Former Facebook marketing director Randi Zuckerberg, who, not coincidentally is company founder-CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sister, has so much confidence in online video that she said it's at the core of her new company, R to Z Studios.
"We're probably a couple of years away from being able to monetize video en masse, but we're seeing an interesting trend online where people are willing to pay for excellent content," she said at the UbiQ digital entertainment conference in Paris, according to C21 Media.
Comedy, she said, is no joke when it comes to online content as "more and more comedians, instead of doing on-air television specials (are) doing direct-to-pay online."
As an example, she said, Louis CK put his comedy special online, charged five bucks and made $1 million over a weekend. That trend, she said, is why other stalwarts of the cable TV space will abandon that media to go online.
"You're seeing folks like Oprah (Winfrey) and Glenn Beck abandoning cable TV and going to digital, with Oprah's Lifeclass and Glenn Beck making $25 million this year in just pay subscription online," she said.
It's enough to encourage her to step down from Facebook (which she did last year) and throw her support behind media companies developing social programming, including the Clinton Global Initiative, Cirque du Soleil, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and the UN Foundation.
"The most important thing is to make your content social," she reportedly said. "We're still in very nascent stages, but I do think that the tide is turning."
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