SBTV - Daily Online Video News for SMB Goes Social

Online video gets daily SMB news and goes social at Small Business TV (SBTV.com), the first of its kind video news and information site for America's 25 million small businesses. The company was launched in 2004 but apparently just unveiled a new enhanced video platform.

SBTV has been around for five years, personally I have never heard of them and have been a small business owner for at least that long (much longer interspersed with stints as a corporate rat-in-a-cubicle-maze). They estimate thousands of videos, daily news videos and an interactive calendar with events of interest to SMB owners.

They've just launched a new redesign complete with new functionality including:

• Share It - easily share online videos and articles through all major social networks, blogs, and email
• Embed It - quickly links to embed Daily News video in your own web page
  
• Rate It - business owners rate the latest news stories daily
• Comment - business owners instantly share thoughts on top small business news stories

Essentially they've become a social networking and media site now it seems taking pointers from YouTube in the hopes to raise traffic? Quickly looking at the traffic numbers on Quantcast shows they have about 232,000 visitors a month with 192,000 coming from the US. It also seems they lost a lot of traffic lately, up to 50% in fact which might indeed explain the redesign and added social features.

The Small Business Events Calendar allows you to now submit your own events and offers a "Power Search" tool.

Strange that I've never heard of them. In all those thousands of small business oriented searches I've done over the last five years they never once came up on my radar. Well, I guess that just goes to show the power of the press releases because that is how I found them, via a press release. I guess video news for small business could have something interesting but I can't see sitting and watching 30 minutes of it on one visit (like they state their average users do).

Checking into the site shows a wide range of topics in video form now including authors, technology, women, marketing, a lot of autoplay video (mostly ADVERTISING) and an Internet marketing area.

Oddly, in the internet marketing area, they make no mention of online video advertising. In fact, there's almost nothing in the entire area (4 videos and 5 articles) and a five-question FAQ. Perhaps this is why they've been around for five years and I've never heard of them. Wait, I found more there, it's hidden away three categories deep in Marketing.