Vidopp.com Video Contest Community

With unemployment rising, the number of how-to Web videos on finding a job and saving money has jumped in recent months.  How-to site eHow.com has seen an 84% increase in the search and viewing of articles and videos about the economy and personal finance over the last six months, with traffic to the site nearly tripling year-over-year. Bank of America recently anted up for an ad deal with eHow.com and YouTube to create a series of videos on saving money.

The trend is rippling across the how-to video business, itself an industry on the upswing. The number of videos is growing, videographers are making extra change creating them and advertising dollars in the niche are rising. (more…)

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Ten of the nation’s top marketers have decided to tap their most passionate fans for new marketing ideas. The brands involved — PepsiCo’s Doritos, Visa, Hewlett-Packard, Marriott, Telstra, Kodak, Phillips and three others who asked not to be named — are launching a user-generated advertising competition through short-film festival Mofilm, culminating at the Cannes International Advertising Festival in June.

The goal of the competition is to unearth the next Herbert brothers, who won Doritos’ third-annual “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, and produced an ad that topped USA Today’s Ad Meter as the most memorable during the big game.

Each brand will select two entries, resulting in 20 finalists, which will be submitted to a judging panel that will include filmmaker Spike Lee. (more…)

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Yahoo announced the latest in a series of niche Web shows. The short segments about celebrity mothers, titled “Spotlight to Nightlight,” are a stark departure from the company’s initial forays into TV-style production for the Internet. This time, Yahoo’s executives say they have found a sustainable model for making original video online, in part by explicitly not competing with television.

During the middle of the decade, the technology company dreamed up plans for elaborate talk shows, sitcoms and other TV-type shows. But the expensive attempts to transport TV entertainment to the Internet “were all disasters,” said Trip Chowdhry, a senior analyst for Global Equities Research.  Since then, Yahoo has acted as a distributor for audio, video and photographs from other media companies. And it has continued to produce its own Web shows, albeit quietly, without any of the fanfare that accompanied its earlier ambitions. (more…)

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