14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube and Warner Music Group recently announced a new partnership that will bring back the music label's videos to YouTube but also provide Warner with customized pages for its artists complete with the right to sell its own advertising on them. The problem was, Warner didn't have a sales team so it partnered with Outrigger Media, a New York-based company specializing in online media.
“We’re pleased to have found such experienced and forward-thinking partners in Outrigger Media to represent our renowned artists and content to the advertising community. This new partnership enables us to leverage Outrigger’s ad targeting platform to effectively exploit key audiences,” Michael Nash, Executive VP of digital strategy and business development at Warner Music, said. “With a majority of our active artists now signed to expanded rights deals, we are constantly seeking ways to build new revenue streams to monetize those partnerships.”
The real interesting part is that Outrigger Media is closely related to Veoh, an online video site that tried (and failed) to challenge YouTube's dominance for the past few years, as its CEO is the former ad sales leader of the online video company. The rep firm will now handle the ad sales for Warner's online video venture, a wise move in the short term, but failing to create its own dedicated sales team might come back to hurt the label in the future.
Just a short while ago, Warner Music Group and YouTube have finally made up after an almost year-long breakup. As it happens, it was the money that eroded this otherwise happy marriage of convenience. Things got really bad last year until, finally, Warner removed its videos determined to hold out for a better licensing deal. Well, they're back together again and this time Warner is pulling out all the stops as not only the videos will make their way back to YouTube, it will actually build dedicated and customized pages for its artists on the online video site and the best part is that it gets to serve its own ads through a revenue sharing deal with YouTube.
The major music labels are finally starting to look at online video as a legitimate revenue source and business model though they're not all in agreement on how it should be done. One thing they have in common though, perhaps reluctantly, they all partnered with YouTube in one form or another. While Warner will use the actual video site, Universal and Sony have opted to create their own music video site, Vevo, to be launched sometime this year, which will use YouTube's technology and hardware capabilities as its backend.