Best video platform for Realtors?
Posted in Real Estate Marketing 2.0 By Joel Burslem, Friday, April 25, 2008.I'm curious, what's the best video platform for Realtors? WellcomeMat, Mixpo, Youtube or others?
Whose had experience using any of them? What have been your results?
Share your experiences in the comments below.
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Submitted by OpenHouseDealer.com on April 25, 2008 - 11:23am.
David Yusupov
Tel#: 646 226-9738
www.OpenHouseDealer.com
Here is the site that might interest you.
OpenHouseDealer.com
This site is desined for real estate videos only.
Submitted by Diane Aurit on April 25, 2008 - 11:56am.
Diane Aurit
www.BestRealEstateLakeNorman.com
Great question. I see more WellcomeMat and Veoh these days instead of Youtube but I haven't them yet. Obviously, with ActiveRain's new program with Mixpo they should become more widely used. I will wait to hear how other Realtors respond as I am fairly new to video.
Submitted by Daniel Rothamel, Inman Community Manager on April 29, 2008 - 7:02am.
We uses Wellcomemat in our brokerage for our listing videos. For my blog videos, I use YouTube.
The Wellcomemat player is absolutely fantastic. The quality is very high, and the bookmarking feature is very convenient.
YouTube is okay for blog stuff, but I wouldn't use it for listing videos. Consumers don't go to YouTube to look for real estate, and the spam comments can be very annoying.
Vimeo and Viddler are also very good video platforms, but I don't think that listing videos would make it through the Vimeo approval process. Viddler allows for very long videos, which can be good for instructional videos or things that are better suited to long form.
I think that if Joel is right about ActiveRain's video platform, and it will be $30/mo., it won't get very far. $30/mo. seems awfully expensive to me.
Submitted by Fred Light on July 14, 2008 - 10:21am.
Real Estate Video Tours
http://www.NashuaVideoTours.com
Consumers are not searching YouTube for real estate. However, a side benefit is good and fast placement in search engines such as Google. I've had videos place on PAGE 1 for the top search phrase in a given market in literally a few hours. But the quality is abysmal.
Wellcomemat has far better quality and is real estate oriented, but nobody searches for real estate on Wellcomemat. It's just a place to host your videos to embed elsewhere.. at least currently.
Be careful - there are many video sites, but MANY forbid commercial and/or real estate videos. Blip.TV, Spike.com, Vimeo are just a few that come to mind who have deleted accounts with no notice due to TOS issues. Not pretty if you're using these types of sites to host your videos and they disappear without notice - a good argument for an exclusive real estate related video site.
Submitted by Deb Agliano (AKA DebOnTheWeb) on July 14, 2008 - 11:05am.
I also use both WellcomeMat and YouTube, but another good real estate only video site is www.Zipvo.com. There's no charge to post a video.
~~~
Deb Agliano (AKA DebOnTheWeb)
ERA Andrew Realty
www.DebOnTheWeb.com
Submitted by G Dewald | Union Street Media on July 14, 2008 - 11:33am.
I'm probably more with Fred on the host-your-own but I'm also a purist about video compression and all that stuff.
One more thing to consider in the video space is mobile distribution. Probably not super-important right now but within the next few years you're going to want to distribute most of your content, including video, to mobile devices.
The iPhone (the most used phone/small-device for browsing) doesn't do Flash. Which eliminates pretty much all the "easy" distribution sources that use a Flash player. That's a technology front to watch.
G. Dewald | Union Street Media | Internet Marketing Blog
Submitted by Fred Light on July 14, 2008 - 12:08pm.
Real Estate Video Tours
http://www.NashuaVideoTours.com
I totally agree, it's always best to host your own videos. You have total control over everything, including quality. I host all my own on my own server for my clients, but I do upload to about 12 video sites for search engine visibility - you can't beat it. Showing people how to embed a YouTube video on their website is a complicated matter for most realtors, so compressing and hosting their own videos on their own server will never happen in my lifetime, I'm sure!
But there is another reason to host your own videos - it's the big, white elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about.
All of these video hosting sites use an extreme amount of bandwidth - even many of the smaller sites. This costs money. With few exceptions, most companies in the world cannot continue indefinitely with a business model that doesn't at least break even, but more importantly, turn a profit. I think most people can agree on this.
Although there are literally hundreds of video sites on the web, I would venture to guess MOST haven't made a dime. Most experts will agree that video is the hottest thing on the web right now, but no company has really figured out how to monetize this business. Just like the days before the 'dot com bust', there were a gazillion very clever, very innovative websites out there, seemingly giving away everything for nothing and shipping it for free... all of which were trying to figure out a way to make money on the internet - and we saw what happened in the '90s. Most went poof in a big cloud of smoke....
There has even been recent discussion of the possibility of Google shutting down YouTube. Why? They can't figure out how to make money on their $1.5B investment!
Even real estate specific sites - NOBODY IS MAKING MONEY. Buyers don't go to real estate video sites to search for real estate - they go to REAL ESTATE sites so they can search for EVERYTHING that meets their requirements, not the 4 listings that have a video tour! Unless a real estate video site has videos for ALL listings and has a mechanism for keeping it current, it will never be a destination for home buyers. Why would you only want to view 1% of available properties? If they don't charge for uploading, and don't charge for viewing..... how are they making money? How are they paying for bandwidth? How are they paying for site development? How are they buying food?????
Most are surviving (thus far) on venture capital money. However, if no money is coming in, eventually those people will start demanding to see some revenue stream and the money will be gone.
Moral of the story: If you host your videos on these outside sites, there is a chance that ALL of your videos could possibly disappear when the money runs out.
The big race right now is for somone to figure out how to make money on video sites - otherwise I think you'll start seeing them disappear off the web, unfortunately.
Submitted by OpenHouseDealer.com on July 14, 2008 - 1:14pm.
Here is the exclusive real estate related video site. You can create your own account, Post your own videos, and its FREE!!! www.OpenHouseDealer.com
David Yusupov
Tel#: 646 226-9738
www.OpenHouseDealer.com