Starting a video contest can seem like a daunting task. There isn’t much information out there on the subject either. I recently researched and helped launch a video contest with the National Outdoor Leadership School. Here are some of the things I learned.
Picking a Platform
YouTube – Gathering information on video contests through YouTube is very confusing. From what I gather you need to be in the Partners Program and then become a YouTube Sponsor. I have heard it costs $5,000+ to run a contest which includes a built-in contest gadget, and promotion through YouTube. You can find out more here. Good luck with that though, getting in touch with YouTube directly has proven unsuccessful for my mid-sized company.
Wildfire (Not Affiliated with my site, The Wildfire Companion, in any way.) – This is the most economical option for a small / midsized company to run a video contest. They have an online contest creation tool that you are able to preview along the way for free, you pay right before you decide to publish. They answered the phone too! I am currently running a video contest through Wildfire for the company I work for, NOLS. Check out the contest here (this link will die after 12/31/2010). We are using their premium plan to run a 4 month contest. The total cost was around $900. They integrate with Facebook nicely, and allow you to embed the contest via iframe on your own site as well. Their template is a little bulky, and for the plan we are using we have to allow their logo and promotion search bar to remain on our contest pages. You can also tweak the design of the contest template with CSS to an extent.
Votigo - This company’s plan was out of our budget, and it’s the one I know least about. Their plans start around $5,000, and it seems they build you a microsite for the contest with promotion tools.
Create Your Own – There are more involved ways to run a video contest that might be more successful, and cheaper too! But, you have to get creative. I have seen video contests run on YouTube simply tied to tagging the video with a specific contest tag. You can also create a YouTube group and ask participants to submit videos to the group as an entry. A dedicated blog / site could also be a viable option. By creating a submission form asking people to submit a link to their video, you could manually embed YouTube and Vimeo entries for viewing and use a widget for voting.
YouTube vs. Vimeo vs. Facebook Video
My thoughts on which video host to use are that YouTube is the most popular and user friendly, with the biggest community, and the easiest to share. Vimeo is a much smaller, but more professional group of video content creators. It could fit your demographic to run a contest through their community. Facebook’s video is clunky and awkward, I don’t watch many videos on Facebook. I don’t even know where to search for videos on Facebook.
Other Considerations
I am currently helping to run my first video contest. The biggest hurdles for my company were figuring out ways to run a worldwide contest open to people 13 years of age and older. If you run a contest worldwide you need to legally comply with contest rules for each country you receive submissions. We did not have the tools at our disposal to explore that option so we had to keep the contest within the United States.
To run a contest where people under 18 could enter, we had to figure out a legal and easy way to get parental consent. Working within templated platforms, this was a difficult task. With Wildfire App, we decided to have parents submit the video on behalf of the under-aged participants. Behind the scenes, the platform only allows people 18 or older to enter.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the info! Did you look in to wizehive’s contest application at all? I’m debating between wildfire and wize hive for a small-medium sized music video contest. Your contest site looks good! Which pricing plan did you go with on wildfire?
Hello Meghan, I did not know about WizeHive’s contest app at all until just now. Thanks for showing that to me. I will have to look at their site a bit more here. Do you know of any current contests being run using WizeHive? We went with the premium pricing plan with Wildfire. That plan was way under any other site/app that we had seen. The premium plan gave us access to the css code and got rid of some of Wildfire’s ads.
Hi William – Really informative article. You’re right, there just isn’t very much info out there on this stuff. Does Wildfire actually handle the video submissions themselves, so that users can upload videos right from within the contest tool/submission form? So that then, the contest organizer can go in and view/review all the videos? And how are multiple file types handled?
Thanks~
Melissa
Hello Melissa!
Yes. Wildfire allows you to upload your videos directly to Facebook and YouTube provided you have user accounts already, from the submission form. It also allows you to attach a video already on YouTube to your submission.
Wildfire has different settings for whether you would like the videos to go live as soon as an entrant submits a video, or if you would first wish to review the videos before they go on the site. We opted to let them go live immediately so that they could see that everything worked with their submission. I could then go in and delete it and contact the person if something was wrong with the video.
YouTube and Facebook deal with the filetypes, so most if not all video file types are accepted and converted through their system. Wildfire then embeds the YouTube and Facebook videos for viewing.
Hope that helps answer your question! Let me know if you have any more.
Hi William,
The information you posted has been extremely helpful as we prepare for our online video contest- Thank You.
Two questions: 1) we plan to use Wildfire but are debating whether to publish a practice-contest for friends/relatives. Do you think this is necessary? Wildfire Q&A shows people experience snags with video submissions & we would hate for that happen once things are official…
2) The videos submitted for your NOLS contest are pretty sophisticated: how many submissions did you have? I plan to do a quick flip video intro on our FB page to intro the contest and show how easy it can be…but it appears your contestants were pretty experienced with video editing, etc.
Thanks again for the HUGE help.
Happy New Year! Susannah
Hello Susannah!
1a. I don’t think a practice contest is necessary. It could be helpful, but not worth the cost IMO. I do like that Wildfire will let you preview the contest as you tweak and customize it. I would suggest letting lots of people play around with the preview before you pay for it and launch.
1b. We did have a few snags with people submitting videos. Mostly the issue was something to do with Facebook Privacy settings (i think). I would work with the entrants until their video was up and viewable. What I did was look through the submissions and email everyone that had an incomplete submission with a message like “Hey I am helping run this contest and noticed your submission was incomplete. Let me know if you are having trouble uploading a video or need more help.” I would always get a response and we would work it out together. I would always suggest that they upload a video to YouTube first, then enter the contest by adding a video already on their YouTube account. It honestly wasn’t that big of a deal until the very last minute. A few folks had trouble uploading during the final minutes of the contest and got cut out due to the deadline. We gave them some prizes for the effort but they honestly should’ve entered sooner.
2. We had about 65 total submissions ranging from sophisticated to trivial. We made a few example videos showing that the entry could be a big production or sitting in front of a webcam, and continued to stress that throughout the marketing of the contest. We did post the contest to a few “video contest” sites and filmmaker sites. The level of production could also be due to our adventurous and young demographic.
Happy New Year to you as well! Let me know if you have any further questions!
Hi William ‘Contest Guru’!
Our contest is live:
http://on.fb.me/hs6h7S
Thanks so much for your help and advice…
Susannah
Hello!
I’m trying to create a facebook video contest and just have one problem with wildfire, it doesn’t seem to have an option where users can submit and vote simultaneously. Do you know if this is achievable? Thanks!
Elena
How about Strutta?
I’m looking at both Wildfire and Strutta and while Strutta is more expensive it also appears to provide greater customisation.
We’re building an affordable, brandable alternative to Wildfire, Wizehive, BigPrize, Strutta, etc., etc.
Soon, there’ll be no more $5k-for-a-single-branded-contest shenanigans!
We’ll give the biggest bang for your buck for sure. Soon. I’ve a feeling it’ll end up being called “contestninjas” or “ninjacontests” or something.
Toss me an email if you’d like to know when we’ll be available!
Take care.
Incidentally, that email address is amber at sunrank dot com.
What about simply promoting a video contest (within a local area only) through whatever resources you have and asking participants to provide a link to THEIR personal YouTube page? For our purpose, I’m not considering promoting it on YouTube or anything. People would just be using their accounts normally. Wouldn’t this work?
William, I was hoping to create a video contest centered around a funny song that I wrote and recorded about” Star Trek.” My aim was to end up with something that would go viral, thereby allowing me to pick up advertising accounts. Any thoughts?
For Photo contest, checkout http://apps.facebook.com/contesttab
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