Vizy.com, the offspring of Poptent and Userfarm is now live and the new company is already running several big video contests. I poked around the site last night and I still can’t tell why this big merger was necessary. Vizy is basically Userfarm with a new name and a slightly different design. Just take a look at these screenshots and you’ll understand what I mean…
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Userfarm 2013
Vizy 2015
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The new Vizy banner looks like it was designed by someone on Poptent’s graphics team but other than that, this new site doesn’t really include any of Poptent’s style or features. And that might be a problem for the new company because Vizy’s Euro-Centric theme will probably be a turn-off to a lot of American filmmakers. Whenever I’m looking for a new contest to enter, I usually skim the listings at onlinevideocontests.com and stop whenever a big dollar amount catches my eye. But I don’t have an automatic currency calculator in my head so I usually ignore contests that list their prizes in Euros. And I hate to sound like a stuck up American but seeing all those little flags feels a little off-putting too. American filmmakers have gotten used to entering contests that are open to US-residents only. So it just seems like bad strategy to enter a contest that’s open to 600 Million people.
There’s really only one reason why Poptent and Userfarm merged to form Vizy; Poptent had tens of thousands of member-accounts and Userfarm wanted them. But most of Poptent’s members are located in the US. That means most of those people will have zero interest in creating video content for foreign markets. (How is a guy in Indiana supposed to know what kind of ads will work in Italy or Spain) So hopefully the folks at Vizy will realize this and create a special web portal just for their American members. All they have to do is list prize amounts in good ole’ dollars, hide the contests that need videos in languages other than English and run the occasional project for a regional US sponsor (like the California board of Tourism) and Vizy will probably wind up being very popular with American filmmakers.
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