Social Media Now: How Much Is Social Media Worth?

We have a couple of indicators this morning about how much a commercial social network can earn, and how inexpensive it is to build a profitable one.

At the top of the market is MySpace. New Corp, which announced earnings yesterday, doesn’t break out MySpace’s numbers in it’s SEC filings but during a conference call with analysts yesterday,  executives confirmed that they expected interactive sales to reach at least $500 million this year, led primarily by MySpace. (FIM also includes Foxsports.com and AmericanIdol.com.)

With nearly 56 million visitors a month, $500 million per year amounts to around 74 cents in revenue per monthly visitor (if all of FIM revenue is attributed to MySpace). We don’t know if MySpace is profitable on an operating basis but perhaps we can infer something from the fact that News Corp doesn’t tell us.

Meanwhile, Techcrunch reports on a company called Tagged. Even at half the scale of MySpace, Tagged’s numbers are substantial–40 million members (half of whom are active) and 1 billion pageviews per month. Furthermore, Tagged CEO Greg Tseng says his company is profitable at $600,000 in monthly revenue. I think that means Tagged is attracting one billion pageviews monthly on an investment of $7 million a year.

Will the commercial social networking business develop on two tracks–with an indie, hits business continually bubbling up from the bottom end?

Look at the current economics of Hollywood comedies, which Jon Gertner brilliantly chronicled in the New York Times Magazine last November:

comedies…tend to have lower physical production costs, since they often don’t require extravagant sets or expensive postproduction work. And if they have low artistic production costs as well (for the cast and directors), they have a kind of jackpot potential that dramas, at least in recent years, have lacked. In other words, even when a comedy doesn’t produce the huge revenues of a blockbuster like ”Harry Potter,” it can help push the returns of a portfolio way up if it is put together in a way similar to ”Little Miss Sunshine” or ”The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” which starred an inexpensive and untested Steve Carell. Such a film will pay off in the theater, on DVD, in television sales — and ultimately contribute to the studio’s catalog. A popular comedy is a valuable piece of intellectual property. If it’s made cheaply, it’s the equivalent of investing early in Google.

Speaking of money, I’m fascinated by Sequoia’s investment in Joost . As Matt Marshall at Venture Beat notes:

Roelof Botha, general partner at Sequoia Capital, led the firm’s investment in Joost. He was also the lead investor in YouTube, a short-length video site — different from Joost, which wants to show full-length video.

Obviously Internet video paid off enormously for Sequoia with YouTube. And by virtue of its founders experience and its corporate support, Joost looks like a great investment. But it sure looks like a hedge, playing both sides against the middle in media wars.

 

 

Social Media Now: Corporations vs. Communities

Events conspired this week to throw into high relief the core question for those who would commercialize social media: can a balanced be reached between user control and corporate control or will commercial social media always exist on a cliff’s edge over which either party can push it at any time?

In the Digg/HD-DVD fiasco, it was users who pushed the corporation over the edge–forcing the company to ignore a legal takedown request in order to keep it’s community alive. As Fred Wilson wrote:

I’ve been around web communities since we invested in Geocities in 1996 and one thing I’ve learned is the community thinks they own the community. And if you are the one who actually owns it, you’d better act like the community owns it or you’ll lose it.…

Forget about what’s right and wrong in this case, the important point is Digg showed that they control the community and will police it.

That’s a big deal. They might get away with that on issues like hate, porn, terror, but not on hacking.

When you get in the way of geeks sharing hacks with each other in a geek community, you’ve done something big.
Meanwhile over at MySpace, it was presidential hopeful Barack Obama who was feeling the wrath of the crowd. The Obama campaign had jumped all over a MySpace page started way back in November 2004 when a paralegal named Joe Anthony became a fan of the then-newly elected senator.

Since Obama announced his presidential bid, his campaign had been working with Anthony and the profile had pulled 160,000 friends and garnered Obama a lot of press buzz. But, after an open dispute with Anthony over control of the site, the Obama camp this week had MySpace hand over the “BarackObama” name, refusing to compensate Anthony who reportedly offered to hand over control for a fee of $39,000, a number reflecting the 5 hours a day Anthony claims to have devoted to the site.

Today the “official” Barack Obama MySpace profile has 33,500 friends and the candidate has lost not only a high profile volunteer but also a voter. As Anthony himself explained to Micah Sifry in an open letter:

The campaign got involved in February and although at first it was very exciting, it quickly became clear that they just had no interest in me or my involvement. They only wanted to take control of the profile and get on with it. I bit the bullet for a while and kept working for the good of the campaign, but they quickly went from passive aggressive, to aggressive, and then eventually just rotten and dishonest.

For the past few weeks, the campaign decided it would be better if they just took control of the profile and we decided to try to come to some agreement. By this time, I didn’t have quite as much respect for the campaign guys, and frankly felt like I was just being used. They knew about this profile the entire time, and really just waited until it got enough media coverage and friends request so they could step in and bully me out of it….

This was not about money and I don’t believe that one person who has interacted with me via the Obama profile over the past couple of years would be able to say that my efforts were anything but sincere. This was about holding a campaign to their message, about acknowledging my work, and taking this community seriously.

Apparently the message here is, as an individual, if you have too big of an impact, you’re just a liability.

This is how Obama lost my vote, and one of his strongest supporters.

TechPresident has offered excellent extended coverage of the dispute, Anthony’s explanation, Obama’s response, and even an analysis of what Anthony’s profile might really have been worth (as much as $90K according to Sifray). Most interesting is the response from someone in the Dean campaign who had faced similar problems to the ones faced by Obama:

We called people like Joe Anthony “centers of gravity”– people who had built up their own Dean communities. We wanted centers of gravity as close to campaign as possible without imploding.

At first, new centers of gravity were exciting, but very perplexing, and our tiny team debated options. We quickly ran into an odd clarifier–the law. Because of legal concerns about campaign coordination, we were told early on by our lawyers that we had two choices: to have a manager/agent relationship with grassroots supporters, or to not direct grassroots supporters actions at all….

We simply couldn’t have a manager/agent relationship and still have all this flowering of intelligent political energy: we chose to be hands off, talking with people but not telling them what to do.

Finally today we have word that YouTube is finally going to begin to bring its user-creators into the corporate side flow by doing something Obama didn’t want to do for Anthony–offer money.

YouTube announced on it’s corporate blog that it was adding half a dozen or so high profile posters to its partnership program–the same program to which CBS, the NBA, and other big media producers belong.

YouTube didn’t announce specific criteria for choosing the initial members who got a bump in status other than to say that “they have built and sustained large, persistent audiences through the creation of engaging videos, their content has become attractive for advertisers….”

At NewTeeVee Om Malik had an interview with Jamie Byrne, vice president of marketing at YouTube in which Byrne 20 to 40 producers would be included in the initial roll out, with more potentially added in the future.
At Techcrunch Duncan Riley wonders what the revenue split is worth:

…the new Partners Program only goes as far as monetizing the actual YouTube page destination with Adsense units. Whilst not without merit, the new program is limited given the way YouTube content is consumed. The great strength of YouTube from its earliest days has been the use of embedded video on external sites: a large number, if not a majority of viewers will never see the advertising, viewing it only on blogs and forums which if they are running Google Adsense units, do so in a way that does not benefit the content creator.

But nearly everyone expects YouTube to begin inserting pre-roll video advertising at some point in the not to distant future. It will be interesting to watch what happens with the YouTube program–will it spark competition to be chosen for partnership? will it spark resentment that some but not all members are chosen to participate? will it generate enough money for chosen members to matter at all?

Link Love:

BlogCatalog Gets Socially Networked

NBA Taps Into Second Life
If Markets Are Conversations Then Twitter Is Money

 

Social Media Now: Google Claims Safe Harbor, Clearchannel Goes Social

There’s not much news to be gleaned from the response to the Viacom lawsuit filed by Google/YouTube in federal district court in New York.

As predicted Google is pinning its defense on the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which was designed to shield ISPs from lawsuits when subscribers used their accounts to trade copied media files.

The response outlines a number of secondary defenses–everything from a claim of fair use to an unexplained claim that Viacom had somehow consented to allow its clips on YouTube because it had other deals with YouTube. The alternative arguments are all weak. But the weakest, and perhaps most revealing, is the “Innocent Intent” defense–in which Google appears to be claiming that YouTube didn’t intend to allow copyright infringement. Donna Bogatin has a short reaction at ZDNet that gets to the heart of the matter, pointing to claims Google made to analysts in its latest earnings call.

If the case goes to trial (an event I doubt will occur) the outcome will be based on case law established in the Napster case. To wit: did YouTube deliberately build it’s business model around contributory infringement and does it have the ability to identify and remove infringing material. Unfortunately for Google, the answers to those questions appear to be “yes.”
ClearChannel Launches Social Nets: Yesterday Billboard’s Brian Garrity reported that radio giant ClearChannel Communications is launching social networks centered on a dozen of its largest radio stations.

Five of the branded Nets have already launched in beta, like Wildspace–the social net for San Francisco station KYLD-FM (94.9 FM). Wildspace is certainly a better Web presence than the station’s extremely busy Web site. The network already has more than 380 members, and of course the radio signal can be streamed.

At Mashable Kristen Nicole notes that social network white label provider Onesite is powering the ClearChannel nets.

I love this strategy. Radio has always been a local business. By virtue of it’s formatted playlist it has been a business that takes advantage of listeners’ sense of shared identity. And talk, not music, is the industry’s driver. Perfect ingredients for social networking success. The radio industry has gone away from it’s core strengths for years–eliminating a sense of personality by jettisoning DJs, centralizing and nationalizing  programming. Social networking could help lead the radio business into a new cross platform era in which listeners are deeply tied to stations. Imagine the power of social network tied to an local sports-talks station like WFAN in New York. This is a strategy that is definitely worth watching.
 

Link Love:

Pure Digital raises $40M, its camcorders share with YouTube
Fascinating new vidcam with a built-in USB plug and software to help enable direct uploading to YouTube

eBay Launches “ToGo” Widgets For Any Listing

Snocap Partners with Warner Music Group to Sell on MySpace

Veodia Streams Live from Your Blog

Runescape Rules

Reunion, Wink Partner Up

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

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. 

 

 

 

 

Social Media Now: What Porn Can Teach NewTube

Yesterday’s reaction to the News Corp/NBC NewTube announcement ran the gamut from typical big media hating (Thomas Hawk’s headline: NBC Universal, News Corp YouTube Killer Will Fail) to typical big media cheerleading (Mark Cuban’s headline: Why the NBC/Newscorp Video Venture is a Great Idea).

Sure, there are plenty of reasons for any 50/50 JV between competitors to fail–from competing corporate interests to anti-trust question that may arise (since the consent decree in the 1940s that first tried to separate movie making from movie exhibiting there’s always been a tension that arises when the makers of entertainment content collude to control distribution).

But I don’t see any inherent reason why YouTube and NewTube can’t succeed side-by-side. After all, new media technologies rarely entirely obsolete old ones. Yeah, talkies made silent movies obsolete and color consigned black-and-white movie-making to an arty niche. But books, magazines, movies, radio and television are all still with us 15 years into the commercial Internet era. And the
filmed entertainment business has a pretty successful track record in adapting to changes in signal distribution technology. When VCRs first hit the market in the 1980s the filmed entertainment business resisted, pricing pre-recorded movies at nearly $100 to try to damp consumer demand and protect old business models. Today the so-called secondary markets–television licensing and DVD sales and rentals–are worth twice as much money annually to a company like Time Warner compared with movies in theatrical release.

The dollar volume of the online advertising business today dwarfs the dollar volume of other sectors of the entertainment business (recorded music sales, for example). If NewTube does nothing more than capture a fraction of that for the producers of Heroes, Family Guy or 24, it will be a smashing success. And that success will have no impact on the growth of social media properties like
YouTube.

It seemed yesterday like people were mostly talking past each other with NewTube skeptics wondering out loud about the venture’s functionality, and NewTube believers wondering out loud about YouTube’s ability to compete for ad dollars.

But given what has been announced so far it seems to me that YouTube and NewTube are designed to scratch different itches.
NewTube is all about distribution. YouTube is all about participation. NewTube is Internet media. YouTube is social media. The difference is a question of focus. The entertainment value of TV, however it is distributed, comes from the content itself. People enjoy the leisure activity of watching well-written, slickly produced stuff.  The entertainment value of social media comes from a sense of community involvement. The people enjoy the leisure activity of making, contributing and tagging.

Yesterday I raised Fred Wilson’s question about social media authenticity. Slapping social-enabled functionality onto traditional media won’t in itself transform traditional media into authentic social media. But it may help open new, hybrid distribution platforms for traditional media. The presence on the Internet of traditional media with social functionality won’t undermine the appeal of authentic social media which focuses not on content but on people.

In an otherwise excellent analysis on Techcrunch, Michael Arrington wrote:

I think a better approach would have been to focus on the user experience, but this was hardly mentioned (except at one point when Zucker said “we are shocked at the willingness of the consumer to sit through the whole show with ads on NBC.com”). It’s either arrogance or it’s blindness to the reality of this Bittorent and YouTube world. Either way, it suggests they are in over their head.

Arrington would be right if NewTube was all about creating an authentic social media property. But that doesn’t seem to be the intention.

In the discussion of how user-generated content and user-generated distribution will transform traditional media the Net is full of parties with dogs in the fight and the discussion perpetually devolves into absolutes: “We Get It!” shouts one side. “No you don’t,” shouts the other. But for the truly fearless I offer the recent history of the pornography business as proof that professional product, social re-distribution, and user-generated content can live happily side-by-side.

From the days when papyrus was the cutting edge “signal distribution technology,” pornography has been at the forefront of media innovation. In the earliest days of the home video boom, it was the porn business that led the way with semi-pro and amateur content (Ed Powers’ Dirty Debutantes series of videotapes remains a landmark in the development of prosumer media).  In the earliest days of the commercial Internet, it was the porn business that did pioneering work in online payment systems. Today the pornography industry is larger in dollar volume than the so-called legitimate filmed entertainment business despite the fact that its leading corporate commercial producers face a volume of online file sharing that embarrasses the volume confronting the music business (try a Morpheus search for Jenna Jameson). And an entire economy exists to support user-generated content–from the personal
websites of amateurs to properties like Homeclips which aggregate amateur content.

If only News Corp and NBC can come up with content as compelling as MILF Money or Baby Doll Naughty Confessions, NewTube would really be on to something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SMC London goes videoblogging

The London experiment with weekly media-making meetups continued this evening with another member getting his first taste of videoblogging. Guy West has been a regular at our discussion groups and kindly recorded some audio at one of the meetings.

We sat in the brand new foyer of the British Film Institute/National Film Theatre which only opened last week and chatted about our social use of the internet. I was showing off a bit pointing the camera in my general direction which results in the people standing behind me being beautifully in focus, but my face (some will no doubt say this is a blessing) is a bit blurry.

No Palme D’or for this one, but at least we had some footage – and it wasn’t just of me! I showed Guy how to transfer from the camera to PC and then do some simple editing tasks and then we topped and tailed it with some titles and credits. We’d stood around for long enough, occasionally getting odd stares from the patrons of the Lesbian & Gay film festival that’s currently running there so I didn’t make Guy watch while we uploaded it to YouTube – he knew how to do that bit anyway.Next week the clocks will have gone forward, we’ll be into British Summer Time, and hopefully it will be a bit warmer for our first Blogwalk.

Watch Lloyd & Guy chat about teh internets in the BFI foyer

Social Media Now: YouTube v. NewTube–Can Big Media Keep it Real?

Last November VC Fred Wilson asked an interesting question of the blogosphere: Can you fake authenticity?

It’s an enormous question of course–the stuff of a thousand dissertation–particularly for Americans. After all, our culture is based on the artificial invention of identities that project authenticity.

But Fred was asking specifically about social media businesses–can the sense of community that inspires the viral growth of companies like del.icio.us, Digg, craigslist, and, yes, YouTube, be intentionally replicated through corporate planning?

Well, it looks like we’re about to get a text-book test case with impending announcement  that NBC Universal and News Corp’s Fox will launch a YouTube competitor this summer.

The effort is hardly a surprise. For months Big Media’s war on YouTube has been shadowed by talk of looming corporate competitors. Staci Kramer at paidContent had the latest chapter nailed on Tuesday — that the JV was coming together, and that Fox and NBC were soliciting Google’s online and tech competitors like Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo with Viacom an on-again, off-again possible collaborator.

PaidContent reports that Fox and NBC video, including material from shows like Heroes and Family Guy, will be distributed on MySpace, Yahoo and MSN.

Also, Terry Semel told an AdAge conference that the new service will be chock-a-block with YouTube-like sharing tools.

Pre-announcement commentary abounds on the Net this morning following the publication an LA Times piece which included this locker room bulletin board fodder:

Google executives’ disdain for the project is evident in their nickname for the consortium: Clown Co.

24/7 Wall Street picks up on the LAT’s comment that big media JVs have a checkered history:

The plan is cumbersome and complex making it unlikely to work. Sites like Yahoo! already have a large store of video content and a huge number of other channels, so making content from major media companies stand out will be very difficult. The same holds true for the other large web portals that the venture will target for distribution.

Mike at Techdirt hedges obliquely:

There are plenty of ways the networks can (and probably will) screw this up, but at least they’re doing something.

Whether or not the JV succeeds will, of course, depend on how cooperative the big media powers can be. It may also depend on legal matters–if the big media companies collaborate on exclusive online distribution, it that illegal, anti-competitive collusion? I also suspect that companies in the traditional distribution channels for TV content–MSOs, TV station owners–will offer some push back.

But most of all the success or failure of the JV will depend on the answer to Fred’s question about authenticity. There’s no doubt that users will show up wherever popular content is posted, especially if it is posted at sites with big traffic like Yahoo and MySpace. But will users confer on this new effort the vibe of Internet authenticity? Will users think NBC and Fox are keeping it real?

That will depend on how much Fox and NBC give to users. Success in social media depends on following the Beatles’ dictum: the love you take is equal to the love you make. Will sharing be limited to the friendly confines of approved destination sites? How intrusive will advertising be? Will users be able to make mash-ups even across ownership (say a Heroes/24 hybrid)? If so there’s a good chance that NewTube will be the feel good hit of the summer.

We’re all hardwired for Music

Tomorrow at the London Club, Michael Spencer and I will show you that we are all hardwired for music.  It’s in our very heartbeat.  Naturally, we want to walk the talk and include appropriate sound effects in the accompanying podcast.

There are several ways to include message-appropriate, cost-effective, and life-giving music and sound in social media. YouTubers record it themselves.  The exact mood or effect that you are looking for may be freely available and one link away, if you can find it! SOUNDDOGS.COM would have sold me 63 seconds of ‘pristing feature film quality’ heartbeat for $6.75 from its awsome collection.  Turbo Squid made no such claims, but would still have charged a round $5.

In the end, I followed a recommendation from Lars Ploughmann, whom I met last week while we learned how to podcast from the London Club’s usual master of ceremonies, Lloyd Davis.  Lars’ friend, Martin Christensen, provided me with several sound effects in easy-to-use MP3 format free gratis – for which I give my thanks.

So where are the results?  You’ll have to listen to tomorrow’s podcast to hear them.  There’s still time to input your thoughts and questions to make it a truly interactive evening.

 

  

 

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?

 

 

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.