Yesterday the Tropenmuseum launched it’s Youtube channel. At last we do something web 2.0. We are alive on the web!!!! But as you can see at this moment their is only one movie on it. At the Tropenmuseum we had a lot of discussion lately about using movies to spice up our website and/or to place it on Youtube. We looked into several youtube museum channels. What we discovered is that almost all the museum channels are barely watched. On a first glance the MoMA YouTube channel has an average of 10.000 viewers per movie, the Rijksmuseum channel has an average of 2.000 viewers per movie and the indianapolis museum of art channel has an average of 1.000 viewers per movie. While seeing this movie viewers we wondered if it is worth the effort to produce movies for the web only.
A very low budget, mediocre quality movie clip of about 30 seconds costs about 1.000-1.500 euro’s to produce. This includes scriptwriting, shooting the movie and editing. When we want to make a short documentary style clip of about 5 minutes the cost easily double or triple. I think there are more effective ways to spend your (marketing) Euro’s in communicating your museum.
What our NoTube strategy is at this moment is not to produce clips solely for the web. What we will do is make agreements with media who want to shoot at our premises that we can use their movies for our purposes. Within a few weeks for example the local Dutch multi cultural broadcasting company MTNL wil broadcast a documentary series about the Tropenmuseum. Those documentaries will also be placed on our youtube channel. Another example is our new commercial that is being made for our upcomming exhibition about Vodou.
This doesn’t mean that we won’t produce movies or movie clips in the future. But we will always try to use the clips with traditional media to stretch out the reach of the movies made.