The 2010 Holiday Season is almost upon us and the demands are growing higher as SermonSpice.com and other sites provide downloadable sermon content. That means more video producers competing to put out the very best holiday themed content for pastors to download. Can you feel it? That is the pressure of a free market. SermonSpice.com provides you, the video producer, with an immediate indicator of exactly how good your videos are. If you are ever in doubt as to whether your videos are any good, just take a look at your sales numbers.
Now don’t get defensive before you hear me out. The more snobbish, video producers are already in protest. They know the crème de la crème does not in fact always rise to the top. They have high quality products that have hardly paid for the ink and paper used to print their royalty checks. There are those video producers who take their job very seriously and would stand by their high quality HD videos to the day they die despite dismal sales. Because they believe they know better than the consumer and are just waiting for the day the pastors using SermonSpice.com will come around and demand higher quality content, like the videos they can’t seem to sell.
There are also those ad hoc video producers, known as pastors or accountants every other day of the week, who have gone out with little more than a sudden inspiration and a home video camera and ended up receiving thousands of dollars of royalties in return. They had “no idea what they were doing” and probably couldn’t tell you whether a 5600 Kelvin light source is Daylight or Tungsten balanced light. And they probably don’t care. What they did – they went out and made something and let the market decide.
If the snobby video producers are still reading, I do want to make a disclaimer. Just because a total green bean goes out and makes a video with a pure heart, unadulterated by the rigorous demands of professional video, does NOT mean they will always have a hit. In the same way, just because a serious video producer spends $30,000 on a set of seven animated videos does NOT mean he’ll make his money back (that would be me admitting one of my greatest video blunders). The success of a video on SermonSpice.com has very little to do with how much the video producer spends, since the end user has no way of knowing this budgetary tidbit. The pastors who propel videos to the #1 spot on SermonSpice.com do so because they like the videos they purchase.
Whether you are spending money on your videos or not, your idea of quality may be somewhat skewed. Let me make it very simple for you. Your best indicator for how good your videos are is the size of the royalty checks you receive every month from SermonSpice.com. That check is a representation of someone else’s money they deemed worth letting go of for the video you produced. Isn’t that amazing? Look at the shoes you are wearing. Mine are a $34 pair of leather kicks I picked up at Target. Last month my income from SermonSpice.com was more than fifteen times the cost of my shoes. The pastors who liked my videos and used them last month paid for the shoes I have on my feet and then some.
The money you are able to generate on SermonSpice.com can help put shoes on your feet and dinner on the table for your family. Or if you already have more then you need, you can help put shoes on someone else’s feet, dinner on someone else’s table, and maybe a glass of clean drinking water while you are at it. Isn’t that what God is all about? Giving things away? That is why I strongly urge you to tithe off of whatever you make from SermonSpice.com whether it’s twenty bucks a month or two thousand dollars. That’s the plan God put in place a long time ago. When we make money, we give it away.
There will be some product that becomes the number one downloaded Christmas video this year at SermonSpice.com. I don’t know what the video will be and neither do you. If the producer of this video is exclusive with SermonSpice.com, they will receive 55% of the money generated by the sale of their video simply by making it available. Will it be a video that is advertised for? Most likely… but possibly not. Will it be a comedy? Maybe… but maybe it will be a short documentary telling a story none of us has heard before. Will it be more than 1 minute long? Who knows… maybe it will be the first SermonSpice #1 video over 10 minutes in length.
After producing more than 50 products for SermonSpice.com only 2 have made it onto the top ten list. Maybe I’m the wrong guy to be writing this article. I don’t know what the formula for success is on SermonSpice.com. But I do know this. If you don’t put anything out there on SermonSpice.com this Holiday Season, you are guaranteeing two things:
1. Someone else will have the #1 video this Holiday Season.
2. You won’t make one thin dime.
If you are still reading after my blatant appeal to the enterprising capitalist inside of you, then let me issue you a challenge. This holiday season make your very best videos available on SermonSpice.com: what inspires you, what you consider high quality, or even something from years past. Why? Because the more you create, the greater the chance something you created will get rewarded with income.
SermonSpice.com provides you a way you can give to the community and the community can give back to you in return. You create great content for SermonSpice.com, the pastors that shop there like it, and they reward you with what could be a substantial amount of cash. What you do with the money is up to you. If you tithe off of the money you receive from SermonSpice.com, then you are giving back to the community again. The more we can all create and reward each other for our creativity the more income is circulating out there and the more money can be given away. The arts are a beautiful thing since they are an economy with a very low barrier of entry and an immediate indicator of success. If you still need inspiration just sing along with me a couple verses from the well-known Christmas tune “Deck the Halls”:
Deck the halls with boughs of holly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Tis the season to be jolly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Follow me in merry measure,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
While I tell of Yule tide treasure,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
(this article is also available in the October 2009 issue of Christian Video Magazine)
‘Yule Tide Treasure – Christian Video Magazine – October 2009
The 2010 Holiday Season is almost upon us and the demands are growing higher as SermonSpice.com and other sites provide downloadable sermon content. That means more video producers competing to put out the very best holiday themed content for pastors to download. Can you feel it? That is the pressure of a free market. SermonSpice.com provides you, the video producer, with an immediate indicator of exactly how good your videos are. If you are ever in doubt as to whether your videos are any good, just take a look at your sales numbers.
Now don’t get defensive before you hear me out. The more snobbish, video producers are already in protest. They know the crème de la crème does not in fact always rise to the top. They have high quality products that have hardly paid for the ink and paper used to print their royalty checks. There are those video producers who take their job very seriously and would stand by their high quality HD videos to the day they die despite dismal sales. Because they believe they know better than the consumer and are just waiting for the day the pastors using SermonSpice.com will come around and demand higher quality content, like the videos they can’t seem to sell.
There are also those ad hoc video producers, known as pastors or accountants every other day of the week, who have gone out with little more than a sudden inspiration and a home video camera and ended up receiving thousands of dollars of royalties in return. They had “no idea what they were doing” and probably couldn’t tell you whether a 5600 Kelvin light source is Daylight or Tungsten balanced light. And they probably don’t care. What they did – they went out and made something and let the market decide.
If the snobby video producers are still reading, I do want to make a disclaimer. Just because a total green bean goes out and makes a video with a pure heart, unadulterated by the rigorous demands of professional video, does NOT mean they will always have a hit. In the same way, just because a serious video producer spends $30,000 on a set of seven animated videos does NOT mean he’ll make his money back (that would be me admitting one of my greatest video blunders). The success of a video on SermonSpice.com has very little to do with how much the video producer spends, since the end user has no way of knowing this budgetary tidbit. The pastors who propel videos to the #1 spot on SermonSpice.com do so because they like the videos they purchase.
Whether you are spending money on your videos or not, your idea of quality may be somewhat skewed. Let me make it very simple for you. Your best indicator for how good your videos are is the size of the royalty checks you receive every month from SermonSpice.com. That check is a representation of someone else’s money they deemed worth letting go of for the video you produced. Isn’t that amazing? Look at the shoes you are wearing. Mine are a $34 pair of leather kicks I picked up at Target. Last month my income from SermonSpice.com was more than fifteen times the cost of my shoes. The pastors who liked my videos and used them last month paid for the shoes I have on my feet and then some.
The money you are able to generate on SermonSpice.com can help put shoes on your feet and dinner on the table for your family. Or if you already have more then you need, you can help put shoes on someone else’s feet, dinner on someone else’s table, and maybe a glass of clean drinking water while you are at it. Isn’t that what God is all about? Giving things away? That is why I strongly urge you to tithe off of whatever you make from SermonSpice.com whether it’s twenty bucks a month or two thousand dollars. That’s the plan God put in place a long time ago. When we make money, we give it away.
There will be some product that becomes the number one downloaded Christmas video this year at SermonSpice.com. I don’t know what the video will be and neither do you. If the producer of this video is exclusive with SermonSpice.com, they will receive 55% of the money generated by the sale of their video simply by making it available. Will it be a video that is advertised for? Most likely… but possibly not. Will it be a comedy? Maybe… but maybe it will be a short documentary telling a story none of us has heard before. Will it be more than 1 minute long? Who knows… maybe it will be the first SermonSpice #1 video over 10 minutes in length.
After producing more than 50 products for SermonSpice.com only 2 have made it onto the top ten list. Maybe I’m the wrong guy to be writing this article. I don’t know what the formula for success is on SermonSpice.com. But I do know this. If you don’t put anything out there on SermonSpice.com this Holiday Season, you are guaranteeing two things:
1. Someone else will have the #1 video this Holiday Season.
2. You won’t make one thin dime.
If you are still reading after my blatant appeal to the enterprising capitalist inside of you, then let me issue you a challenge. This holiday season make your very best videos available on SermonSpice.com: what inspires you, what you consider high quality, or even something from years past. Why? Because the more you create, the greater the chance something you created will get rewarded with income.
SermonSpice.com provides you a way you can give to the community and the community can give back to you in return. You create great content for SermonSpice.com, the pastors that shop there like it, and they reward you with what could be a substantial amount of cash. What you do with the money is up to you. If you tithe off of the money you receive from SermonSpice.com, then you are giving back to the community again. The more we can all create and reward each other for our creativity the more income is circulating out there and the more money can be given away. The arts are a beautiful thing since they are an economy with a very low barrier of entry and an immediate indicator of success. If you still need inspiration just sing along with me a couple verses from the well-known Christmas tune “Deck the Halls”:
Deck the halls with boughs of holly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Tis the season to be jolly,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Follow me in merry measure,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
While I tell of Yule tide treasure,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
(this article is also available in the October 2009 issue of Christian Video Magazine)