Rocky-historied video blog Rocketboom has a new sponsorship model and a major new sponsor. The first sponsor paying out to associate its name with Ms. Joanne Colan is online video phenom YouTube.
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Andrew Baron, Rocketboom’s founder, announced the new model and sponsor on his blog. Companies can buy a simple text frame (reminiscent of the old “brought to you by” announcements on daytime television) that says “This Episode Sponsored by”.
And that’ll run you about $3000 a pop. It raises to $5000 after September.
Baron also has set up a Rocketboom channel on YouTube, where you can make yourself with all that Joanne (and maybe some Amanda, too, but I didn’t look that far.)
What was most interesting about Baron’s blog post was a short history detailing how much the site struggled in the beginning and about how difficult it was to keep the show afloat.
Just over a year ago, we ran out money for Rocketboom. We were not mature enough to consider investments and so I decided Rocketboom had to go forward with an E-bay auction….
I’ll never forget the fear of failure that buit up to 5 seconds before the auction ended a loser, followed by a final refresh click with just 2 seconds to go that suddenly showed a $40,000 winner. To this day, I had never publicized that $40,000 was actually our reserve, helping to set the high market value.
