YouTube wants more magazine partners. And as Jordan Hoffner, head of Premium Content Partnerships for the Google-owned video sharing site, mentioned to me after his keynote presentation at the Magazine Publishers Association’s 24/7 Digital Media conference, it wants more broadcast, cable and radio deals as well. Earlier this month, YouTube held two days of high-level meetings with ad agencies and marketers, including a mini-upfront presentation closed to the press. As YouTube builds up its ad services, the company has been on something of a goodwill tour the past few weeks. So, given the audience, Hoffner tailored his talk to an industry that’s been growing more accustomed to the web as print continues to struggle. Making his pitch, he promised magazines a large audience, engagement and a new avenue to sell a magazine’s brand and extend its advertising: “You control the ad inventory, not us. You off-load that inventory to us, at a discount, we all want to make money, but you control it.” He did admit that it will still take time to work out the standards for ad formats. But once that happens, “it will be easy to make money.” As for how magazines can gain a toehold in the online video realm, Hoffner offered some pointers both in his presentation and during our conversation afterward:

-- More personality: Rule number one is don’t just put a camera out during a photo shoot. Video thrives on personalities, not just narratives, so make your editors a star, not just a background part of the storyline. He then showed an example of Seventeen’s coverage of a recent Victoria’s Secret Fashion show. It had an editor, a personality, it had information. However, beware the competition: namely, a 24-year-old from Kentucky named William Sledd, a self-fashioned fashionista who opens his video reports with “Hey, b*tches.” Sledd was YouTube’s 12-th most subscribed of all time, then the video site made him a YouTube partner and he’s now the sixth most subscribed partner. Bravo snapped him up and he’s now becoming a brand in his own right. 

-- Competition: I asked Hoffner about how magazines are taking advantage of an area where print should have been weaker against the resources of broadcast companies. Because magazines don’t have the traditions associated with video that broadcast does, it does stand an even chance—but that doesn’t mean it stands a better-than-even chance: “Online video is flattening the playing field, allowing any entity within or outside the sector to build an audience. You don’t have to wait for anybody to greenlight anything or deal with the closed environment of a schedule. But we’re saying that to everyone - we’ve been talking to the broadcasters for a year.  We continue to talk to cable, radio, every single one, anybody who has video.”