How to create a free blog and monetize with a smartphone?
Last night, I attended the virtual Shark Tank-like Dribbble event at digital agency Amplify. The segment involved me pitching two-minute video essays to an audience of industry insiders. Due to my work on the platform, I am familiar with the Dribbble format, from reading #littlenotes on Medium to the London Pick (sic). But because of the nature of tech and a fast-moving advertising environment, Dribbble is becoming increasingly popular.
During the hackathon’s on-air part,
I was asked whether Dribbble was better suited for YouTube than Medium. The panel (which included “Rooster” College and Bright Media CTO Hunter Walker) agreed with me that Medium lends itself well to Medium content because Medium users can upload images and links to Medium web pages, and Medium vs YouTube content are viral. Quantcast estimates 3% of Medium subscribers are YouTube viewers.
How to create a free blog and monetize with a smartphone?
But Dribbble can attract a much wider audience because people have a permanent URL to their short pieces. Several panels also concluded that even Medium can’t scale to a YouTube level of page views and people will gravitate towards Dribbble from a content-creation perspective and platform for getting introduced to podcasts and long-form articles.
But I’m pretty sure that Dribbble’s ability to promote iOS apps wasn’t even entertained.
The panelists concurred with me on the similarities of using Medium and Dribbble, though they were divided.
The easiest example to compare was when we pointed out that we were allowing our clients to upload 10-10-10 posts to Medium and Spotify ads that have a thumbnail image and three 90-second videos to Medium and YouTube, using the Medium poster tag.
So that works to our advantage, but if readers don’t have an account, it’s complicated. If Medium is too complicated for regular users, it also proved to be too complicated for our clients, so the clients didn’t try to use it at all.
On Dribbble, I quickly grew a fan following, with videos ranging from 2-minute essays to 30-second ads.
But when the program put a brief requirement that videos must be 120-seconds long, all content had to be edited to 5-7 seconds or less and create one way or another to promote the content.
For Instagram videos, I personally don’t think it’s such a big deal. I still don’t think it’s as detrimental as Medium, which allows users to link to Medium web pages and Medium apps.
The panelists also agreed that no matter which platform is used,
creating viral content still gets a better response. Even a two-minute video essay can be related to the advice our panelists gave us last night. They said that if you mention posts from Pageshare and Adhost and Facebook, people just see that these pages want subscribers, so the comments will look more favorable. But if you ask someone to link to a video written by Medium or a tweet about Medium, people might say that was great content, so people might “V” you because you are shunning yourself from Instagram. You can see Facebook success stories such as Colorful, Caridoo, Cordcil, and Happy Thoughts on Instagram.
Throughout the hackathon, I was asked multiple times if I think digital company founders should start their own websites. Although it’s clear that both Medium and Dribbble are helping to promote my brand, Dribbble only promotes my agency’s Instagram account, so I don’t have the ability to do amazing things on Medium.
And with any company, you need to start small.
You want to put your best foot forward so that when investors and customers come into the light, they will see your value and that your brand is authentic. Giving every marketer the chance to create great content is a good step in the right direction.
I am looking forward to creating a few great videos and integrating them on Medium. But for now, I can proudly say, “My role at TechCrunch can be erased tomorrow. My Facebook account lives on.”
