Video: How to Monetize Live Streaming on Social Media Platforms
In this excerpt from a panel at Live Streaming Summit, Adam Rymer of Legendary Digital discusses current limitations for directly monetizing content streamed to social media platforms such as Facebook Live and YouTube Live, and suggests indirect monetization opportunities that leverage brand and content exposure via those platforms.
Learn more about live streaming monetization at Streaming Media East.
Read a complete transcript of Rymer's remarks in this clip:
Adam Rymer: Monetization for live streaming has a long way to go. That's partially because the platforms themselves haven't implemented a lot of the tools and features that we need to enable monetization. The second thing is that advertisers haven't really grasped what it means to be right in front of people on a live basis. They understand it a little bit from broadcast television, but they don't seem to understand what it actually means when you're doing it on other platforms. To address the first one of those things, we actually had to get ourselves to the place where we have built our own platform.
We spent the last year developing our own live-streaming platform which is launching in a couple of weeks, which some of you may have read about, called Project Alpha. It is a way for us to add a certain degree of interactivity and features that allow us to monetize live streaming content in a way that we currently can't on any of the other existing platforms. It doesn't mean that we're going to go away from any of those other places; they are very much important centers for our audience to gather and aggregate.
Our feeling is, it's only live streaming that actually makes social networks social. If you really think about the platforms like Facebook, or YouTube, or even Twitter, to that extent, they're not really social by definition. Social, to me, is two people talking to each other in a room; and if you think about these platforms, it's actually asynchronous communication. Live streaming is really the first thing that allows for real social interactivity to happen on these platforms; so to us, it's actually very important to be there, but for monetization purposes, we think it's important to drive people to something else.
Even if you talk to Facebook, they'll say to you that their goal is not necessarily to monetize on Facebook, to allow their content creators to monetize on Facebook. They know that they're aggregating a huge amount of people with the goal to drive them somewhere else, to actually do the monetization. For us, it's this new live streaming platform we're creating that, we hope, is going to allow people to subscribe. It's an SVOD service, although more membership-based, with a lot of live streaming capabilities.
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