE 7″

Didn’t Techcrunch already post that?

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/11/porn-browser-heatseek-launches-yeah-porn-browser/

How do you eat an elephant? A bit at a time!

Sometimes I wonder if you have any idea who your audience is? Surely, despite what you say, you are in a commercial venture and you want people to revisit The Scoble Show.

You already are aware that you aren’t spending enough time editing. So when you have that in place, do give it a go and edit one of your longer 45 minute items up into 5-6 shorter pieces linked together & then track how people prefer it – as a 45 minute one-shot or 6-7 episodes?

I think you really know that shorter is better – river of news and all that – just haven’t got around to it yet!

TC: shorter is better, absolutely, but along with short comes a non-passionate, non-engaged audience. I’d rather start with a small, but more engaged audience.

For instance, do I want the kind of fanboys who are over at Gizmodo today reading their Zune review, which really didn’t tell you a single new thing, or do I want the kinds of comments I had a week ago when I put up my 40 minute interview with someone from the Zune team?

There’s no comparison. I’d rather have the longer, more in depth, interview and the more engaged, smarter, audience.

As for enough time editing, the 1:10 photowalking series took me about 12 hours of encoding, editing, compressing time. I’m not sure how much more time you’d like me to spend, but at some point the cost/benefit isn’t there. Especially when shows like Diggnation and TWiT are at the top of iTunes. Those aren’t edited and are also long.

I think the big power of podcasting (audio and video) is in the fact that it *is* aimed at a niche (and hence more passionate) audience. I’ll sit through 120min of crappy audio to listen to someone discuss something I’m passionate about. I do it nearly every day during my commutes. Shows (podcast and traditional) aimed at grabbing the largest market are always a lot more boring to me.

Sure the shows might seem amateurish, but the word amateur originates from ‘love’. People who are doing it for the love of it. It comes across in the work.

“There’s no comparison. I’d rather have the longer, more in depth, interview and the more engaged, smarter, audience.”

Agree. This is why I rather focus on in-depth discussion or presentation on our Web SIG meetings rather than showing product demo. I’d rather have more active and engaged members.

Video editing is labor intensive. It took me 2 full weeks to edit a 45 min corporate video and insert video with slides, audio, and music following a movie script. Another 2 weeks to make 4 revisions to achieve the release video version. It is considered very fast compared to video professionals. Compressing and DVD burning take another chunk of time usually block of 3-6 hrs.

My wishful thinking is to train students to do the boring encoding, compressing and dvd burning. Then I can focus on slide images, video transition, audio transition, music selection and editing like a director.

Robert, you haven’t given me your buying recommendation on professional video camera. I need to get something reasonablely light that I can carry the entire camera, tripod, lighting and stand alone without any help. I need something that I can shoot landscape with low lighting like night scenes, and wide angle like city shot.

I like to hear your comments.

“Surfing porn shootout: Firefox 2 vs. IE 7″

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/07/11/porn-browser-heatseek-launches-yeah-porn-browser/

This is useful. I have to manage the implementation and execution of running webinars within our saleforce. One of our concerns is how clean the browser on our saleforce’s computers. You can’t stop those guys from watching porn after work hours. You really don’t want to run webinar sharing the desktop and suddenly those porn popup from browser.

This lead to another interesting area. Does it mean that porn sites are run better in Firefox 2 than IE7? If the porn sites take longer to load in IE7, would you switch to Firefox 2 just because you are frustrated.

For a minute there you sounded like someone’s stodgy old Grandpa: “You dad-gum kids and your short attentions spans! Why back in my day…”

Bess: Get a Canon XL-2. You won’t be disappointed.

Scoble, you shouldn’t take the Bush approach (either you are with us or against us – in your case, it’s either long interviews or nothing!). That doesn’t work… anywhere!

People like your videos because of your unique style. Let us see you doing your usual long(ish) videos and let us also see some short videos. Do 5 (or 10) minute clips – Scoble style!

Robert,

4.3 million views! Wow! That’s pretty darn amazing. Your production values on the ScobleShow are a far sight better (must be the $4K camera vs the $300 camera) than what you had at Channel 9.

Let’s hope ScobleShow grows the same way. I do my own editing, too, and know what a pain in the ass it is.

Given the simplicity of the format, you might want to shift from Final Cut to iMovie to do your edits. You don’t really need that powerful of an editing system to edit one cut interviews.

I’ll be watching more ScobleShow today…

Take care,

Andrew

Of course you know those 4.3 million viewers aren’t going to follow you, right? I doubt you will get anywhere close to that, but that remains to be seen. My point is, and I’m sure you know this, be careful not to think of yourself as the former lead singer of a popular band that thought people bought his records because of him and not the group. Justin Timberlake you’re not . And while some think longer is better, I’m not sure what he attention span is of someone wanting to download and/or stream a video to their monitor. Do you know what the average time a person will stare a video on their monitor is before wanting to tune out? I think that would be an interesting metric to find out.