YouTube to cost Prospect Council $44k a year — but the clips just aren’t rating
AN Adelaide council is spending $44,000 a year to upload its meetings to YouTube but it’s proving a ratings flop with each clip only viewed by about 30 people.
PROSPECT Council is spending about $900 a week to upload videos, watched by about 30 people, of its meetings to YouTube.
Councillors, shocked at the cost, last week backed Cr Ashley Dixon’s call for staff to find ways to save time and money uploading the videos because the price tag was “excessive”.
A report showed the council would spend about $44,000 and hundreds of staff hours in 2014/15 to upload the videos.
An average of 30 people watch each video which can be hours long.
Deputy mayor Mark Groote said the videos were “important to do for transparency” but cost too much.
Cr Groote suggested the council only upload videos of full council meetings to save money.
“I still can’t understand why it costs what it does to upload a video to YouTube,” Cr Groote told the meeting.
“Some people around the table have probably done this in the past and it doesn’t seem to be an arduous task and I accept a three-hour video is much more than a two-minute video.”
The report said it cost up to $300 in staff time to upload the video.
It cost on average about $570 in recurrent costs per meeting, including $329 for a high-speed fibre link to the video conferencing software, $220 for the software licence and $21 for a dial-up connection.
Staff were spending up to 7.7 hours per meeting to upload a video to YouTube.
Prospect Mayor David O’Loughlin said he had “difficulty defending” the project’s price tag.
“I agree that for what we are getting the cost is excessive and if we are getting an average of 30 users, you’ve got to think $900 over 30 users, even they would think that isn’t good bang for buck,” Mr O’Loughlin said.
In May, the council became the first council in Australia to start putting videos on YouTube.
The council used a Federal Government grant to buy the $3000 camera used to film the meetings.