Today we’re welcoming a new sponsor to VCN and a new player to the video contest scene!  Womadz.com is a brand new crowdsourced video site and on Friday they launched their first competition.  Obviously there are already about a half dozen video contests sites on the web but I think the marketplace actually needs MORE resources like this to meet the needs of advertisers.  2012 has been an unbelievable year for crowdsourcers and the number of video contests and spec assignments that are running right now is just kind of mind-boggling.  Facebook and youtube have turned into giant bottomless pits that companies need to constantly try and fill with fresh content.  And it seems like a lot of these companies have realized that it’s sorta dumb to pay a production company $50,000 to make a video that will be used up and over-exposed in a few weeks.  But when companies get their content from “the crowd” they gain access to a nearly endless supply of low-cost, high-quality videos.  So sponsors are now turning to independent producers in droves when they need online ads.  It just makes good business sense which means the demand is just going to climb higher and higher over the next few years.

I’ve seen a few startup video contest sites come and go since I started this blog and I can always tell which ones are going to succeed and which ones are going to and .  To be frank, the sites that have money behind them always flourish and the ones that are put together on a shoestring always fail.  The folks who build the cheap sites are hoping they’ll get lucky and find an investor….but they never do.  So if you see a new video contest company that is running “just for fun” contests with a $500 first prize you should probably stay away since that company won’t be in business for very long.

And that’s why I’m excited about Womadz.  It’s nice to see a new player in this industry that actually has its act together.  Womadz’ first contest is being run as an experiment but they’re actually putting up some big ass prizes.  It total, $15,000 is up for grabs in their inaugural “Be The First” competition.  Submissions should be 30 second ads for a fictitious generic consumer product.  No brand names are allowed; this is just an experiment for filmmakers to show off their creativity.  Womadz is a little diffrent than other video contests sites so be sure to check out all the FAQs before you pick up a camera:  http://www.womadz.com/how-it-works