February 14, 2006
Startup Watch: TurnHere (Your Local, Neighborhood, Video Site)
TurnHere is that rarest of video sites on the Web: it actually pays filmmakers for the mini-documentaries that it shows on its site. "I could not imagine not paying creators," says founder Brads Inman.
The site, which soft-launched last December and is about to unveil a vastly superior redesign on May 31, currently features about 300 videos showcasing neighborhoods in different cities. There is the one about NYC's Canal Street narrated by a private detective who works on product counterfeit cases; an homage to the Lower East Side's famed smoked fish shop Russ & Daughters; a history of San Francisco's Palace Hotel; a tour of Burlington, Vermont; and a look at the real Tijuana. They tend to be hit or miss, but pleasantly there are more hits than misses.
Inman wants to film the world, one neighborhood at a time. The online videos are all made by freelance filmmakers, journalists, and other semi-pros (although there is one 17-year old who contributes as well). Inman pays $500 and up for each video, and he is very selective about what he accepts This is no YouTube free-for-all. "We want professionally created video," says Inman. "You don't need to be a Hollywood studio to do this stuff." He is taking advantage of cheap video and editing technology, even cheaper Web distribution, and a highly-skilled, highly-distributed freelance workforce.
Each video is three to five minutes long, artfully shot, and driven by
a narrative approach to a neighborhood. Inman is starting with a focus
on LA, New York City, and San Francisco. He wants to build up about 100
videos for each city, although he accepts vidoes from all over the
world. He wants TurnHere to become a place where people go to learn
about the cities they live in or the ones they are going to visit. You
can learn a hell of a lot more watching a good video (good, meaning
both information-packed and entertaining) about a neighborhood than you
ever could surfing on CitySearch for just five minutes.
On the new site, when you watch a video, a Google Map will appear in a
pane below, with a virtual pushpin marking some of the spots featured
in the video. TurnHere will also be included as a content partner in a
soon-to-be released version of Google Earth. Inman showed me a demo of
this at lunch last week on his laptop. He typed in a location in
Thailand on Google Earth, it zoomed in from a satellite's point of
view, down to the street, and then a TurnHere video of that location in
popsped open on his screen. "For me," says Inman, "that is the first
time the result really matches the search."
Inman, who previously founded and then sold real-estate site HomeGain,
has not taken any venture money. So far he is funding it himself to
the tune of more than $1 million. "It is not a credit-card startup,"
he says.
So how does he plan to make money? There will be banner ads on the
site, of course. But he is resisting putting pre-roll ads in the
videos themselves. Rather he is offering local businesses the chance
to advertise in a very unique way on his site: by sending a filmmaker
from his network to shoot a video about their business and show it as a
sponsored video alongside the other mini-documentaries on the site. Here's one for the Damascus Bakery in my neighborhood (they make the best pita bread and spinach pies in Brooklyn).
These sponsored videos cost the businesses about $2,000 between $750 and $3,500 to make, so it is much less than a TV commercial (unless you count Spot Runner)
and about what they might spend on a print ad in the Yellow Pages. The
trick will be to make these ads just as compelling as the
non-commercial neighborhood videos. That may be easy for a unique
business like Russ & Daughters, but it will be more difficult to
pull off for the hardware store down the street.
Another potential source of revenue will come from TV itself. Inman has
had preliminary discussions with a few networks to repackage the videos
into half-hour or hour-long shows. The videos on TurnHere are classic, microchunked content,
which means they can easily be cobbled together to create longer fare.
His pitch to TV execs is: Take five videos about San Francisco from
TurnHere and you've got yourself a super-cheap travel show that you can
put on the air on a Saturday afternoon. And the best part of all for
Inman would be that such a show would in turn be a free commercial for
TurnHere.
What I like about TurnHere is that it is really trying out a different model than the gazzillion other video sites on the Web. Inman is tapping into the culture of participation to get his videos, but he only wants the best stuff. And he is willing to pay a little bit to steer his network of filmmakers to contribute work that fits his theme of location-based video. Whether he succeeds or falls flat on his face, it seems like an evolutionary step in the right direction.