How Virtual Gifting Drives Social Streaming Revenue
Learn more about social streaming monetization at Streaming Media's next event.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Aaron Nagler: For a long time I struggled with the idea of, "Okay. we're gonna put a product in a video for so and so's Facebook Live or YouTube or whatever." Again, the generational thing where I, for the longest time, was very resistant to the idea of native advertising or look, so and so is sponsoring this video and look it's so cool, and they're just playing with it on their channel. That to me was very like, "Oh, it's so kind of crass and commercializing, it's such a sellout move."
Casey Charvet: It's exactly how they do it.
Aaron Nagler: But that is it, that's where it's, this whole generation lives there. And it's just this weird idea where like, I don't know. Growing up, man, if you heard your favorite band in a commercial, oh, total sellouts. Now, that's the goal. Any really.
Dan Houze: I think part of it too is, you know, in speaking to the social streamers or the independents in the room and people that are thinking about getting into this, that's really how they're gonna make their money,
Aaron Nagler: That's right, exactly.
Lauren Hallanan: Not necessarily.
Dan Houze: Oh, challenger! Yes.
Lauren Hallanan: Our platform, so we didn't get a chance to introduce ourselves.
Dan Houze: I'm so sorry.
Lauren Hallanan: Our platform is The Meet Group, and we have a portfolio of social mobile entertainment apps, social networking and dating, and we've integrated live-streaming into them. And we built the product and from zero to 12 months, we now have an $82 million annualized revenue run rate and none of that comes from working with brands. It's all from in-stream virtual gifting.
Aaron Nagler: So, like, micro-transactions and stuff?
Dan Houze: Very interesting.
Lauren Hallanan: If I'm a viewer on the platform, I can purchase virtual currency and then I can send these virtual gifts to streamers that I like, and the streamer gets a cut of that virtual gift. The platform gets a cut, obviously Apple and Google get a cut. So, it's a virtual online currency exchange through gifts. There are other options available. If you're familiar with Twitch, they have their subscription model as well so I think besides brands, for live streamers there's actually plenty of other ways to make money. That's also something that you need to consider as well. For example, if you're working with a social streamer. whether it's our platform, whether it's LiveMe, YouNow, Twitch, if they do have these other ways of making money, then you need to think from their perspective. For example, if they can earn a lot of money just through virtual gifting then why would they work with your brand? Right? Maybe they want to work with your brand because of the prestige of your brand. Maybe they want to go to your event because they think that the event would be really cool to share with their audience. So you kind of have to balance that because, actually, for a lot of live streamers, they can earn money without even working with your brand. So actually there's less of a motivation to... You really have to find from their mindset why they would want to work with you.
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Streaming Media's Tim Siglin interviews Meet Group VP of Livestreaming Lauren Hallanan at Streaming Media West 2018.
11 Dec 2018