PerezHilton.com
Perez Hilton spices up wildly popular blog with a dash of video
Perez Hilton is renowned as one of the Internet's most notorious (and successful) gossip columnists. Perez was named the #1 Web Celeb for 2007 by Forbes Magazine and has recently been tapped as one of the 15 most influential Hispanics in the US by People in Espanol. Since the site's launch in 2004, PerezHilton.com has become one of the leading go-to sites for celebrity news. With a large and growing audience, eMarketer identified PerezHilton.com as one of the top 5 websites for college aged women, placing ahead of MySpace.
His Video, His Way
After generating more than 25 million page views for YouTube, Perez Hilton decided that he could offer a more compelling – and profitable – experience by bringing the video in-house. "I can make more money doing that, and my ad people are going to start selling ads on my original videos on my site. I don't think anyone can offer me as good an offer as what I will potentially make on my own videos on my own site." Despite the fact that this decision made sound business sense, the technical challenges of bringing YouTube's feature set to his own site were daunting.
Yet in just days, Twistage was integrated into the blog, giving rise to PerezTV (http://www.perezhilton.com/tv). A total "Perez experience," the video player itself is pink and bears the uber-blogger's logo. Publishing is a point-and-click operation and the process of inserting the videos – and generating playlists – is completely automated. Twistage also capably manages the issues surrounding scale – a critical concern for a site with such high traffic – providing reliable and consistent video ingest, encode, and playback.
Twistage Underneath the Covers
Perez's supporting cast on both the business and technical sides quickly reached the decision that Twistage was the best online video solution for their needs. Miklos Gaspar, Managing Director of Pressflex, the company that manages the technical operations of PerezHilton.com, decided Twistage was the clear winner for a variety of reasons:
Tight Integration
Twistage empowers businesses to generate greater returns on their existing investment. The API approach allows the platform to be leveraged by any website built in any language, with any database on the backend. PerezHilton.com was already an incredibly well established website. With Twistage, the Pressflex team was able to build on top of what they had developed rather than requiring any re-architecting or changes to their existing infrastructure.
Brand Friendly
Even a brief glance at PerezTV communicates that this is Perez Hilton's brand. Twistage offers a pure business-to-business video solution, allowing its clients to control the look-and-feel of everything having to do with online video. There is no intrusive branding, no logos on the player, and no references to Twistage.
Monetization
With legions of demographically desirable site visitors, PerezHilton.com is the apple of many an advertiser's eye. The site has leveraged multiple ad partners with the simple activation of Twistage's ad integrations to monetize the video content on the site.
While the technical merits of the Twistage platform were the driving factors behind the decision to use the service, the primary user of the service was mostly focused on ease-of-use and dependability. "What I love about Twistage," Hilton explained, "is that it's not only very easy to use, but the service is super reliable. I haven't had any problems! I highly recommend them."
More and Better
Since selecting Twistage, PerezHilton.com has continued to expand its online video experience. From the early days of simply embedding videos into the main blog to the development of PerezTV, video has become an increasingly important part of the site. The result: significantly increased video traffic. Users now go to PerezHilton.com not only to read the latest gossip, but also to watch it.