I’m starting to look into user-generated online video contests for an upcoming report on the topic — recently I spoke to German video-sharing site myvideo.de about some of their video contests, and yesterday I had a fascinating conversation with the women behind Vancouver-based video contest platform Meme Labs. I’ve got a lot more research to do — both survey work and industry briefings — before this turns into a report, but I wanted to call for participation now.
If you’ve ever worked on a UGC video contest, or run one of your own, I’d like to hear about it — either by e-mail (nelliott at forrester dot com) or in the comments below. What product or service was the contest for? What type of video did you ask users to submit, and what prizes did you offer? How did you promote the contest? How many entries did you get? And how else did you measure success?
Even if you’ve never worked on a video contest, I’d love to hear about the video contests you’ve come across online. There are a lot of crazy video contests out there — like this one for wrenches, or this one for psoriasis — and I want to hear about the best or the worst you’ve ever seen.
Thanks!
Hi Nate
I run a network of c2000 music video directors, we matchmake between labels & bands and directors worldwide. Social network meets commissioning platform. We’ve generated over 2.5 million views on our channels for commissioned videos.
We started out 2 and half years ago running UGC music video competitions, asking labels like Mercury, Mute, Parlophone, NinjaTune, Warp, Domino etc and etc to put forward tracks and reward winners with £1000 or a new commission for the label.
They were successful comps – c200-300 entries each year, which was big for that kind of UGC comp. I changed the model though, mainly because it’s not very scalable.
Now we only deal in offering budgeted music video commissions, for which directors submit treatments. We’re used by independent labels and DIY artists worldwide and mainly deal in under $7500/£5000 budgets.
Other benefits apart from scalability include quality of content. Clients choose the best director to commission. A very good video stands the chance of getting hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube (which we get). 30 poor videos will probably be seen by the immediate friends of 30 people.
Directors tell us they love Radar’s service. No-one is asking them to create a video in the hope it might get chosen. Making a video up-front is a big ask, writing a treatment can be considered just good practise in writing treatments from a director point of view.
I see a lot of UGC competitions many of which extend deadlines again and again, I assume because they’ve got so few entries. They often don’t focus on what’s in it for the director. Good ones do but are few and far between. We learnt a lot during our UGC phase, but wouldn’t go back there.
all best, Caroline