A topic I’ve tackled several times here at Mashable has been the question of Hulu versus YouTube in terms of their advertising strategies. My friend Frederic Lardinois over at ReadWriteWeb brought the topic today in reference to news from the Financial Times regarding the revenue of the two video business units.
In the past, though, tons of bloggers have taken potshots at YouTube for not realizing the potential of the $1.65 billion investment by Google. One of the more recent times I got on this particular merry-go-round was back in June in response to Mark Cuban, who said that Hulu was in danger of roundly kicking YouTube’s ass in terms of viewership and monetization. Back then, as they do now, the traffic numbers simply tell a different story.
As you can see, back in June through October of this month, Hulu has seen significant gains relative to their current traffic patterns (very likely due to the highly watched election videos and Sarah Palin - watch for this line to drop in December). Compared to YouTube? The difference is still monstrous.
How is it possible, then, that the Financial Times is able to make statements like this:
Neither company breaks out its advertising revenues but Arash Amel, analyst at Screen Digest, forecasts that in 2008 YouTube will generate about $100m in the US, compared with about $70m at Hulu. Next year both sites will generate about $180m in the US, he says. YouTube currently earns around half of its revenues in the US, while Hulu has not yet launched internationally.
Setting aside any quibbles we may have with their estimates, for a moment, very simply put - the Hulu sales team is lightyears ahead of what’s being done at Google.
Aren’t Advertisers Just Scared of YouTube?
That’s the phrase that pays when pundits and analysts come together to talk about monetization efforts on UGC video. Frederic mentioned it in his writeup. Henry Blodgett said something similar when he deigned to advise Google to “throw in the towel” on YouTube. The issue doesn’t have anything to do with advertiser readiness to throw down with the money, and more to do with the limited avenues to do so.
Just as a proof-of-concept on this theory, give yourself a five minute limit to figure out how to put an ad on the side-bar on a Google search result. Even if you don’t know where to start, you should get there with four minutes to spare, assuming you know how to … you know … type a Google query.
Now try the same thing with YouTube.
Not so easy, is it? If you’re lucky, on your third or fourth search query, you’ll turn up this page, which YouTube dubs it’s online media kit. If you have the patience, you can spend about a half-hour watching Googlers tell you how awesome it is to advertise on YouTube, complete with some product manager playing with his plastic dinosaurs.
This is what I’m talking about. If you actually watch these videos, you get the picture that YouTube is running advertisements on only a fraction of those gazillions of page-views and video views. In fact, they only run ads on videos that participate in the “Partner Program,” a program not easy to figure out how to join, either.
Just think of the money YouTube could make if they ran just a stupid little text-based AdSense unit on every page on YouTube. We started running through this intellectual exercise the last time this topic came up here - we determined that YouTube needed to monetize (generously) 1% of their traffic to to thoroughly trounce Hulu.
It’s easy to see here that the same minds that brought us search ads aren’t working on what’s at YouTube, otherwise they’d have this problem licked by now. For further proof, take a gander at your AdWords account, and try to find the button that allows you to advertise on YouTube. I’ll save you some time - it isn’t there, not even next to the “advertise on radio” or “advertise on TV” links.
Hulu Doesn’t Have a Easy Advertiser Form Either. How Are They Doing So Well?
That’s because they don’t need one. As Blodget notes in his write-up, Hulu gives more money back to it’s partners than YouTube does with theirs. What Blodget fails to mention is that this is a pointless statistic, since Hulu is essentially a puppet entity for News Corporation and NBC Universal.
This means that they don’t really need to rely on an in-house sales team as YouTube does, at least not throughout the year. They do the bulk of their big name, high dollar selling at what’s called the “upfronts” every year. Millions of dollars trade hands after the May sweeps at these star-studded events, and YouTube hasn’t made inroads to tap into this market.
If they sold at the upfronts, it isn’t like it would land them the type of money Hulu’s getting. Even the most watched content on YouTube still doesn’t have the international brand recognition of your average show on the WB. Simply put, the TV networks still have decades of brand recognition built up, and YouTube is technically still a toddler.
As Soon as Google and YouTube Start Playing to Their Strengths…
Here’s the point I’m driving at - YouTube has been doing things right in almost every category so far when it comes to growing the brand and and traffic to the site.
They have a lumbering behemoth in terms of traffic, and it looks to me like they’re trying to outlast some dinosaurs of Old Media just long enough so that some of these pesky copyright issues outmode themselves (either by these Old Media companies dying off themselves, or their grasp of New Media catching up with reality). That’s frankly the only explanation I can think of behind why they’d not treat their YouTube traffic like every other type of traffic contained within the Google family.
Playing to their weaknesses, and by that I mean trying to compete with Hulu and other studio produced aggregators head on… it’s akin to looking for the golden needles in the haystack, instead of feeding all that hay into the gold-spinning wheel they have sitting in the back.
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Hulu: News Corp’s YouTube Rival Gets a NameHappy Holidays Hulu Style: 2500 InvitesThe Daily Poll: Your Predictions for HuluHulu - Still Not That Fun If You’re In EuropeHulu Search Now in Embeds: Complete, Distributed VideosNo, YouTube is Still Kicking Hulu’s AssHulu Invites
read full story of "YouTube is Fighting Hulu with Both Hands Tied Behind Their Back"
NewsJunk, Dave Winer’s slightly more than errant weekend project, has been shuttered. I wrote up NewsJunk here at Mashable shortly after it’s launch back in June. From his blog:
Now that the election was almost two weeks ago, we’re winding down newsjunk.com. It was an interesting experiment, but it didn’t achieve the biggest goal I had for it, not very many people used it. Not enough to justify continuing to do it.
He also mentioned that the tech.NewsJunk variant had ceased operation, mainly because his “heart wasn’t in it,” and he just doesn’t “care much these days about tech news.”
I felt there was a vacuum in the flow of political news, one site whose mission was to be a “briefing book” on a single topic for people who wanted to be more or less completely informed. I feel we accomplished that much for the election, and as one of the editors of the site (there were three others) — just reading all the news also had tremendous value for me. On this one topic, I was pretty close to fully informed, or as fully informed as you could be through news and blogging.
As I noted in that write-up, the launch was probably a bit stilted for a number of reasons relating to partisan politics. Chiefly, the project was architected and executed by Dave himself, and Dave has never made any secret of his partisanship. That combined with the fact that in the early first few days the site was making the rounds, all the articles were very liberally slanted may have turned off a lot of folks who were looking for an aggregator or news-at-a-glance, rather than yet another biased view of the news.
For that matter, while the bias situation certainly improved, the spartan design of the site never seemed to. The site seemed to bill itself as something more than an aggregator, but never rose to that occasion. Disscussion capabilities (powered by Disqus, at one point) were stripped from the site, and it wound up looking like a slightly less flashy version of the Drudge report.
All this begs the question, then: is there a market for a linkblog anymore? I recently launched a public-facing linkblog of my own, and recent news from Matt Drudge suggests that the activity is as popular now as it has ever been, with 30 million unique visitors on election day alone. For that matter, what is Boing-Boing (one of the most popular blogs on the Internet) but a very pretty linkblog?
I suspect that a linkblog has the potential to still do quite well, even in the face of tools like FriendFeed and Twitter rising in popularity. The key is representing it as such. Most of us, when we were pitched on NewsJunk, expected an alternative to Memeorandum, not Dave Winer’s linkblog. In fact, I imagine that something pitched as “Dave Winer’s Linkblog” would have been a lot more successful than NewsJunk ended up.
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:NewsJunk: Fast-Breaking Political News (for Obama-maniacs)Jangl Calls the Whole Thing Off; JaJah Reaps the BenefitsYahoo! Mash Has Been QuashedMuxtape to Stop Being a MixtapeOld Media Deathrace: Newspapers Nose AheadRumors of the Death of Jangl were Greatly ExaggeratedWhitePages to Acquire Snapvine, After Turning Down Jangl
You can always tell when the weekend is approaching. If it isn’t Twitter getting killed, it’s podcasting dying, death of blogs, slaughter of the record labels or one or more form of Heritage media. It’s honestly quite difficult to top it every week. On the one hand, we bloviators have generally no compunctions re-using the same media type, but for it to really generate a respectable bitchmeme, you’ve got to really be creative.
Steve Rubel, well known for predicting economic doom and gloom due to over-investment in technology, this week predicts the death of all tangible media.
Steve says “by January 2014 I will wager that in the US almost all forms of tangible media will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct,” including (but not limited to) software, books, video games, newspapers, CDs, and DVDs.
Once again, Steve’s penchant for hyperbole gets him in trouble. Certainly, there will be a sharp decline in the usage of a lot of the media we still purchase to this day, and for a lot of the categories of physical media he alludes to, I expect them to disappear altogether a whole lot sooner. But all tangible media eliminated? That is something that won’t happen until we’ve as a race technologically transcended the need for human bodies.
Video Games
Steve cites systems like XBox live, and the advent of their online only markeplace for UGC content as evidence the death of video games in their physical format. The problem comes in when you consider the size of your typical video game can be between 4 gigabytes and 34 gigabytes. On your base level Internet connection, the download times start at six hours, and end at three days.
Even if you have one of those brand spanking new Comcast or FiOS connections, you’re still looking at least a couple hours. None of that takes into account those cute bandwidth caps all the operators have decided were such good ideas recently.
Newspaper and Music
He doesn’t get much argument on this one from me. Music, in physical form, is more or less dead. Physical record shops are a rarity, and the record labels continue to pursue self-destructive business models (suing your customers and their 12-year-old children is not a winning marketing move).
Similarly, newspapers around the world and across the country refuse to take drastic enough actions to adapt to life in the digital age. Those that understand that the future is online don’t do enough with organization to adapt to producing content for the web environment, and the rest of the industry is still in denial.
These are examples of industries that will not transition to digital media, but be replaced by a new guard that has the will and ambition to create viable solutions in this arena
Books
As dozens of Rubel’s commentors noted, there might be a transformation of the book business to a mostly online model, but it will never make the full transition. Books in many of their various forms and genres are considered collectible. Some commentors had other protests:
“I like having the artifacts of my reading around me to decorate the house. I’m in my 40s, though, so perhaps future generations will have no such nostalgia for tangible media artifacts.”
“I like being able to flip through an atlas and a few large picture books, something I can’t do on Kindle. These provide very different experiences than Google Maps and a Flickr photo album.”
I think that innovations in eBook technology will make the format so popular that this will be a moot point, but it’s almost impossible to put a date on when this will happen on a broad scale. There is so much that needs to be right about the device, from user experience on down to business model. Kindle is the closest we have at the moment, and I’m really excited about what’s promised by the PlasticLogic, but there’s no telling how the general public will receive it.
TV and Movies
We’re getting closer and closer to a world where physical media and even the traditional distribution methods are superflous, and no longer needed. The primary limitations in place that prevent a full on replacement of network TV, cable TV and the Hollywood studio and distribution system lay in monetization and, of course, bandwidth limitations.
It wouldn’t be fair to cite Blu-Ray statistics for a fair estimation of your average size, since many pundits think that Blue-Ray adoption rates indicate it won’t take hold as a standard before it become obsolete. If you take into account the standard size of a regular DVD movie, you’re still looking at average download times of five to seven hours for most broadband subscribers.
Timeshifting, media RSS, podcasting, and downsampling all can help to bridge this gap, but it will all be meaningless until someone is able to create some sort of set-top box for the living-room that people will actually want to use on a regular basis. This, in my opinion, won’t happen until the device makers in this space start to pay attention to the types of content out there and the ways that people like to consume their digital content.
I’ve been imagining this moment is just around the corner for at least the last five years. At this point, I’m starting to give up hope they’ll ever understand.
Given these factors, we won’t see the elimination of the physical media for movies for quite a while (with the outside chance that some device maker could have an epiphany tomorrow).
So, Could It Happen? Could It Happen by 2012?
Yeah, maybe. Maybe if …
eBook manufacturers absolutely nail the perfect combination of form, function and business model. Oh, and Oprah has to keep plugging it on a regular basis…
… the recording industry continues down it’s self-destructive business model…
… the New York Times goes out of business …
… device manufacturers finally read one of my articles about “the veg-factor” …
… and the cable and telco companies decide to lift bandwidth caps and finish building out a real broadband network for America.
Quite honestly, I’d love to believe that all this could happen in the next two years or so. I just don’t see it happening, though.
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:The End of the Music Industry in 2008RIAA’s Sacrificial Lamb Appeals Damning Court RulingHow Big Media Can Beat P2P and Make a Killing in the RecessionDon’t Send Bac’n: Use TwitterSearchThe RIAA Will Die in 2008The Case of Facebook v SlickCashIs Social Advertising a Safe Haven for Marketing Budgets?
read full story of "The Death of Tangible Media is a Little Murky"
Right now, as per usual, California is burning. The current catastrophe is dubbed the “Tea Fires,” and like many crisises in recent months, is being very well documented by social media tools like Twitter, Flickr, blogs and through the various Google Maps mashups.
I remember the earthquake that occurred a little over a year ago felt in San Francisco. Twitter was new to most of us, and Pete and I were the only two at Mashable on it yet. He and I were shocked and amazed at the volume, accuracy and rapidness of the data being provided on Twitter.
While the data was available almost instantly on Twitter, we were able to get a post up on the data within about ten minutes or so. The local news lagged behind Mashable coverage by about a half hour, and it wasn’t reported on cable news for another hour or two.
I later mused that it would be grand if there were some way to better track the data and make it useable for journalistic purposes, since shortly after news spread of the event, the data came in much quicker than it could be viewed and digested.
CrisisWire is a solution to that problem.
The site is a “self-aggregating website” that pulls information in not only from Twitter, but a variety of sources, including blog posts, photos, and videos. The site was launched yesterday evening, which site founder Nate Ritter tells us was purely coincidental in it’s timing with the Santa Barbara Tea Fire.
“During a disaster people spend valuable time searching the internet and waiting for the media to report on their city, their neighborhood, their street,” Nate told us. “While main stream media serves a vital role during disasters, it is impossible to update the population on everything that is happening during a crisis.”
He went on to explain that CrisisWire bridges this gap by being a sort of personal “situation room.”
It’s a clever idea that has been tried several ways. The layout and presentation of the data on CrisisWire is more suited to the flash event, as opposed to some other similar attempts at this idea that are maybe more ideally suited towards ongoing coverage (we’ve seen a large number of these attempts during the various campaign coverage sites in the last several months - I’ll spare you screenshot comparisons, since most of us are still trying to move on with our lives after politics).
The layout to the site is still a bit spartan, but the information is there, and the updates seem fairly up to the minute. If you’re affected by or interested in following the Tea Fires, I suggest giving it a spin to see if it might be one of those sites you keep bookmarked… just in case.
He explained the concept and vision in a bit more depth to the team at Refresh San Diego earlier last month.
read full story of "CrisisWire: Your Aggregate Source for a Catastrophe"
A concept in video advertising has been bubbling up amongst the professionals I’ve been listening to over the last six months, one that makes a lot of sense and is already in use by several successful podcasters, but one that is rarely described explicitly and definitely lacks a cute buzzword-y name, at least as far as I’ve seen.
Most advertising in video and audio media is treated separately from any other content, text or otherwise. Most blogs and news organizations that regularly (or irregularly) produce and feature video and audio content don’t monetize it at all. Those that do monetize it either rely on remnant advertising methods or sell by CPM, and are often discouraged when production costs outpace the sales returns for the content being created.
I’ve spoken here before many times about the value of sponsorship models for all forms of online content, and their inherent superiority over metrics-based advertising for publishers. The topic has come up a few times when we’ve discussed different ways to monetize Twitter, particularly in the context of making money from a personal brand, rather than trying to look at the content as monetizable inventory:
Folks like Louis Gray and Robert Scoble have been able to launch entire Web 2.0 niches just by describing a problem, and then subsequently promoting a company or set of developers that work to solve those issues. Those are just two names I’m intimately familiar with within the hundreds of Twitter users that have several thousand or more subscribers. Twitter should be striking deals with these users and splitting the cash with them.
And I spoke even more recently about the idea of sponsorship in the context of online video when I explored some of the hidden reasons behind Revision3’s recent cuts:
For a real world example, why is it, do you think, that Cisco signed on to sponsor the Mashable Conversations video podcast (one with zero subscribers at the time when they signed the deal) before we’d ever put out an episode? Why do you think Seagate continues to sponsor Robert Scoble’s endeavors, despite the fact that he doesn’t have the distribution of larger blogs like us? The answer is the same in both cases - those advertisers want to have their name associated with the brands they’re buying into.
When you compare the budgets spent on brand sponsorship to metrics based ads on the very same show, the value to the publisher is clear - sponsorship is the way to go, as it can swing the money dial upwards easily by between a factor of 10 and 100.
With a Difference Like That, Doesn’t Advertiser Value Suffer?
Advertiser value, in theory, should go up. The reality of sponsorship situations is that they’re chosen much more carefully, and with much more manual interference. A company simply isn’t going to drop what can easily be a six figure sum on a well known publisher’s brand without some human interaction taking place. Conversely, buys that take place on remnant video inventory or CPC text and image inventory can easily exceed that value, and most of the time it’s handled primarily by automated systems.
Perhaps in a coming age, these sponsorship transactions will also take place by sophisticated automated means (and when that day comes, a lot of folks in the sales and marketing business will be fearful of their jobs), but I rather doubt it.
These types of sponsorships are generally made because careful consideration has been made by both the savvy publisher and the savvy marketer to identify where the audience for the product or service and the content being monetized coincide closely.
For a real example of what I’m talking about, simply look no further than our daily sponsored feature at Mashable, the Sun Startup Review. The content and the sponsorship is strictly textual in nature, but the concept here is the same. Sun decided that a key target for their future business lay in the startup sector, and Mashable’s brand is inextricably tied to the startup business, so thus a sponsor-publisher relationship made sense.
Sun could have simply bid on a text ad on the side bar, or even purchased one of the more expensive graphic ads we sell, but they were looking to shape their image to our audience beyond what may or may not be glimpsed when a reader scrolls through our pages looking for content.
In terms of online video, these concepts are no different, it’s just that the added value of the sponsorship becomes much more stark and visible.
New Media Beats Heritage Media Moguls at Their Own Game
Although I’ve vocally disagreed with Brightcove’s media distribution strategies from time to time, their Vice President Adam Berrey very succinctly made this point about publishers with respect to how they work to monetize their video efforts at a recent roundtable discussion hosted by Beet.TV.
The point that he’s driving at there is that it’s the audience you’re selling, and not the content. This is true for any media organization, and it’s an important distinction for those who are trying to sell any New Media inventory to learn and learn well.
Put another way, New Media publishers hold in their grasp the holy grail that moguls of the olden days spent millions, if not billions, to acquire - the ability to sell against multiple media types. Congress won’t ever pass legislation to break up a media monopoly by an online website in an effort to prevent them from utilizing video, audio, images and text on their website. On the other hand, congressional hearings are routinely held whenever mergers and acquisitions take place that consolidate too much media in the hands of too few publishers.
Just In Case You Need a Refresher on the Value of Video
Case study after case study shows how video and audio are more valuable than simple text content. The old standby study I like to cite was published two years ago by Ken Rutkowski, and it documented the simply amazing response rates to online video advertisements.
It found that of those that watched a video advertisement online, 45% had some sort of measurable response from the ad, and 31% followed through on the advertisement enough to go to the company website. Of those that watched the advertisement, 16% ended up making a purchase, and separate 13% either signed up for a free trial or ordered a subscription.
Plainly, if under half watch the advertisement, and then 45% of those folks respond, you’ve got around a 25% viewer to response ratio, a not insignificant number. Likewise, of all the folks that will view a video, 12.9% will end up buying the product, requesting a free trial, or ordering a subscription.
At this point, evangelism for online video response rates is almost preaching to the choir, no matter who it is you’re talking to. The reasons behind it, particularly for the web savvy, are almost common sense.
A video advertisement defeats most common forms of web ad-blindness.
Standard video and audio CPM base rates for even remnant ads are far higher than that of text.
Video and audio are more memorable and often easier venues for conveying complex ideas, and thus …
… better at creating a lasting impression of advertiser brands, offers, products and services.
The formulas for CPMs and CPCs are great starting points, but shouldn’t be set in stone. When a publisher is looking to solidify the sponsorship relationship, they should treat all inventory (be it audio, video or text) as ala carte. The key is, for both advertisers and those who sell ads, to wrap your head around the concept of what a video or audio ad is worth, what your brand and audience is worth, and how to convey that to those who want to partner with you to reach your audience.
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Google Testing AdSense for VideosThe CommunityNext::Monetize Event is Coming Up!Broadband Enterprises Partners with ScanScout for Video Overlay AdsNew Media Expo 2008 Conference Ticket GiveawayLiveRail is a Video Ad Distribution NetworkFor Your Imagination Gets Another $1M for Internet Video ProductionYouTube IPO?
read full story of "Online Video Publishers Should Look to Monetize Audience, Not Video"
Wizzard Media announced this Monday their third-quarter results, which continued along their impressive track record of sustained growth for this year. Wizzard, the publicly traded podcast network, is still not in the black but continues to bring in more revenue than most other networks could dream of doing.
The year to date reported revenues that exceeded last year’s by 29% at $4.6 million as of September 30th. The Q3 revenues alone sat at $1.5 million, only a 4% increase year over year, yet still impressive in what has been a generally unimpressive quarter so far for the general economy.
Growth is slowing slightly at Wizzard, but they continue to close the gap towards profitability, and it’s on track to at least match last year’s performance in terms of revenue.
As reports of the economic slow down finally hitting the online advertising sector have surfaced, it’s a good thing that Wizzard has appeared to have significantly cut their costs, with their net losses having outpaced revenue and dropped by 89% since last year.
Enough With the Numbers. What Does it Mean?
As I said last week when Revision3 announced their performance last week, 2009 will show us which business model is superior in terms of online multimedia content providers.
The two companies represent two competing forms of content monetization for today’s podcast only content. Revision3, like other niche outfits such as FunnyOrDie, is primarily a creative force, putting the bulk of their resources into show development, on-air talent and production value. Wizzard represents the other side of the industry, like YouTube and others, who act primarily as a hosting outfit and put their resources into developing unique and innovative ways to monetize the content created by those who aren’t directly employed by the company.
Neither model is particularly cheap, or clearly superior on the face of it, but running a network isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. The aggregation route has the potential to be the superior distance runner, since they’re in the business of developing and utilizing monetization technology for massive amounts of content, which after a point will go down in costs. Meanwhile, independent creative networks will continue to have significant production overhead, since on-air talent, when it’s successful, can only go up in cost.
Logic would then dictate that since content must continue to be created, yet won’t be most efficiently monetized by strictly in-house teams and technology, that the only way creative networks can succeed in the long term would be by either folding into or partnering with larger aggregation networks.
I think that as 2009 rolls in, we’ll see some of this start to happen with the recognizable names in this space. We’re starting to see some of this with the larger heritage studios and labels biting the bullet and partnering with YouTube. This trend will continue and possibly accelerate due to larger economic motivations.
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Wizzard Media Joins the NavyWizzard Launches Branded Podcast PlayerWizzard Media Publicly Traded on AMEXWizzard Releases Video Using Adobe Media PlayerWizzard Media Joins Forces with TubeMogulWizzard Sees First Quarter Revenue Grow 130%Podcast: A Conversation with Wizzard’s Rob Walch
read full story of "Wizzard Media Continues Impressive Growth"
Wizzard Media announced this Monday their third-quarter results, which continued along their impressive track record of sustained growth for this year. Wizzard, the publicly traded podcast network, is still not in the black but continues to bring in more revenue than most other networks could dream of doing.
The year to date reported revenues that exceeded last year’s by 29% at $4.6 million as of September 30th. The Q3 revenues alone sat at $1.5 million, only a 4% increase year over year, yet still impressive in what has been a generally unimpressive quarter so far for the general economy.
Growth is slowing slightly at Wizzard, but they continue to close the gap towards profitability, and it’s on track to at least match last year’s performance in terms of revenue.
As reports of the economic slow down finally hitting the online advertising sector have surfaced, it’s a good thing that Wizzard has appeared to have significantly cut their costs, with the slow-down of their net losses having outpaced revenue and dropped by 89% since last year.
Enough With the Numbers. What Does it Mean?
As I said last week when Revision3 announced their performance, 2009 will show us which business model is superior in terms of online multimedia content providers.
The two companies represent two competing forms of content monetization for today’s podcast only providers. Revision3, like other niche outfits such as FunnyOrDie, is primarily a creative force, putting the bulk of their resources into show development, on-air talent and production value. Wizzard represents the other side of the industry, like YouTube and others, who act primarily as a hosting outfit and put their resources into developing unique and innovative ways to monetize the content created by those who aren’t directly employed by the company.
Neither model is particularly cheap, or clearly superior on the face of it, but running a network isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. The aggregation route has the potential to be the superior distance runner, since they’re in the business of developing and utilizing monetization technology for massive amounts of content, which after a point will go down in costs. Meanwhile, independent creative networks will continue to have significant production overhead, since on-air talent, when it’s successful, can only go up in cost.
Logic would then dictate that since content must continue to be created, yet won’t be most efficiently monetized by strictly in-house teams and technology, that the only way creative networks can succeed in the long term would be by either folding into or partnering with larger aggregation networks.
I think that as 2009 rolls in, we’ll see some of this start to happen with the recognizable names in this space. We’re starting to see some of this with the larger heritage studios and labels biting the bullet and partnering with YouTube. This trend will continue and possibly accelerate due to larger economic motivations.
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Wizzard Media Joins the NavyWizzard Launches Branded Podcast PlayerWizzard Media Publicly Traded on AMEXWizzard Releases Video Using Adobe Media PlayerWizzard Media Joins Forces with TubeMogulWizzard Sees First Quarter Revenue Grow 130%Podcast: A Conversation with Wizzard’s Rob Walch
read full story of "Wizzard Media Continues Impressive Growth"
With a sensational headline like that, you might think that we had a hold of some stellar inside sources at the FBI. In fact, though, it’s commonly available information you can find at a number of blogs (and very likely in your very own Twitter account.
Kevin Rose set up a Twitter account yesterday pretending to be his cold, which amazingly accrued during the previous 24 hours over 787 followers:
@kevinscold: hanging out w/@kevinrose, making his head hurt and nose stuffed up… hopefully he’ll take me to @digg tomorrow.
How is this felony computer hacking? As both we and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick have explained over the last few month, a very dangerous precedent is being set in the trial of Lori Drew in the aftermath of teenage Megan Meier’s cyberbullying and subsequent suicide. Kevin’s actions in creating a fake Twitter profile for his recent cold mirror the actions Lori Drew is being accused of doing on MySpace.
Back in May I noted what a stretch it was to call the act of creating a fake profile on MySpace “accessing a protected system.”
Only in the biggest stretch in the sense of the word can you call MySpace a protected system, especially when what all Drew did was click on a very prominent sign-up button, and then enter false information for the personal data.
Mike Massnick noted that developments have occurred in the case yesterday:
While the judge in the case decided not to dismiss the case, he apparently has decided that evidence of Meier’s suicide will not be allowed in the case. This, at least, is a good decision. The lawsuit itself has nothing to do with the suicide, and allowing it to be used in front of a jury would likely lead to the same emotional response that resulted in the original charges being filed. Of course, with the case getting so much widespread publicity, you’d have to imagine that many jury members will already be familiar with what happened in the case.
The fact that so many potential jurors will already be familiar with the story is exactly the problem with the judge deciding to let stand the case, despite the strong reasons for dismissal. This means that even though said jurors will likely be instructed not to take the mitigating circumstances of Megan’s death into consideration, they will.
This will set an unfortunate precedent for the future. It’s important to note that Lori isn’t being prosecuted for what she did with the fake MySpace profile, only that she set one up.
I don’t think that realistically those of us that set up a joke profile like Kevin’s can expect prosecution for every frivolous act. On the other hand, it does set up the dangerous situation in which we’re all liable for criminal prosecution at any moment. By making innocuous actions criminal, it completely devalues and blinds law enforcement to actual online criminal behavior.
In an age where anyone’s free speech becomes illegal, only unpopular speech will be prosecuted. In other words - was harassing a young woman and taunting her to the levels of extreme emotional distress immoral and wrong? You’d be hard pressed to find someone to say no to that. Does that mean that the law should be perverted so that she can face justice by way of the legal system? I say no - the cost to all of us is simply too great.
We’ve all created fake profiles similar to what Kevin did yesterday, and if Lori Drew’s prosecutors have their way, we could all see headlines like the one above with our names in Kevin’s spot, and the convictions will be a lot more easy for prosecutors to achieve.
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:MySpace Bullies: These People are ScumLori Drew Indicted over Megan Meier CyberbullyingShould There Be a Law Against Asshats Like Me? [smcb]Kevin Rose: Mobile Web Is The Next Big ThingDiggers Revolt Over New Comment System (Resolved?)YA DIGG? Yahoo Buying Digg, AllegedlyUStream to Play Host to Digg Townhall
read full story of "Kevin Rose Allegedly Guilty of Felony Computer Hacking"
Kevin Rose’s podcast network powerhouse Revision3 announced their financial returns for 2008, and they paint a rosey picture for online video. It also helps fill in a little bit of the gaps I and the rest of us were left wondering about following the cancellation of several shows on the network earlier in October.
The revenue for the network as a whole was reported to have tripled in 2008, though the press release doesn’t have any hard numbers as to what the total dollar amount was. Oddly, and unlike most media networks, rather than talking specifically about viewership and download numbers, Rev3 highlighed the amount of watching going on by quantifying it in minutes of “viewer engagement.”
It’s definitely a term that’s being used to obfuscate the amount of actual viewership taking place. Given how they seem to sell their ads (pre-rolls, post-rolls, host-read ads and certain affiliate relationships), it might be a more telling and insightful number to report exactly how many episodes viewed there were, rather than saying simply that they had achieved 140 million minutes of engagement monthly.
“Despite today’s tumultuous economic climate, Revision3 is making huge strides, dramatically increasing both viewership and revenue,” said CEO Jim Louderback in a statement today. “Like everyone else, we’re being cautious in how we approach 2009, but we anticipate continued growth over the coming months.”
They highlighted quite a few of their 60 advertising partners, including the Air Force, EA, Sony, Anheuser-Busch, Dolby, Virgin America, Go Daddy, Zune, Dr. Pepper, Carmex, Adobe, Microsoft and Axe.
The ones that are most prevalently advertising on the network these days are GoDaddy, Netflix, Michelob and Becks beer, GoToMeeting, and GoToMyPC, as we mentioned last month. Most of these seem to be affiliate style relationships, which definitely leaves the network with a lot of head room to grow.
2009 will see the online video market’s battle of the business models.
Revision3 is definitely one of the horses I’ve been watching run the video network race since their start in the business, and I’ve always had an affinity to its founders and many of their on-air talent. They’ve done a good job of pulling together a combination of recognizable faces, interesting genres and engaging shows. Because they’ve approached the business as creatives focused on video rather than aggregators with a broad-stroke approach (like Wizzard Media), they’ve an uphill battle on two fronts.
The first difficult front is that of content and audience monetization. Their application of commercialization has been uneven so far, though it seems to have markedly improved since the hire of Jim Louderback as CEO. Since the majority of the team is so focused on the creative side rather than the monetization side, this is to be expected, to a certain extent.
The other side of the business that’s an uphill battle for Rev3 has been the high cost of doing business as compared to a lot of the other players in their business. Aggregators like Wizzard don’t have to front the costs of production, only that of distribution. That’s why they’re able to sustain their business off the same type of advertisments that Rev3 may have a hard time breaking even with.
This isn’t to say that Wizzard has a superior business model. I think that if you talk to the business side over at Wizzard, they’ll readily admit that on average, the shows being produced at Revision3 are superior to what they host - that’s to be expected. Wizzard hosts tens of thousands of producers, whereas Revision3 hosts tens of producers.
That’s why Revision3 has made moves to crowdsource some of their production, but at it’s heart Rev3 is still a production house (not an aggregator). During the tough economic times we’re now facing for the forseeable future, it’s going to be a battle of the business models to see which one is boud for success.
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Revision3 Expands Partnership with Blip.tv for Content DistributionLayoffs Hit Revision3Revision3 Branded Miro Player, Now Available for DownloadWine Library TV Moving to Revision3Revision3 Signs Transpera to Power Mobile VideoThe Digg Reel - Best of Digg VideosRevision3 Revisions. New Design Revealed Today.
read full story of "Revision3 Reports Tripled Earnings for 2008"
Google Reader today announced the completion of one of their 20% time projects - translation. Google reader is an essential tool in my daily life as a blogger and news consumer, and the ability to consume news from a wide variety and large quantity of sources is only made possible by this tool, so being able to pull in news from other languages will only add to the value for me.
When the announcement was made this evening, the feature had not yet propagated to my account, but as with most updates Google does to their apps, logging out and reloading was required to see the new features.
I must say that I’m rather impressed with how it works. Google translation has recently replaced Babelfish as my go-to service for translation, not necessarily because it’s more accurate (it seems to be stronger on some languages, and weaker on others), but because of the longer list of translatable languages available.
When I applied the translation option to a mixed language ego search feed I have set up in Reader, I actually had to carefully page through each item to try to find the article that was originally in Chinese.
To enable it on any feed you currently have set up, simply click onto that feed so that you’re viewing it directly (not a category/folder view), and then click on the Feed Settings pull down. From there, simply “Translate into my language.”
Might this actually be significant?
Over the years, I’ve found myself in the odd position of having seen my content become very popular overseas, despite the fact that my content is most of the time very centric to the United States. None the less, my personal politics and technology podcast I produced throughout 2007 was far more popular in China and the Middle East, and very recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of my Mashable articles recieve a second life as they make the rounds through the various Chinese news networks.
There’s an undeniable cultural divide between both of the geographic areas I mentioned above and most of the Western world. In terms of the Middle East, the cultural divide is said by many folks smarter than I am to be the cause of the very physical conflict between the US and the Middle Eastern fundamental Islamic culture. In terms of China and the West, there’s very real divides between what our perspectives on freedom are and what theirs are. This is currently being highlighted by Robert Scoble during his China tour, and Paul Glazowski talked a bit about this over the weekend.
So, not to gush too much over what is essentially a minor feature update, but the potential for this very minor feature is that it seamlessly puts content from a much more diverse selection of authors and publishers in the mix, and works to break down the cultural barriers little by little.
Put another way, when I was interviewed over a year ago by Bill Grady on You Are the Guest, we broached this very topic of what the biggest stumbling block there existed between American members of New Media and the burgeoning sectors of New Media in Iraq and Iran, it came down to language. Now that the most widely used tool for reading blogs has the ability to render that stumbling block moot, the fences that existed between the East and the West might start to come down more quickly.
—Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Google Reader Graduates, Launches International VersionsGoogle Translate Now Eats its Own Dog FoodGoogle Reader Gets Search!Google’s AJAX Translation Apps Make You Global, Fast.Microsoft Launches Online Translation ServiceGoogle’s Translation Engine Now LiveNew Google Reader for iPhone: Still Neat, Not Very Social
