Published Date 3/28/12 8:16 PM
1. What do you propose to do?
Simple automated hyper-local advertising to sustain open projects – the new digital sweetshop window.
2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different?
There are many automated advertising projects, but none for video that are as embedded in the communities they come from. It’s craigslist for video, google adwords for the alternative.
3. Describe the network with which you intend to build or work.
visionOntv creates and trains highly productive hyper-local video news communities, e.g Merseyside Street Reporters Network. These will be the exemplars. Then we expand to sites already embedding our media players and partner with aggregating hubs, followed by local blogs and business websites. The adverts follow the content.
4. Why will it work?
Simplicity and automation: to make an ad, you add an image, title and link to a webpage. You can then choose tags. If the tags are in wide demand they will cost an amount of money, which will initially be very low. These are then served in between content based on user/video geo-location, content tag, and user tags. The viewer will therefore have a close relationship with the ads. The project is built from the bottom up, and has a psychological understanding of peoples’ sense of belonging.
5. Who is working on it?
6. What part of the project have you already built?
visionOntv has 18,000 videos aggregated already, with much of the metadata required. As for local news, Merseyside Street Reporters Network is currently aggregating nearly 500 videos from a single UK city. There is therefore an existing database of curated and tagged geo-located films to hang noticeboard posts off. Beginning with these nodes which we control, we can test solutions to UI / security / spam etc issues. We can also rapidly show a practical outcome.
7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires?
As a distributed project, it has very low running costs. It is a network for income-generation. The key thing is to push the network out and sustain it through the growth phase. We will use flattr as a partial funding model to help with this.