WellcomeMat Takes Network Approach to Real Estate
WellcomeMat isn’t the latest player to enter the SMB video space, but it is starting to get more attention as the medium itself picks up.
As TurnHere, Mixpo and a few others do to varying degrees, the three-year-old company focuses mostly on the real estate vertical. High-ticket items, pressure for leads and a subject that is conducive to video have made real estate a focal point for some early movers in the space.
But WellcomeMat’s model differs from some of the other players we’ve interviewed, most of which fall under the designation of “vendor” (read: video production). WellcomeMat instead serves as more of a network — almost analogous to the way an online ad network works.
On the advertiser end, it works directly with real estate professionals and video producers. The latter can include independent videographers and conduits to videographer networks such as TurnHere. It connects the two through a social network-like platform in which video producers bid on jobs that are submitted by any advertiser (a few end-product examples here).
Once it makes a connection, WellcomeMat serves the advertiser with an ad management dashboard including distribution in the various places that are becoming opportune for local video (vertical search engines, core search engines, IYPs, etc.).
“Most of the time in real estate, it doesn’t make sense to post video everywhere, and in places that aren’t focused on this type of content,” says WellcomeMat cofounder Christian Sterner. “People aren’t searching for real estate on YouTube, and some brokerages are sensitive to being placed near inappropriate content. We’re more interested in distributing to places like real estate blogs or vertical sites like Trulia.”
Overall the company is very bullish on video and how it has reached the local level in SMB accessibility to low-cost video production and online distribution (important themes in TKG’s recent local video forecast). It’s building on these market factors by creating a marketplace for local video production and distribution — starting with real estate.
“For video producers that graduate from film school and want to be a director, this is a whole separate medium for them to cut their teeth on instead of working as a waiter to stay afloat,” says Phil Thomas Di Giulio, cofounder and chief marketing officer. “Meanwhile for local businesses, it will do for them what music video did for bands 25 years ago. It will put them on the map.”
