Why Don't More Companies In The Online Video Industry Have Blogs?

As my previous post has pointed out, many times there are a lot of questions members of the media have for vendors and suppliers in this industry that should be getting answered on that companies blog. I understand that not all questions will be answered but why is it that bloggers and others in the media have such a hard time getting companies to respond to questions in an open forum?

Why don't more companies in our space have blogs? It costs you nothing to have one, it drives more traffic to you, it gets you more visibility and you're seen as being a thought-leader. The excuse I always hear is "we don't have the time", which to me means you're lazy. If you are really small company, that's understandable, but when you're a hundred plus organization, there is no excuse. People also say to me, "we're not StreamingMedia.com and you can easily get traffic to your blog". You're wrong. Google sends more traffic to my blog than StreamingMedia.com does. Each month, Google accounts for over 60% of all the traffic I get simply based on people typing in phrases they are looking for. If done correctly, with the right tags and feeds, your blog can get a lot of traffic too. This blog does over 100,000 page views a month now and it's only been online for four months.

All day long people contact me to write about them, feature their product, etc..... and to many of them I ask why they don't have a blog to talk about what they are doing? Or better yet, team up with two or three other companies that are in the same vertical industry you are and do a blog together. Why are there no blogs that I am aware of about topics like "Enterprise Video" or "Mobile Video" or "Webcasting" or better yet "P2P Video". Yes, I know there are some sites about P2P applications, but P2P for video is a great example of a product that is not understood by most in our space and even more so by customers. Why hasn't three or four of the P2P/grid computing/delivery vendors gotten together to start a blog to educate customers on what exactly P2P is all about? What are you waiting for? Customers don't know what you do, I can't explain it as well as you can, so where is the outreach?

And I'm not just picking on the P2P guys, although they are at the top of the list as that subject has more confusion than most. Myself, StreamingMedia.com and the other sites out there can only educate the market so much for you. We have limited resources, we have to cover so many technologies, products and vertical markets that we can only get to so many things. Vendors and suppliers need to step up and start educating the market at well via channels like blogs.

If your company wants to do one, wants to work with others to do one, I'll even help you as much as I can - free of charge.

Comments

[Dan Ciruli]

I've got a grid computing blog (http://westcoastgrid.blogspot.com), but I don't talk about video much.

Jeff Richards of Verisign blogs about video and P2P a bunch: http://blogs.verisign.com/demandinsights/

[Trevor Sumner]

Check out IPTV Times at http://iptvtimes.blogspot.com for Iolo Jones's blog. He is the Chief Strategy Office for Narrowstep (http://www.narrowstep.com), which powers over 180 channels including Virgin Media, Terra Telefonica, the Outdoor Channel, and many others. His blog is quite insightful. Full disclosure: I work for Narrowstep.