ReveNews
Nuuvy.com - Video, Reviews and Affiliate Marketing
If you haven’t been living under a rock the last year or so, you’ve heard how video on the net is going to change the way we watch TV, shop, interact with our friends, market to our customers and so on and so forth. There is so much excitement around this that we as an industry can hardly contain ourselves. The big question though is how is revenue created with it. The big question for us in our industry is how do affiliates use video to sell merchant’s goods, add value to the buying process and add to their own bottom lines. Fade in: Nuuvy.com.
Nuuvy.com is the newest player in the affiliate space that is trying to reshape the shopping experience in an attempt to answer the video question.
What is Nuuvy.com? I’ll let them explain as they do a pretty good job: “Nuuvy.com is “entertaining online videos” meets “user-supplied product reviews.” Think of it as a new way to recommend cool stuff to your family and friends, or a new way to review products that you think people should know about. Nuuvy allows anyone-yes, anyone-to produce product reviews on video and post them on Nuuvy.com for others to view and discuss.”
- User generated video product recommendations of any product they choose.
- Social shopping with a bit of fun thrown in.
- A shopping destination that will pay users for the content they generate.
- An affiliate endeavor that shows a lot of promise.
Consumer generated user reviews in video format! Epinions meets YouTube with an affiliate marketing theme threaded through the whole thing. To learn more you have to read their About Us page at http://www.nuuvy.com/aboutus.asp. It is a great read. Probably the most entertaining About Us page I’ve read. But, what should you expect from a new venture trying to make shopping more entertaining. You can tell they are really having fun with it.
Nuuvy.com is the brainchild of Kurt Lohse and his colleagues at Keycode.com. Keycode is a very successful organization that has done a good job of incorporating offline marketing with the affiliate program business model (which I think is going to be a huge opportunity for growth in our industry but more on that in another post). I got a kick out of how the site describes Kurt pondering his new project: “In the Summer of 2006, Entrepreneur Kurt Lohse-clad in polished brass armor-is sitting at his desk when he decides something should be done to make shopping easier, more effective and more entertaining for all.”
I was able to pin Kurt down at the Linkshare Symposium last week and got the skinny on Nuuvy.com. Kurt has seen the importance of social media and how affiliates can take advantage of it. “Nuuvy is our best attempt to make video product reviews fun, entertaining and ultimately useful to shoppers. If you can make a video site that actually helps people find new and exciting products while keeping them entertained and involved in the community, then you stand a good chance of leveraging affiliate marketing as the primary revenue source. Besides, it’s just a lot more fun than posting coupon links all day.”
There is the interesting part, leveraging affiliate marketing with video. As you browse through Nuuvy.com you’ll watch some very interesting submissions. Under each video you’ll see a box that has tabs for Product Info, User Comments and Where to Buy. The site is in beta so there aren’t many user comments, but the Where to Buy tab is most interesting to me. Currently they are using Keycode links to direct users to merchants that may carry that product through Keycode.com. When you are searching you’ll see that those links can take you to relevant merchants, but sometimes you’ll spend more time searching for the product through those links than watching the video. This is a crucial part and one I spoke with Kurt about. They will be providing direct links sometime in the future and I’m sure that will do quite a bit to increase the sites profitability and usefulness to the users. It is definitely something that will truly have an impact and will add value for the customer. They watch the video and then see a link to that particular product at several merchants. Possibly even some price comparisons?
Uploading a video is pretty easy. You are given the option of tagging your video with several tags to identify the product. This, I’m sure will be used to provide product links on each review page. I did have some trouble with signing up when I filled in all the fields, but they are aware and are working out the bugs as we speak.
So why will consumers record, login and upload? I think there are many reasons. People truly do love to see themselves on video and you can tell that some of the early members are really putting some thought and time into their video reviews. People love video. Nuuvy is also rewarding consumers with a $10 for each accepted review. I’m not entirely sure $10 will entice a lot of production out of somebody, but hey it is a start towards monetizing consumer generated video. My suggestion would be to reward the consumer on a percentage of either sales made through their videos or popularity of each member’s content. The more the consumer is able to earn, the more they contribute and the better the quality of the videos. I think they do a good job of letting all users know that contributors are earning revenue from their submissions, transparency is essential, although I think it is pretty obvious that this is a commercial entity.
As you can probably tell by reading my posts over the last year or so, I truly believe affiliates can be very successful by adopting, integrating and participating in the new social media avenues and can generate customers and income through this means of acquisitions. Nuuvy is a great attempt at social media affiliate acquisitions and is only the first of many things to come. I’m excited to watch this site grow.
so many good examples of this type of site out now
Nice write up Jamie. And Kurt, man, great product. Love to interview you about it?
Wrote up here about it:
http://www.howtodovideo.com/nuuvy-entertaining-online-videos-meets-user-generated-product-reviews/
Jamie - thanks for picking this up and for reviewing the site. You know we originally wanted to give video producers a rev share of the affiliate sales te site generates. We certainly have experience and capability of doing that trough sub-affiliate tracking, but it presented a huge problem relating to content. If you agree to pay people a percentage of product sales, all you will get is people trying to sell stuff - which isn’t what we want. Honesty and credibility in the reviews are paramount to the success of the site as a legitimate informational resource. You never know if web ideas like these will take off, but we’re going to make sure we have some fun along the way.
Jim - Thank you too, and let’s talk!
Great article Jamie.
This isn’t anything new considering ExpoTV has been out for well over a year and a half. While it appears Nuuvy pays more (up to $10 per review rather than $5) ExpoTV has a much larger database of video reviews. In fact they’ve even worked out a partnership with Smarter.com to syndicate the reviews via Smarter’s price comparison engine.
Scott,
Thanks for chiming in. I hadn’t heard of ExpoTV before this. It appears that it is a pretty similar model with affiliate links on the page of each review. I don’t see links to individual products so the user still has to search at one of the sites they provide (this was after a 15 minute look), but it looks awfully similar. Do you happen to know the organization behind it?
No, I don’t know the organization, but I have heard about it a few times on Web 2.0 blogs and the like.