WellcomeMat Goes Social
WellcomeMat, the popular real estate video hosting site, has undergone a fairly extensive facelift – and they are now taking the service in a totally different direction.
The new Mat is carrying on the trend to ditch the maps (Real Estate Search Tit for Tat) — if you remember, the original site was designed as a consumer search tool to find real estate videos — and has introduced a number of social features designed for real estate professionals to connect with and get the experience they need from their peers. The goal is to help them improve their workflow so that they can more easily get up and running producing real estate video.
The site borrows liberally from social networks like Facebook, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. With WellcomeMat’s Activity Feed can see what your connections are doing across the site. You can create networks of different users so groups of agents in a single sales office could potentially combine their efforts to create a deeper local real estate channel.
Of course, the heart of WellcomeMat is still the video hosting and streaming service. In the My Channel section of the site you’ll find the link to upload your own video, as well as a listing of all your active videos. Clicking on an active video gives you the necessary embed code for your videos.
As you can see, WellcomeMat has also launched its new player with this release.
And while there are a lot of neat new features (cuepoints float on the video rather than take up space below the player) it honestly caused a few headaches for me, since the new player is so much bigger than the last one. Luckily you can still find the legacy code for the old players if your site’s design (like mine) can’t accommodate the new player’s dimensions.
Also, if you’ve uploaded video with the earlier smaller dimensions – you’ll see black bars around it during the playback, which I didn’t like very much (you can however expand the video to get rid of them).
Granted, this is still in Beta and there are bound to be kinks in a release this big. And WellcomeMat promises they will be rolling out many new options in the months to come, including new widgets to help you publish your videos anywhere you want.
WellcomeMat continues to be one of my favorite hosts for anyone considering dabbling in real estate video. This release has gone a step further to really drill down and tackle what’s the heart of the issue with real estate video right now; adoption rates. By providing more of a platform for people to interact and find support, hopefully more agents will begin to experiment with video.
andrew | Dec 21, 2007 | Reply
Only thing i really cannot stand about this site is the domain name. The 2 L’s always throws me for a loop. As small as this may seem it could hurt growth.
melanie | Dec 21, 2007 | Reply
Facebook’s impact on WelcomeMat is notcieable. the video quality in the past two years is much improved. Movie theatre quality.
Tony | Dec 22, 2007 | Reply
“what’s the heart of the issue with real estate video right now; adoption rates.”
Disagree. The heart of the issue with real estate video right now is with the results as a function of cost. Adoption rates are driven by simple economics. The per video view rate for most property videos is appallingly low (usually averaging in the dozens of views or less) which makes the cost per view. Fix that issue and video adoption will rise.
We’ve got enough confidence in our property video results that we were the first to offer performance based pricing with just a few cents per video view over a fixed three month period. We even film the property and do all of the post production work. We’ve remained profitable or break-even since June.
Does InmanTV uses wellcomemat in a way that is fairly typical of the average user trying to sell a home? Likely not. While the focus on the technology itself is good, if the functionality ultimately isnt resulting in more views from prospective buyers or more sales, you’ve ended up essentially with the prettiest knife in a shootout.
Happy holidays!
Tony
Christian Sterner | Dec 27, 2007 | Reply
We had a great time building our newest release, and definitely appreciate all the feedback. I do have some points to make:
1) There is not much of a difference between the goals of the last version of WellcomeMat and the new one. We have very simple goals:
-help people that are not using video to start
-help people to efficiently gather professionally-produced video content (if desired)
-enrich the sites/blogs of our members
-make the first three fun when possible
It is the means by which we accomplish our goals (“social” functions) that have changed. There is nothing about our socialization that is meant to help people waste time. It’s all about productivity and help through collaboration.
2) The player: Joel, the decision we had to make when building out a larger standard player was to a) stretch old videos to the new dimensions or b) maintain the clatiry/quality of playback by playing videos back in their original size. The black bars are proof of the decision that we made: maintain quality/clarity. It’s a real bummer to watch grainy real estate videos, and people have worked pretty hard to get their files into settings that are ideal on WellcomeMat. We’re confident that the path we took was the best we could do.
3)Andrew, you’re right in many ways regarding the domain name, but-if you reflect on the ways in which you found most of the websites that you frequent-you might start to see the reason that we went with two L(s). I remember clearly the first time that someone told me to go to “Google.” I had no clue what they were talking about and had to ask them to spell it. What about Yahoo!, or Craigslist? The list of these sites goes on and on. I have yet to see or hear of a better name than WellcomeMat for what we do. But, again, you are right in many ways: we didn’t take the easiest path.
4) Tony, the problems that you point out are not solved by your company, but you are right about one thing: WellcomeMat is one pretty knife. Bottom line is that real estate search portals need to start accepting automated feeds from content creators, and we are more than ready accommodate them when they do. Feeds are not a hard thing to accomplish, and-unless you are privy to some huge real estate portal that is accepting feeds and have an exclusive deal-you are in the same boat as we are.
Tony | Dec 29, 2007 | Reply
Christian
Sorry, we aren’t in the same boat at all. At Vidlisting.com, we believe that the Views => Leads => Sales cycle is how most paying customers with property videos measure success. We focus our functionality on boosting each of those three factors – clearly, boosting views from prospective buyers are the first step.
View issue solved? No, we’ll never consider the video view issue as being solved even when we have the hundreds of thousands of views per month that we expect within the next 6-8 months. However, we have succeeded in gaining thousands of video views for any given property video within 45-60 days. That is arguably a good start to actually helping customers sell their properties with video…a better start than dozens of views over several months anyway.
With over 80% of our just shy of 1 million video views on our infrastructure being property videos, we can confirm that indeed a good part of our views have come from exclusive agreements that vidlisting and our sister sites have formed with various real estate portals and organizations since July 2007.
The feeds issue is a red herring. Since many portals dont accept feeds, we built our syndication technology in such a way that portals can manage/display our videos with or without feeds. Integration problem solved.
Funny how the whole customer benefit viewpoint of real estate video functionality rarely makes it into these tech reviews or even the comments. Since no company has unlimited resources, a product’s functionality roadmap reflects a company’s priorities with respect to their perception of customer needs. Those needs are actually business problems.
Are customers saying that they want to see video transcripts? Yes – it is a common request and not just on our site – so we added an embedded transcript capability (example: http://www.vidlisting.com/player/videopage.asp?vid=ghfgfdfd&t=v). Are visitors really saying, “we’d prefer to see the various video chapters displayed in the player than a photo of the property”? I’ll leave that answer to you.
Tony