Please note that this post was updated on the 26th of November. Updates are marked in Italic bold font.
BlogTV, the live streaming pioneer, is facing both opportunities and challenges.
BlogTV’s CEO, Guy Eliav, defined and executed a brilliant strategy to increase traffic. In a targeted marketing activity, he managed to convince some of the brightest stars in YouTube to start live broadcasting in his network.
This activity and others enabled the company to grow its audience considerably, as the graph above clearly shows. It seems that under Guy’s leadership, the efforts bear fruits. They also claim to get in some cases $10-$12 CPM for ads in some of their star broadcasters.
Financial Challenges Ahead
BlogTV is a subsidiary of Tapuz, a publicly traded Israeli portal. The company went through several changes recently. Guy Eliav, who served as Tapuz’s CEO, became full time CEO of BlogTV. Dan Chen, who was responsible for Tapuz money making cellular activities, was appointed as Tapuz CEO, and additional key positions were filled with new people, such as Ilan Zinman as VP of Marketing and Itay Nagler who was promoted from Flix (Tapuz’s UGC video site) to the chief content editor of the site.
Tapuz is financing BlogTV’s operation since its first day. As a public company, we have unique opportunity to see the operating costs of BlogTV.
In their latest report (Hebrew) the company claim that BlogTV lost more than 5M NIS, which is about $1.4M, in the first nine months of 2008.
BlogTV significantly changes Tapuz’s operation results, as it brings it to a loss of approx. $153K in the first quarter of 2008, last 3 months, instead of operational profit of $252K. However, in later quarters Tapuz managed to reduce the effect of BlogTV expenses. In recent interviews and discussions with the company, Dan Chen explicitly said that Tapuz will stop supporting BlogTV as it is a financial burden. Tapuz stock lost 68% of its value since January 2008.
As a part of this move, Tapuz appointed Shai Schiller as BlogTV chairman. Shai was Emblaze’s CEO, and a chairman of Parrot Media and Axis Mobile. He was recruited to BlogTV in order to help the company raise the required funds to continue operation after Tapuz will stop supporting the company. According to Tapuz’s financial reports, Shai’s incentive program is based on a successful financial round. Prominent VC also confirmed that the company is in a financial round.
Dan Chen later on calrified that they will not be able to support BlogTV as they do today, but not have intentions of closing the company. He also stated that he believe in the product and company, and certain that Shai Schiller will continue supporting it in the future.
And the business model?
However, it is not only nickels and dimes that are a challenge for Guy and his team. BlogTV focuses its efforts in live streaming of user generated content. Unlike ustream.tv and Mogulus, which invested in superior platforms and stronger content focus, BlogTV is aiming at being the YouTube of live broadcasting, a questionable model in my opinion. As stated in previous post, YouTube failed to monetize their UGC content, and now using it as a way to attract viewers to professionally produced content. BlogTV doesn’t have any pro content what so ever. BlogTV’s focus on UGC still pose a major challenge to the monetization of their content.
BlogTV CEO believes that their content has better monetization ratio than others, as it is legal, thus raising its monetization factor. This claim still does not mitigate advertisers’ reluctancy to affiliate their content with poorly produced video.
It is yet to be seen what will be the future of BlogTV. In any case, live streaming is still an interesting niche to follow.
UPDATE: BlogTV sees Traffic Growth, Faces Major Challenges
BlogTV, the live streaming pioneer, is facing both opportunities and challenges.
BlogTV’s CEO, Guy Eliav, defined and executed a brilliant strategy to increase traffic. In a targeted marketing activity, he managed to convince some of the brightest stars in YouTube to start live broadcasting in his network.
This activity and others enabled the company to grow its audience considerably, as the graph above clearly shows. It seems that under Guy’s leadership, the efforts bear fruits. They also claim to get in some cases $10-$12 CPM for ads in some of their star broadcasters.
Financial Challenges Ahead
BlogTV is a subsidiary of Tapuz, a publicly traded Israeli portal. The company went through several changes recently. Guy Eliav, who served as Tapuz’s CEO, became full time CEO of BlogTV. Dan Chen, who was responsible for Tapuz money making cellular activities, was appointed as Tapuz CEO, and additional key positions were filled with new people, such as Ilan Zinman as VP of Marketing and Itay Nagler who was promoted from Flix (Tapuz’s UGC video site) to the chief content editor of the site.
Tapuz is financing BlogTV’s operation since its first day. As a public company, we have unique opportunity to see the operating costs of BlogTV.
In their latest report (Hebrew) the company claim that BlogTV lost more than 5M NIS, which is about $1.4M, in the first nine months of 2008.
BlogTV significantly changes Tapuz’s operation results, as it brings it to a loss of approx. $153K in the first quarter of 2008, last 3 months, instead of operational profit of $252K. However, in later quarters Tapuz managed to reduce the effect of BlogTV expenses. In recent interviews and discussions with the company, Dan Chen explicitly said that Tapuz will stop supporting BlogTV as it is a financial burden. Tapuz stock lost 68% of its value since January 2008.
As a part of this move, Tapuz appointed Shai Schiller as BlogTV chairman. Shai was Emblaze’s CEO, and a chairman of Parrot Media and Axis Mobile. He was recruited to BlogTV in order to help the company raise the required funds to continue operation after Tapuz will stop supporting the company. According to Tapuz’s financial reports, Shai’s incentive program is based on a successful financial round. Prominent VC also confirmed that the company is in a financial round.
Dan Chen later on calrified that they will not be able to support BlogTV as they do today, but not have intentions of closing the company. He also stated that he believe in the product and company, and certain that Shai Schiller will continue supporting it in the future.
And the business model?
However, it is not only nickels and dimes that are a challenge for Guy and his team. BlogTV focuses its efforts in live streaming of user generated content. Unlike ustream.tv and Mogulus, which invested in superior platforms and stronger content focus, BlogTV is aiming at being the YouTube of live broadcasting, a questionable model in my opinion. As stated in previous post, YouTube failed to monetize their UGC content, and now using it as a way to attract viewers to professionally produced content. BlogTV doesn’t have any pro content what so ever. BlogTV’s focus on UGC still pose a major challenge to the monetization of their content.
BlogTV CEO believes that their content has better monetization ratio than others, as it is legal, thus raising its monetization factor. This claim still does not mitigate advertisers’ reluctancy to affiliate their content with poorly produced video.
It is yet to be seen what will be the future of BlogTV. In any case, live streaming is still an interesting niche to follow.