Oct 30th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
(cross-posted from my blog at www.mathewingram.com/work)
Two announcements that indicate the process of evolution in the TV 2.0 business is really picking up a head of steam: Brightcove — which until recently was like the wizard behind the curtains, powering online TV ventures such as the recently announced music video deal with Warner Music — remakes itself with a consumer-facing site and service that plans to compensate users for video content, and Metacafe announces its “producer awards” feature, which pays video uploaders $5 for every 1,000 views their video gets above the 20,000 mark.
Plenty of people wondering what this means for GooTube, of course, now that Google has paid $1.6-billion out of petty cash for the thing — but it’s also worth wondering how the folks over at Revver are feeling, since they more or less pioneered the whole “pay the users” video thing. Thanks to Revver, the guys at Eepybird.com who made the Diet Coke-Mentos video got $30,000 or so for all the views that their clip got (Revver pays creators 50 per cent of the ad revenue they get, and you can also get paid based on how many places the video is embedded).
As Matt Marshall explains over at VentureBeat, Metacafe not only pays producers of video, it also tries to filter out the chaff by submitting videos to a group of reviewers who give it the thumbs up or down before it hits the site, adding a kind of Digg-style (or American Idol-style) voting aspect to it. And then there’s Brightcove, which will give content owners 50 per cent of the revenue from ads, or the ability to offer paid downloads of their content, for which they get 70 per cent.
In a sense, YouTube and its ilk are coming at the market from the opposite end of things as Brightcove: they started with videos of kittens and skateboarders hurting themselves and so on, and are now trying to become more mainstream and legitimate, while Brightcove started as the corporate stooge who works with the networks and now wants to layer some popular, viral video on top of all that. Who will win? The betting window is now open.
Oct 30th, 2006 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
(crossposted from my blog at www.mathewingram.com/work)
I’d love to know which journalist Jason Calacanis of Netscape was emailing with recently when he decided to post a big chunk of the interview and his responses on his blog (something Megaphone Mark Cuban has been known to do from time to time). Was he frustrated by the dumb questions about whether blogging can be a business or not, or was he just trying to share his thoughts with the blogosphere? Hard to say with Jason. In any case, his comments about the blogging business are pretty much to the point, and worth a read. Here’s an excerpt:
We are an eight figure a year business today. In terms of profitability the blogging business is better than the magazine or newspaper business in two main ways: 1. there is no distribution cost to blogging (i.e. printing, shipping, and postage), and 2. we don’t have the large management cost structure because our bloggers are not edited.
Jason goes on to say that blogging is “the most profitable media business today” and describes a good blog as being almost as hard as working at CNN, because the pressure to produce never stops. And then he tells the journalist this:
I think so far you’re looking at blogs are one big thing, and they are not one thing — they are many things. There are blogs done by companies to promote their products. There are blogs done by friends and family to keep in touch with each other. There are “faux blogs” created by unscrupulous marketers to abuse the public. There are blogs that are run as publications in order to make a profit.
And Jason adds that blogs have become “a vital part of the media ecosystem,” in that bloggers are interacting with journalists and “helping them build their stories.” He says the media business has moved from a handful of people speaking on their pedestals, to dozens of folks at hundreds of tables having conversations about an issue. Not a bad description. More chaotic? Definitely. Far from perfect? Absolutely. But in my opinion, still an improvement.
Oct 27th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Editor & Publisher has a piece about a speech that Los Angeles Times editor Dean Baquet made to the Associated Press Managing Editors’ conference on Thursday, in which he urged newspaper editors to put up more of a fight against cutbacks by newspaper chains and proprietors. “It is the job of editors of newspapers to put up a little bit more of a fight than we have put up in the past,” he said. “Don’t be shy about making the public service argument.”
Baquet said his public stance against cuts drew hundreds of e-mails from around the country by supporters, something that helped him stick with the position against cutting. Such notes ranged from The New York Times to the Akron (Ohio) Beacon-Journal. “I even got one from a Wall Street analyst who said it was about time newspapers started pushing back a little bit,” Baquet said.
The publisher of the Times also resisted pressure for newsroom cuts, and was later fired as a result. Baquet said he considered quitting but decided that “the best way to protect the paper was for me to stay.” The New York Times also had a piece about Baquet’s speech here.
Oct 25th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Slate magazine has a piece up about the Daily Telegraph, the venerable London newspaper that has been going through a lot of upheaval of late — changing editors repeatedly, axing hundreds of staff, moving into a new building and simultaneously trying to turn the newspaper into a digital multimedia enterprise. As the story puts it:
For a paper that fancies itself retrograde in all matters political and aesthetic (even its Gothic logo has barely changed in a half-century), the Telegraph’s move from a print newspaper to a multimedia hybrid is worth studying. How do you steer an old battleship into a new harbor?
Not many details about the new “hub and spoke” newsroom, or about the multimedia efforts of reporters, but some mention of podcasts and blogs and so on. Worth a look.
Oct 25th, 2006 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
The Sun — the tabloid paper in Britain that specializes in news about David Beckham and women without any clothes on (not necessarily in that order) — has launched a social media site it’s calling MySun, which features a “Have Your Say” discussion forum and allows readers who register to have their own blogs hosted by the paper. Users can set up member profiles complete with photos and personal details, and the pictures appear whenever they comment in a story forum, and they can upload pictures of news events as well.
Users who register can also select stories from the site and have those arranged on a MyPage homepage. PaidContent has more details, including a quote from the editor: “What this will do for us is create stickiness,” said Pete Picton. “Readers have to register if they want to comment and once that happens, it creates loyalty - and that’s better for selling adverts and for creating revenue.”
