Fullscreen Goes #BeyondRevShare With Custom Brand Integrations

Fullscreen has been YouTube’s largest independent multi-channel network in terms of unique monthly viewers for all of 2013. According to comScore’s U.S. Online Video Rankings from May, the MCN’s 36.4+ million monthly viewers are generating upwards of 284 million video views every month in the United States alone. And according to the company’s own internal numbers, Fullscreen videos are watched 2.5 billion times per month around the world.

That’s a lot of views. And a lot of revenue is generated when YouTube displays ads against the videos accumulating those views and then shares that advertising revenue with Fullscreen.

That revenue source isn’t going to be replaced in any meaningful way anytime soon with any type of newfangled technology or destination. But Fullscreen, like all YouTube multi-channel networks, is looking to supplement that revenue stream in creative ways that help the creators on its network make more money from making online videos. One such creative way is branded programming.

Sami Kriegstein is the VP of Talent Integrations at Fullscreen, where she works with content creators to incorporate sponsor messages into their videos in (hopefully) ways tasteful and organic. Kriegstein will be discussing the ways in which she and Fullscreen work #BeyondRevShare at our Tubefilter Meetup this Tuesday, June 25. We asked her a few questions so you can have a primer on what she’ll most likley discuss:

Tubefilter: How important are alternative revenue streams outside of the classic rev share to Fullscreen’s business?

Sami Kriegstein: Rev share will always be a driving force for Fullscreen, but the various alternative revenue streams emerging on and around the platform are very exciting for us and our partners. I think a key role of any MCN involves discovering and exploiting untapped value in the YouTube ecosystem, and Fullscreen has been really excellent at that from day 1. We were built to be adaptable and evolve rapidly; it’s essential to survival.

TF: What’s one of your favorite ways in which Fullscreen is generating revenue for its creators outside of the classic rev share?

SK: I specialize in running custom brand integrations with some of our bigger partners and those opportunities are always really fun to put together; but I think the best work being done at Fullscreen to help generate extra revenue for creators is with our Gorilla product. It enables us to share the brand love with dozens, if not hundreds, of creators at once. No other network works as hard to scale value across the mid- and long-tail channels

TF: How do you make sure talent doesn’t alienate audiences by promoting products or brands?

SK: We understand there’s a delicate balance between passionately promoting something you love and sounding like a sell-out. Fullscreen puts a lot of energy into educating our brand clients on the importance of trusting creators (we like to call them “influencers”) to translate the brand’s message organically into their content, through their personal voice.

I think transparency is always a strong choice – it’s no less powerful for an influencer to say to their fans, “hey guys, this brand gave me a great opportunity to help promote their product; it’s actually really cool” than to try and shoe-horn an awkward shout out that is clearly scripted. Of course it depends on the influencer’s style and the nature of their relationship to their audience, but if they can help their fans understand that brand promotions make it possible for them to keep making awesome videos, everybody wins.