I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I founded Impact Eleven. At its inception, I honestly believed that ImpactEleven would be my first real success. A year later, I can comfortably call it a failure.
Impact Eleven was born during January 09′ while I was lying in bed. With the TV on, I was slowly drifting into sleep. For the better part of an hour I was fighting to stay awake to make it to the end of the show. On that January night, while half asleep, I had my first “Ah-hah!” moment.
You may have experienced something similar. While on the phone, taking a shower, or cooking dinner, a light bulb flashes above your head…
I Suddenly Envisioned the Next Big Thing!
For the following week, I did nothing but think about the idea. I damn well thought that this idea could be the next million-dollar, industry-changing company. But money wasn’t my main motivation. My excitement was fueled by the prospect of entrepreneurial success.
Impact Eleven was supposed to revolutionize advertising on YouTube. My vision for the business was to connect major advertisers with YouTube publishers, providing publishers an alternative to the YouTube Partner Program (which overlays ads on popular videos and gives a [low] percentage cut to whoever uploaded the video). Impact Eleven’s main advantage over the YouTube Partner Program would be that there would be no minimum channel popularity pre-requisite, and that the average revenue per 1000 views would be much higher than the Partner Program currently delivered.
The business model I envisioned for Impact Eleven relied on short pre-roll video advertisements that publishers would manually insert at the beginning of their videos before they uploaded them. An example of a 15 second pre-roll is embedded to the right.
The YouTube publishers would download the 5-20 second pre-roll video ad and insert them at the beginning of their videos that they upload. Advertisers would sign contracts with Impact Eleven agreeing to pay $xx CPM for the first 15 days, with an initial X number of target video views. We would attempt to match their target impression count by predicting the amount of views each of our publishers usually delivered. The advertiser would agree on a CPM for the first 15 days, a lower CPM for the following 3 months, and an even lower CPM for the following 6 months, since there is no way to remove the ad once it is attached to a video without removing the video altogether.
Read more for “Finding Our First Customers” and “Inexperience, Naivety, and Blind Passion.”
I wrote a simple script last week that sends email alerts when you have new twitter mentions. The script simply searches your @username every five minutes, or whatever interval you choose, and sends an email if a new mention is found.
