Collab Clips

A vertically-integrated D2C marketplace for licensing viral videos.

Role
Product Designer

Organization
Collab Inc.

Ownership

Stakeholder Interviews
Systems Mapping
Research Synthesis
Co-Creation Workshops

Feature Ideation
Wireframing
UX Design
User Testing

The Problem

How might Collab reimagine the content licensing experience?

Collab, a media company, licenses out viral social media content. While they ingest over 500 clips a day and sell over $1m worth of content a month, they can no longer scale and have begun losing business to competitors.

The Solution

Collab Clips, the first vertically-integrated UGC marketplace.

For the first time, a single tool enables users to browse rights-cleared, high-resolution clips, curate with the use of AI-powered discovery tools and smart bins, and license instantly with a simple pricing model.

How It Works

Discover. Curate. License.

Discover new content on a hand-curated Homepage or use AI on the For You page.

Curate clips into Playlists and add easily via dragging & dropping into the Drawer.

License clips without the salesperson using a straightforward pricing model.

Key Features

Easily manage hundreds of new clips.

Saved Search remembers previous filtered searches and auto-adds new clips meeting your search criteria.

Nested Playlists allows brand teams to easily categorize found clips according to their workflow.

Drawer lets users quickly drag & drop clips into Playlists, share with teammates, & download en masse.

Why It Matters

A powerful licensing platform supports creators, consumers, and brand teams.

CREATORS

earn passive revenue and gain automated copyright protection.

CONSUMERS

view more diverse, less biased, better-curated content.

BRAND TEAMS

gain more creative control over the licensed content they use.

Research + Synthesis

Original Problem Statement

How might Collab address the unmet needs of creators, consumers, and brand teams?

Research

Understand the user.

LISTEN

What are our user’s biggest needs, wants, goals, and questions?

VALIDATE

Does our product roadmap align with user wants & needs?

FRAME

Which problems might Collab address on behalf of our users?

interviews

minutes Each

1:1

sessions

Synthesis

Identify key themes & user insights.

After conducting interviews, shadowing stakeholders, and sampling current workflows, I grouped the data into themes, with more frequent themes visualized larger and smaller themes smaller.

Ideation + Prototyping

Reframed Problem Statement

How might Collab reimagine the content licensing experience?

Our research clearly showed that to address the unmet needs of our users, we needed to focus on the content licensing experience.

Systems Mapping

Visualize the current state.

VALIDATE

Does our product roadmap align with user wants & needs?

INGESTION

Where Collab tags, catalogs, & records newly-submitted clips.

DISTRIBUTION

Where Collab utilizes & monetizes clips for claims, licensing, promo & more.

Copywriting

Define your terms, dammit.

In order to clarify communication across departments and outward to stakeholders, I gathered and published an in-house glossary of content licensing terminology.

Aggregator: A “meme page” or social media account (usually on Instagram) who both brings in and posts UGC.

Also called: Meme Partner, UNCLE Partner

Asset: A reference number associated with a clip inside Video Library II.

Also called: Asset ID

Asset Group: A prefix at the beginning of a clip's title describing who owns the clip. All clips with the same asset group prefix will have the same revenue split.

Claim: The process of asserting ownership of a clip on YouTube on behalf of its owner, usually after it’s been plagarized unlawfully.

Clearance: The process by which Collab tags then accepts or rejects clips into Video Library II.

Client: A brand, media agency, creative studio, or other business entity who licenses content for commercial purposes.

Clip: A user-generated video, up to one minute in length, used to create YouTube compilations.

Collab Clips: Collab’s public-facing, licensing-focused view of Video Library II. Hosted by Veritone.

Compilation: A group of user-generated clips stitched together into a single, minutes-long YouTube video.

Also called: TikTok Compilation, Comp

Content Management System (CMS): A native YouTube tool used to manage digital content.

Dashboard: The central technology hub for Collab, where the team can access user info, payment info, VL, VLII, deals, sales, and creator profit metrics.

Detail Sheet: A list of the content included in a YouTube compilation, usually used by accounting to determine revenue payments..

Library: A subgroup of content within Collab’s platform belonging to a single aggregator.

Licensing Conflict: When multiple parties claim ownership over a single piece of content.

Also called: Licensing Overlap

Managing Partner: A member of the Licensing Team in charge of “managing” an aggregator (aka an “UNCLE Partner”) and their content.

Also called: Licensing Manager, Licensing Member, Account Manager

Meme Partner: A “meme page” or social media account that posts other users’ submitted content.

Also called: Aggregator

Metadata: Information associated with a clip including location, names of people in the clip, tags, licensing history, aggregator source, video context, and other data.

Over The Top (OTT): Streaming service aggregators like Roku and AppleTV.

Partner: Either a Promo Partner or Client depending on the context.

Pirate Channel: Any YouTube channel utilizing & monetizing Collab UGC without Collab’s consent.

Also called: Unauthorized Use Channel

Promo Network: A group of YouTube channels that post and monetize clip compilations using Collab-owned content.

Promo Partner: A social channel (usually YouTube) utilizing and monetizing Collab UGC. (Most Promo Partners start as pirate channels before signing a rev-share deal with Collab.)

Public View: Collab’s secondary public-facing view of Video Library II. Hosted by Collab.

Rights Manager: Software within Facebook where digital content is stored and managed.

Split: The breakdown of revenue share between Collab, promo partners, aggregators, & in some circumstances, the clip owner (expressed in %).

Submitter: An individual who films & owns a clip.

Also called: Creator, Video Owner

Tag: A keyword used to identify and categorize a clip inside a clip library.

UGC: User Generated Content, or any piece of multimedia created and submitted by a lay user in a “spontaneous” context.

Also called: Clip, Viral Clip

UNCLE: (Ultimate New Clip Licensing Engine), A Collab-owned tool for ingesting and clearing user-generated content via a web-based upload form.

User: Anyone with a user account on Collab Dashboard, including Collab employees, promo partners, creators, aggregators, and media buyers/researchers.

Video: Either a Clip or a Compilation depending on the context.

Video ID: the list of letters and numbers after “v=” in a YouTube video’s URL.

Video Library (VL): The first iteration of Video Library, used in limited circumstances due to missing features in Video Library II.

Video Library II (VL2): The Collab-owned repository for all creator content, including UNCLE-submitted clips, creator clips, and legacy Vine content.

Also called: Video Library, VL2.0

Watermark: The small logo and handle affixed on top of all downloaded TikTok clips, usually appearing in the corner of a clip’s frame.

Product Strategy

Make sense of how your users experience their problems.

I took time out to wrap my head around how my user experiences the complexity of the licensing process and ideated on how we might intervene or redesign the system entirely.

Product Strategy II

Identify specific problems to solve for.

Lost and/or forgotten UGC

Incomplete clip metadata

Slow, high touch client relationships

Tight content delivery bottlenecks

Ambiguous platform branding

Vague licensing agreements

Bloated content libraries

Poor content discovery tools

Tedious clip licensing tracking

Limited client and partner bandwidth

Stakeholder Workshopping

Co-create with key stakeholders.

I designed and led co-creation design workshops with stakeholders at 3 different levels of the org to ideate on features and generate buy in. Then, we compared notes across workshops to help prioritize features.