Sharkle.com lets participants post videos for free

In 1999, Brian Kropp was considered a pioneer in the Internet advertising business, helping his startup company, Flycast, go public and reach $500 million in market capitalization.

The Cincinnati native is at it again with Sharkle.com, an online video sharing site that allows members to post videos on the Web free of charge.

It's the latest craze in user-generated media. Video sharing is to 2006 what podcasting was to 2005, and what blogging and uploading photos were in early 2000. Why talk, write or post still images when you can broadcast video for the entire world to view?

Kropp lived in San Francisco during the Internet technology boom at the end of the '90s. When Flycast was acquired in 2000 by CMGi, an Internet holding company that bought more than 80 companies, he and a team started another company called SME Global Solutions. They sold Internet advertising to telecommunications firms.

But Kropp was eager to move back to Cincinnati and continue his consulting work. In 2003, he took a job in financial services with Legg Mason and started Queen City Ventures LLC, a company that provides consulting services to startup entrepreneurs. But he kept in touch with his former partner, Trevor Wright, and when Wright came to him with the framework for Sharkle, he jumped on board.

"I wanted to keep my entrepreneurial juices flowing and help a friend out," he said. "A lot of people did startup and stopped, but I went through the entire gamut of the wave and popped out in Cincinnati."

Sharkle was launched in September 2005 and now has 60,000 members. Kropp said more than 1 million people visit the site each month and most spend an average of 25 minutes watching videos.

"There is a sense of voyeurism. You see slices of people's lives that you'll never meet," Kropp said.

Members get one gigabyte of space to store their videos and each video is capped at 100 megabytes. Many videos are recorded from everyday-use digital cameras, which makes video sharing so accessible.

"You can't buy a digital camera that doesn't have some level of 30-second video capability," said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer for Nielsen BuzzMetrics Inc., formerly Intelliseek. "As camera technology gets more advanced, you'll find more outlets and it will be interesting to see the brands that emerge."

Blackshaw analyzes and measures consumer-generated media for companies and has been very involved in blogging. He said in order for Sharkle to distinguish itself from other video sites, like Flicker and UTube, it needs to figure out its competitive advantage and market the company along those lines.

According to projections, Sharkle.com will reach positive cash flow this summer. Revenue is based on site advertising -- video advertising before and after each roll and traditional banner. But Kropp and his partners are exploring use of promotional videos, where companies ask users to create their own commercials for a product.

They'll also market Sharkle to newspaper sites for classified advertising or auction sites for use of video to display items for sale.

"If you take a look at the real estate industry with video and the virtual tour, you can multiply a million different comparable scenarios: job interviews, museum tours, etc. Just about every kind of business-to-business activity has some type of video corollary," Blackshaw said.

Blackshaw said Kropp's timing is good, as video is being accepted as a medium.

"In some sense, it's just TV going online," he said. "It's not as clean or as packaged as TV, but it's really just on-demand TV."

link: http://cincinnati.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/stories/2006/02/27/story8.html?page=1