Stream Monetization: Importance and Implementation

Millions of broadcasters, streamers, and influencers have chosen to use stream monetization to distribute content. Some products have monetization built into their product model from the start, while others seek to add it later. The product must be thoroughly evaluated in order to ensure that stream owners are receiving the promised financial benefits. Read our blog to understand what stream monetization is, its growing importance, and how to implement it the proper way.

What is Stream Monetization?

Getting paid for the video content created by the user is referred to as stream monetization. The audience views, likes, or subscribes to a video or channel, and in return the creator earns money. The income is based on the number of users who watched, liked, or subscribed to the content. People could also access the videos on a pay-per-view basis.

Why Should Businesses Invest in Stream Monetization?

Stream monetization allows a way to connect, build a community, and grow followers and brand presence. Creators can now monetize the Livestream easily and earn good profits for themselves as well as for the brands. By using monetization platforms, you can produce professional-looking live-stream videos and access a variety of platforms. Some of the major benefits of performing monetization of the stream are as follows:

• Increase Revenue: Businesses can generate significant revenue through live streaming. Research from Digital TV Research projects that by 2023, video advertising income will total $47 billion. You did read that right — $47 billion! That indicates a substantial sum of money.

  Businesses that participate in stream monetization find it profitable. Particularly, businesses that monetize live streaming can boost their revenue 49% faster than non-monetized businesses. As a result, the primary goal of stream monetization is to generate significant profit.

• Access Every Device: Reaching all devices is the second important advantage of stream monetization. A paywall that requires a subscription or pay-per-view creates a barrier for users to access your content. Additionally, viewers are less inclined to purchase with a mobile device than a desktop.

  Across all devices, 2.38 billion individuals streamed or downloaded videos in 2018 and created $70.8 billion in revenue by 2021. Over 75% of these viewers watched them on a mobile device. And even now, those numbers are rising. In short, stream monetization is the best choice for mobile video businesses when used in combination with a compatible video player.

Challenges in Stream Monetizing

Companies can now measure their success in terms of conversions and seize more opportunities to expand their businesses thanks to digitization. Having said that, it does present a number of monetization challenges that the majority of news organizations are now battling to resolve. Some of the major challenges are as follows:

• Creators need to have a creative mind to make engaging videos so that they can maintain the existing viewers as well as attract the new audience
• Streamer’s channel must have a large number of followers to start earning as collaborators or big brands like to collaborate with creators who have more than thousands of followers or subscribers
• Need to opt for ad-stitching in case viewers use ad-blockers which might cost the content creators in case they need to purchase some plugins or tools to do that
• High network bandwidth is required for delivering high-quality content to the viewers otherwise losing their audience could be a consequence
• Creators need to produce unique content to avoid plagiarism and legal issues of copyright

How to Monetize a Live Stream or Video?

There are several ways to monetize the stream, some of which are mentioned below:

1. Ads Support: Users can add advertisements to their videos/streams depending on the platform (YouTube, Facebook, etc.). Three types of advertisements are available:
   • Pre-roll: At the beginning of the stream
   • Mid-roll: In the middle (during playback) of the stream
   • Post-roll: At the end of the stream
2. Subscriptions: Based on the popularity of the content, broadcasters can make either whole or some of their videos accessible to the subscribers only. Subscriptions can be short or long terms like the following:
   • Weekly or Bi-weekly
   • Monthly
   • Quarterly
   • Half-yearly
   • Annually
3. Extensions: Streamers can add extensions to the player and people can buy those to cheer their favorite streams and videos. A few extension categories are mentioned as follows:
   • Stars
   • Bits or Coins
   • Emoji (which can be channel-specific as well)
4. User Donations: Most of the live streaming platforms allow streamers to earn money from donations. People nowadays like to encourage their most liked influencers, broadcasters, and streamers, by donating money or something valuable to them. This not only helps the live streamers financially but also motivates them to produce more quality content.
5. Affiliate Programs: While enrolling in an affiliate program, users can always earn a good commission when a shopper purchases from their affiliated link. Platforms of various services like online shopping are generating revenue by running affiliate programs and inviting creators from different genres. This way, it is a win-win situation for everybody like the platform owner, brand, and video creator.
6. Pay-per-View: Make the streams live and put tickets for viewers to watch the same. You can make money by selling tickets for your live stream if you have content that appeals to these viewers. People of all kinds of interests are now turning to live streams to learn and exchange opinions with like-minded individuals. This method has made its mark in the world of streaming already. Numerous content creators like fitness instructors, musicians, comedians, and educators are gaining benefits from this technique.
7. Different Users: To monetize streaming video, segregate the users into separate categories like Normal, Turbo, or Partners. It helps to authorize the various users with different levels of access to content as per their user role. Access authority can be divided among the users like basic content but with ads, premium content without ads, earning commission from sales.
8. Sponsorships: It allows the creators not only to be paid by the sponsors but also gives the opportunity to grow the audience reach and engagement rate on their content. Both sponsors and content creators can avail the benefits from different collaboration schemes like Cashback, Barter, and Paid.
9. Merchandise Sales: Content creators who are in partnership with a merchandise supplier can add a section on their channel or page for their viewers to purchase the listed items. They can also suggest their favorite items to their fans to make a good sale.
10. Broadcast Stream on Different Platforms: To engage with a large audience, broadcast your content on various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. In this way, creators can use this method to monetize their Facebook streams, YouTube streams, and other platforms.
11. Build your own Live Streaming Platform: Create an independent website where you can provide access to your live broadcasts to the viewers. New start-ups are growing extremely well in the market and creating their own space among viewers.
12. Create your Brand and Sell Products under the same: Creation of products (physical or digital) which will guide your followers or subscribers and make them feel like a part of your community. Digital content can be a video, picture, painting, or musical note, and the same can be auctioned in the live stream by listing these as NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens)
13. Ask for monthly pledges: Build a Patreon page and encourage viewers to pledge money to the business in exchange for some premium content. Dedicated viewers will surely contribute to seeing the new premium content, which in turn will be useful for the channel owner.

Role of QASource

Our organization has expertise in testing stream monetization in many ways depending on the client's requirements and the way stream monetization has been implemented in the application from the product side. A few of them are listed below:

1. Advertisements: Sometimes, viewers use ad-blockers to avoid ads while watching videos. Thus, QA’s role here is to make sure that advertisements stitched in a stream from the server side are showing up on the player and it is bypassing ad-blockers.
2. Extensions: Ensure that the extensions added by the stream owners are visible on the player and viewers can purchase (which is again to be QA verified for smooth purchase) the same as per their interest.
3. Subscriptions: The whole process is fully tested to ensure the functionality of the following features:
   • Subscribe a channel
   • Notifications for subscribed Streams/Channels
   • Access to content only for the subscribed audience
   • Subscription Renewals
4. User Experience: To ensure the product meets the end user’s expectations by testing the same as per the intended user’s aspects.

In addition to the above mentioned, there are a lot more ways where QASource can help to ensure a seamless experience in monetized streaming.

Conclusion

Stream monetization is broadly popular in this technical era and is being opted for by millions of broadcasters, streamers, and influencers. Some products have baked monetization into their product model from day one and others have plans to opt for it in the later stage. To make sure that stream owners are getting the intended monetary benefits, it is highly required that the product is holistically tested. At QASource, our testing experts have extensive experience in running a variety of tests to ensure that all processes are working as expected. To learn more about our services, contact us today!!