Thread by @MichaelEWebber

I teach Entrepreneurship @UTAustin w/ @ATI_UT so I think about biz models.

Viral videos have their own biz model but I never knew the details until I had my own. My video of Paris traffic had ~5M views and I earned $495.01 from news orgs to show it.

https://twitter.com/MichaelEWebber/status/1321878671213416448?s=20

I earned ~$0.0001/view, which is a good data point to have. Generally speaking for other social media platforms of content creators I estimate the monetizable value to be ~$0.01 to $0.10 per follower/subscriber, 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than a random one-off viral video.

I also discovered there is an entire cottage industry of media companies that reach out to owners of viral videos to help manage licenses for a cut of the fees. As my video was taking off about a half dozen companies DM'ed me saying they can handle licenses for a cut of the fees.

I went with the first one that reached out to me. Though they kinda freaked me out by knowing my personal email address.😬 They asked for a 50-50 split but I negotiated them lower. Then as I got inquiries from media companies I pointed them to my new representative.

Most of the licensees were international news organizations. The domestic news orgs also expressed interest but generally speaking did not have the budget (say ~$100+ per org) to pay the license fee, so they passed. That created an interesting dilemma for me...

...if I hadn't signed w/a company to handle licenses, I could have just given the video away for free to everyone who asked (including the biggest news orgs in the world). Doing so would have meant I did not earn the $500. BUT, in exchange I probably would have had 10M views.

So what's better? Another 5M views (and free promotion that comes with it) or $500?

Anyway, I'm going to use this example in my class and will see what the freshmen entrepreneurship students think. [END]

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