Social Media Now: CBS and Rolling Stone Go Social

CBS’s Online Video Network Targets Advertisers, Not Audience: One of the big differences between new media circa Web 1.0 and new media circa Web 2.0 is that this time the big boys get it, or at least the big boys get that they need to do something different quickly.

Consider the CBS Interactive Audience Network–a cross-platform programming network announced yesterday. The gist of the plan is for CBS to distribute video content it owns on the Internet wherever and audience may be looking for it—that means AOL, MSN, CNet, Comcast, Joost, Netvibes, just about everywhere EXCEPT YouTube (after all, Viacom, CBS’ sister company, is still suing YouTube).

Henry Blodget credits CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith with smart deal making. Smith, who helped sell YouTube to Google as an investment banker at Allen & Co., really gets it, says Blodget, laying it on thick.  You can decide for yourself about Smith thanks to Staci Kramer’s interview with the man at PaidContent.

After reading the interview  I was left wondering just what’s going to be so interactive about the CBS Interactive Audience Network. It won’t offer wide open VOD. Instead, according to the company “a rotating list within a specified viewing time frame of programming from entertainment, news and sports will be offered.”–sounds like a semi-traditional TV schedule to me. There MAY be sharing and embedding but that will depend on how well those features serve advertisers, Smith tells Kramer. And classic CBS programming will be made available to the extent that its content that CBS owns free and clear (which means, basically CBS News programming).

Maybe the company is just doing a poor job describing the idea, but the CBS Interactive Audience Network sounds to me like it’s being driven more by the sales department than anything else. From the Kramer interview:

“Advertisers deserve mass out of CBS, the largest television network on the planet and we should second that with on line mass.” He offered as a scenario taking a Monday night comedy, then creating an audience for it that’s bigger than the Super Bowl by Friday. Smith: “This is a real chance to make numbers matter and at CBS that is what moves needles.”

It’s hard to imagine what’s in this for the distribution partners. According to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

CBS has been asking to keep 90% of ad revenue generated by its videos; the other 10% would go to distribution partners, according to people familiar with the matter. That payment structure is identical to the one secured by NBC Universal and News Corp. A CBS spokesman declined to comment. A spokesman for the NBC-News Corp. venture wasn’t immediately available to comment.

Maybe those companies have secured that kind of revenue split, maybe not. But at ZDnet Larry Dignan points out that the biggest winner in all this may just be Akamai–which will benefit from serving all this new Internet video the way UPS benefited from e-commerce.

Rex Hammock is skeptical about the whole Internet video thing:

 I think when given an option, people will view programming on those nice, new expensive big-screen HD TVs. (Granted, the programs will be recorded and the commercials zapped, but still, we’ll still need those friendly local affiliates.)

Rex may be correct in the near term but as an investor I wouldn’t be long on the TV station owners. With something like 90% of Americans getting TV through cable and satellite distribution,  local broadcast affiliates have become living anachronisms. And with the ability of programming networks to go direct to consumer over the Net, it looks to me like TV station owners are on the verge of being disintermediated. And who says you can’t watch IP video on a big screen TV?

If you want a gauge of the trend watch political ad spending. Presidential election years are to TV station owners what the Christmas buying season is to retailers, and, with the Feb 5 super primary coming up next year should be a banner one for people selling broadcast ads. But my guess is that it will be the last of these such national election cycles. A comparison of the online political ad spend vs. TV in 2008 and 2012 will tell the tale.

Poking Jann Wenner: Talk about a soft launch, apparently Keith Blanchard, Wenner Media’s executive director for online media told a group of journalism students at NYU that Rolling Stone plans to launch a social network for pop music fans build largely around user created best of lists.

It’s hardly a unique idea. MOG already offers a mix of social networking, social discovery, and traditional editorial together with lots of streamed music. Rolling Stone has a marketing advantage over start ups like MOG, but not much else.

Blanchard plans to launch a separate site that will be a social network for music fans, complete with profiles and the ability to have a say in their “Best of” lists. Blanchard called it the “American Idol version of lists.”

The digerati were quick to pile on the idea well in advance of it being more than a twinkle in Blanchard’s eye. At Mashable Pete Cashmore announces “Rolling Stone Social Network Bound to be Lame”.  Cashmore and others like Michael Arrington at Techcrunch repeat the old saw that Rolling Stone can’t compete in social networking because it’s neither young nor hip like social net audiences are. But Pramit Singh at Mediavedia points out some interesting numbers:

Comscore analysis shows that,
- More than half of Myspace visitors are now 35 and older.
- 71% of the Friendster’s 1 million user base is 35 and above.
- 50% of Facebook users are 25-plus, despite that it has now almost become mandatory for new college and high school students to register there.

Aiming an aging demographic is a smart idea. They have the buyer and stating power, vis-à-vis the fickle younger crowd.

Adult-oriented social networking sites are already up and running, Multiply for example.

Next up: A social network fro Esquire and New Yorker magazines, perhaps?

Gosh I hope so, there are few better reads than the personals in The New York Review of Books!
Link Love:

Twitter trouble
The technology challenge of catastrophic success

Wikia Adds Four More Open Source Magazines

VisiblePath Is A Lot Like LinkedIn, Except It’s Useful

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Social Media Now: The Social Edge, Debating Viacom’s Value to YouTube

It hardly signals the end of the line for social networking hubs like Facebook and MySpace, but it may be the beginning of the end. I’m talking about the potential impact of a Mozilla skunk works project to embed social networking functionality directly in the Web browser.

There’s a lot of buzz among the meme-makers. At Techcrunch Michael Arrington calls it bad news for start ups like Flock with ambitions to build social browsers. That would certainly appear to be the case, particularly since Flock is built on top of Mozilla, although for the moment the window is wide open for socially enabled browsers. Speaking of windows, Microsoft must also be developing similar functionality for Internet Explorer.

At ZDNet Larry Dignan raises an interesting question about the potential impact of social browsers on the economics of social networking hubs:

Another interesting thread will be how this works for big social networking sites that depend on page view growth like MySpace. If I can track all my social contacts in my browser will I visit MySpace?

Technology, functionality and ease of use will ultimately tell the tale of which implementation wins the day. For now the Mozilla effort, called The Coop, is an experiment, existing publicly only as a prototype which I intend to begin playing with today. But as a general matter the more social enabling included in a piece of software, the more valuable and sticky that software becomes to users.

Embedding social networking directly into Web browsers reflects the typical evolutionary path of Internet functionality away from hubs and central servers towards the edge where individuals have greater control over their user experiences. And it’s hardly the only sign of  the decentralization of social networking. Kristen Nicole has a piece at Mashable about OtherEgo.Com–a revamp of the social network formerly known as Rantiq. Kristen identifies the killer app hidden within the new service–the ability for users to make all their social network profiles available in one place–but criticized the company for making the feature hard to find and inconvenient to use:

Surprisingly enough, the ability to add other profiles, OtherEgo’s major differentiator, is not prominent on their site at all. The link to add a profile is rather low key, and any added profiles actually show at the very bottom of the page. Another concern I have is the ability to add anyone’s public profile to your own OtherEgo space by simply inserting the URL. Those things aside, it’s an interesting (but not totally convenient) way to keep your social networks in one place.

On his blog, Internet Outsider, former Wall Street wunderkind Henry Blogett called attention  to a report from Vidmeter suggesting that YouTube’s success is not predicated on copyright infringement. Blodgett draws the following conclusions from the report:

• Traditional media videos make up only a small percentage of YouTube views.
• NBCFoxTube, the hypothetical consortium, even if successful, won’t dent YouTube’s growth.
• Online video viewers usually watch short clips, not full shows.

But Pete Cashmore at Mashable offered a more detailed reading of the report, one that pokes holes in Blogett’s over hyped reading:

Well, bear in mind that since it’s unfeasible to crawl all of YouTube, they stuck with a sample size of 6,725 clips. This was not a random sample - it was taken from the most viewed list. Of those, 9.23% had been removed due to copyright violations, and the removed videos only accounted for 5.93% of video views in the sample. Viacom removed the most clips: about 40% of the videos removed were from Viacom. What’s more, Viacom clips accounted for 2.37% of all videos views counted.

There are lots of ways to interpret this, and we actually think it’s risky to draw conclusions. The thing is, Vidmeter only counted removed clips, since they’re unable to count the total number of copyrighted clips that haven’t been taken down. They also used the most viewed list as a sample, meaning that it’s not necessarily representative of what’s going on elsewhere on the site. And Viacom’s 72 videos in the sample still accounted for about 38 million views.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Pete. The complete report is available here. 

 

 

 

 

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Social Media Now: Can Vid Sharing Start-ups Survive the Clampdown?

From the bad timing department:  today MyToons  , a cartoon-specific video sharing site, takes the wraps off its service which has been in private beta. The site is being pitched as a place where animation pros and fans can share “their creations” not the creations of others, and naturally the company has a DMCA-compliant take down policy. Maybe there are enough pro and semi-pro animators looking interested in an online hub for MyToons to build a sizable community. But there’s no doubt that South Park clips would have been like Miracle-Gro for the start-up.

Meanwhile NBC, which has sent YouTube mixed signals–exploiting the viral impact of Dick in a Box while at the same time sending YouTube a take-down letter–has cut a deal with VMIX, a big-media friendly vid-sharing startup led by Greg Kostello, former exec VP of tech at MP3.com and president of Vivendi-Universal Net Technologies. The NBC channel offers mostly teaser clips for NBC shows as well as original shorts like Zeros, a parody of NBC’s series Heroes. There are YouTube-like tools for sharing, including embedded player code for bloggers.

At VMIX NBC appears to be pursuing the Mark Cuban/BBC model–viewing VMIX as an aggregator that can redirect traffic to NBC’s own sites. Cuban was crowing yesterday about the Viacom suit. But even he noted that the problems with current copyright law is that it exists strictly to advance the financial interests of big corporations at the expense of innovation:

The DMCA Safe Harbors as they are written will not exist for very long. You can bet the same companies that spend tens of millions of dollars to extend copyrights to ridiculous extremes, or that want to push for truly ridiculous things like a Broadcast Flag, or the new Webcast Royalties, will spend whatever it takes to get the law changed to their liking. Just as they have done multiple times before. One thing is certain, our lawmakers and lobbyists are relatively cheap compared to the
dollars at stake here.

Like I wrote yesterday, maybe it’s time to rethink copyright law along the lines of its original intent (to promote the useful arts and sciences) and using limiters other than time to protect the limited interests of creators.

A bigger problem with VMIX is that it force-feeds content into the hands of users giving them the potential to share but not load or alter. Successful social media properties allow users not only to tag or comment on media but also to contribute it. The process of contributing and collaborating is part of what makes social media entertaining to users. A site or service that limits contribution and collaboration is doomed to stepchild status.

Among the flood of predictions surrounding yesterday’s big story, my faves were delivered by Jon Fine at BusinessWeek who offered a numbered list of reasons why Viacom and Google will settle. Here are the first three:

1. No network—or networks—will be able to build a YouTube on their own

2. The ancillary traffic to Viacom clips will always be much greater at YouTube than it would be at any Viacom or Viacom-plus-whoever-site; control as the networks once understood it is over, etc.

3. Thus, it would make sense for Viacom to partner with YouTube, and especially to partner with a company that’s proven adept out of putting a system to target ads around truly massive traffic . . . .hmmmm . . . now who would that be?

 

 

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Social Media Now: Dere Oughta Be a Law!

This isn’t a defense of YouTube. Not a legal defense anyway.

The Viacom/Google suit will revolve around how much control YouTube has over the content posted to it, whether YouTube’s business was deliberately built on copyright infringement, and the nature of the prior negotiations between it & Viacom. If the case reaches the Supreme Court Google will lose.

Maybe Viacom really wants to shut down YouTube. Or maybe we’re witnessing is a public price negotiation, one in which Sumner Redstone just put the hammer down.

Unfortunately the whole matter leaves the most important issue off the table–what to do about the broken state of copyright law in the US.

The Constitutional intent of copyright is , ” . . . to promote the progress of science and useful arts…” by extending copyright protection for a limited time. The idea was to give creators incentive to share original work, then allow other people the ability to built on the work. The time-limited nature of the protection would balance the competing interests of creator and society in a way that would best advance the interests of each.

The first US copyright laws followed the English model. An individual creator could be granted a 14 year copyright, and if he or she lived long enough there could be a 14 year extension. In the mid 1700s the average life expectancy of an adult was 64 years. Creators could protect works for 44% of their lives.

Today copyright extends for the lives of the creators plus 75 years essentially providing a sinecure to corporations who amass copyrights, effectively limiting instead of promoting progress in the useful arts.

Meanwhile people keep doing what they always have done–making stuff and sharing stuff.

Let’s not forget that Google is a big corporate interest in all this. But I wonder if Viacom can actually prove damages. Were ratings down because Daily Show clips were on YouTube? Did ad rates drop? Did the company sell fewer Chapelle Show DVDs?

In other words could it be possible that Viacom’s commercial interest was protected AND something innovative was promoted?

We need copyright laws for the 21st century that protect the rights of creators in ways that continue to spur innovation and time may not be the difference maker anymore.

The thread on Techmeme is predictably enormous. My favorite quickie analysis come from Carlos at Techdirt:

The suit illustrates Viacom’s misunderstanding of the web and YouTube: its claim for $1 billion essentially says that’s the amount of money it thinks it’s missed out on because of YouTube (just to put it in perspective, Viacom’s 2006 revenues were $11.5 billion). That’s pretty ridiculous, and should Viacom’s own video site ever become popular enough to deliver similar viewer stats, the revenues it generates will underline that.

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