Just yesterday, I was talking about the importance of newspapers viewing themselves as a media outlet, rather than an ink and print organization. That was actually before I caught a posting from late last week by Andy Plesser over at Beet.TV.

In it, he described a conversation he had with Chet Rhodes, the Assistant Managing Editor of News Video over at WashingtonPost.com:

The small number of U.S. newspaper with online video operations, are seeing 27 percent of their online revenue coming from video ad sales, according to a research report released today by Borrell and published in Editor & Publisher by Jennifer Saba.

How is this possible, given that most of us don’t view our video news from newsprint organizations?

Simple – CPMs and sponsorships are much higher for video when aggressively pursued, and when done right in a hybrid New Media news organization, costs are significantly lower.

The Washington Post admittedly doesn’t use top-flight equipment, but they aren’t creating theatrical masterpieces, either – they’re creating video documentation and entertaining additions to written pieces they’re putting out.

Most importantly, the video has a monetizable shelf-life away from the website, something that can’t be said about the writing itself.  Once a quote or a splogger scrapes your text content, that’s the end of your CPMed profitability.  If a video is embedded, however, your pre-rolls, overlays and postrolls stay intact, and continue to earn.

It’s as simple as that, and it’s amazing that more larger organizations, both New Media and Old, aren’t implementing this strategy.