Video Series Turns Moneymaker For VT Site

Somewhere along the timeline of alt weeklies’ evolution into digital, there needs to be a mark scratched for Eva Sollberger and her videos. A multimedia producer for Burlington, Vt.’s Seven Days (“Yes, I made that up myself,” she mused of her title) Sollberger has claimed her own new territory with “Stuck in Vermont,” a personality-driven video series of profiles and human interest stories that play by their own off-kilter set of rules.

Sollberger’s narrative voiceovers are minimized, though when she turns the camera on herself it’s just a little too close, her sense of (possible) irony just a little too ambiguous. And the videos run long — sometimes over seven minutes — much to the chagrin of her peers shooting Web videos at dailies elsewhere in the country.

But after five years, hundreds of videos and a cult following that ranges all over the country (not to mention a strong measure of local celebrity), Sollberger has become one of the tentpoles of Seven Days’ Web presence, her videos a case study of how alt weeklies might extend their patented edginess in more digitally-savvy directions.

“When we saw Eva’s work, we realized that her sensibility was very similar to ours,” said Cathy Resmer, Seven Days’ associate publisher and Web editor. Having commissioned her first videos on spec on the strength of a local cable access show and then bringing her on staff after just a few installments, Resmer said the paper’s investment in Sollberger is paying off.

“Eva’s salary is not 100% supported by our video revenue, but we’re generating enough to pay for more than half of it, plus money for her equipment and hosting expenses,” Resmer said. Sollberger shoots on a Panasonic HMC150 and edits on Final Cut Pro, having gotten an equipment upgrade from the paper last year.

Meanwhile, “Stuck in Vermont” has found an ongoing sponsor in Cabot Creamery Cooperative, and Sollberger has been additionally tasked to produce between 10-15 commercial/advertorial videos a year. (Her commercial videos are hosted on Brightcove and her “Stuck in Vermont” pieces live, for the moment, on YouTube — Resmer said Seven Days hasn’t yet been swayed toward investing in its own potentially costly customized player.)

Resmer added that having a video journalist on staff has also been valuable for producing videos of events that the paper sponsors, and that Sollberger’s mere presence at those events projects a marketing halo for the Seven Days brand that’s difficult to quantify but palpably felt.

Resmer notes that digital is still in its revenue infancy for Seven Days, bringing in only about 4%-6% of its annual revenue, but a strong classifieds section — particularly employment — and a highly competitive personals section have further helped the site get a robust digital grounding. This builds on the entertainment listings that are a cornerstone of its online and print presence. And a strong play for the college crowd (the bevy of local schools includes the University of Vermont) via an annual college guide and a digital-oriented jobs fair (TechJam), aims to court young, tech savvy potential users where Sollberger’s video charms may have yet to reach.

Seven Days has an editorial and sales partnership with local TV giant WCAX that has also helped further its digital reach. On the sales side, it’s through a deals program, DealTicket, which piggybacks on WCAX’s JumpOnIt program. Editorially, writers promote their stories on WCAX’s air and Sollberger appears weekly with a two-minute version of her latest video.

A daily e-newsletter, the “Daily Seven,” has put Seven Days in the aggregation space, pulling the top seven stories from sources as varied as local community papers to college newspapers and even YouTube videos. “We'll likely expand our curatorial and aggregation efforts,” Resmer said. “There are a lot of strong local media outlets in Vermont, many of them community weeklies. We'd like to recognize high quality content there and promote it to our audience.”

Looking ahead, Resmer wants to do more on the video front, where Sollberger continues to produce video stories that users often revisit (or discover) for years (one episode, “Tiny Houses” has racked up over 160,000 views and remains a viral favorite among the small domicile cognoscenti).

And to the videographers and naysayers who continue to grumble that her videos are too long, Sollberger maintains her alt weekly defiance that good stories set their own length. “I do think viewers will commit to a longer video if it holds their interest,” she said, noting that the content well of local material — from extreme snowmobile racers to builders of tiny houses — looks, from her slightly skewed vantage point, to be bottomless. “I have more content than I know what to do with.”

Resmer provided a closer look of Seven Days on the Web.

Launched: Newspaper in 1995; website in 2007; redesign in 2007