NoTube strategy
Yesterday the Tropenmuseum launched it’s Youtube channel. At last we do something web 2.0. We are alive on the web!!!! But as you can see at this moment their is only one movie on it. At the Tropenmuseum we had a lot of discussion lately about using movies to spice up our website and/or to place it on Youtube. We looked into several youtube museum channels. What we discovered is that almost all the museum channels are barely watched. On a first glance the MoMA YouTube channel has an average of 10.000 viewers per movie, the Rijksmuseum channel has an average of 2.000 viewers per movie and the indianapolis museum of art channel has an average of 1.000 viewers per movie. While seeing this movie viewers we wondered if it is worth the effort to produce movies for the web only.
A very low budget, mediocre quality movie clip of about 30 seconds costs about 1.000-1.500 euro’s to produce. This includes scriptwriting, shooting the movie and editing. When we want to make a short documentary style clip of about 5 minutes the cost easily double or triple. I think there are more effective ways to spend your (marketing) Euro’s in communicating your museum.
What our NoTube strategy is at this moment is not to produce clips solely for the web. What we will do is make agreements with media who want to shoot at our premises that we can use their movies for our purposes. Within a few weeks for example the local Dutch multi cultural broadcasting company MTNL wil broadcast a documentary series about the Tropenmuseum. Those documentaries will also be placed on our youtube channel. Another example is our new commercial that is being made for our upcomming exhibition about Vodou.
This doesn’t mean that we won’t produce movies or movie clips in the future. But we will always try to use the clips with traditional media to stretch out the reach of the movies made.
January 11th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Hello,
I help administer the MoMA YouTube page, and while I agree that museums as a whole do not get very large numbers of views for videos, I think the experience is worthwhile because it opens the museum up for visitors in a new way and makes the museum consider ways to interact. I think the trick is that you need to approach the medium of YouTube differently from other videos. A visitor to YouTube is not looking for perfect lighting and tight-scripting of videos like television; they are looking for a quick look, a sneak peek behind-the-scenes, or a few words from an artist/curator either before or after a visit. Produce the videos quickly and timely, and embed them on your site and offer them through other channels (iTunes, Vimeo, etc) and you should get better results. Brooklyn Museum is another place to look at different approaches (visitors creating videos, videos for their new program with Twitter, etc), as well as the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the San Jose Museum of Art (to name a few).
In the end, the goal is not purely numbers; if you can provide content to 1,000 people who are very interested in, for example, watching public programs (without investing huge time/money from your staff), this might be worth more than 10,000 people who just look at a video once and don’t care about your institution.
Regards,
David