Beyond Viral: How to Attract Customers, Promote Your Brand, and Make Money with Online Video

Chapter 9. Marketing via Webstars

In this chapter, you will learn:

• How brands have partnered with webstars to create entertaining promotion that is more credible and difficult to ignore than traditional online advertising.

• The benefits and challenges of identifying a webstar who fits a brand, and how to manage the process to balance the audience and marketing needs.

• Some examples of highly visible campaigns that tap webstars to augment advertising campaigns.

Earlier we identified three layers of brand content, and webstars are a cost-efficient way to reach large audiences. Brands are increasingly augmenting traditional display advertisements with investments in sponsored content and branded entertainment via online-video stars with an existing audience.

A webstar is usually an individual who has an authentic and regular connection with a growing audience, and has as many as 100,000 to 1 million subscribers. These subscribers are fans who request an alert when new videos are posted.

For instance, I'm one of the "most-viewed comedians" on YouTube with 175,000 subscribers and more than 150 million views to date. I have no agent, no staff, no production team, and no writers. But my videos are seen hundreds of thousands of times each day. We webstars aren't stalked by paparazzi or chased for autographs, but we have an intimate relationship with our loyal audiences. Our viewers interact with us, make video replies to our videos, and tell others about us. The webstar is not necessarily a polished ...