12seconds Makes UGC Commercials for Twitter Attention Spans

User-generated commercial contests are a dime a dozen. But what if the people putting on such a contest asked you to put in little to no effort — only a few seconds of work — to enter? That’s the idea behind bootstrapped startup 12seconds.tv’s new “Tweetable video commercial” concept. 12seconds powers video updates, usually from webcams, with a time limit of, yes, 12 seconds. 12seconds — which we broke the story on here at NewTeeVee — aims to be a video version of Twitter, and indeed in its less than a year of existence the site has become sort of a video utility for some Twitter users.

As for the new “12omercials” concept, it’s a full-bore social media concept, where sponsors are looking to have participants start and propagate conversations about their brands. “The idea really came from the need that agencies had to have a ‘Twitter strategy,’” 12seconds co-founder Sol Lipman told us. 12seconds took the idea and ran with it, and its first contest will be with LG this week (after it recovers from a data center outage this morning). Users who make a 12seconds clip about the LG Versa phone will be entered into a sweepstakes (not even a judged contest!) for a trip to Las Vegas.

Lipman didn’t disclose user numbers, but said 12seconds’ users’ Twitter followers (a.k.a. the company’s reach) account for 15 percent of Twitter’s userbase. Since Twitter’s userbase is estimated at 6 million, that leaves 12seconds with a reach of 900,000, and a userbase of far less than that. Alongside the launch of these “12omercials,” the company is enabling some new features for all its videos: in-player web links and user access to analytics.