My friend Steve O’Hear alerted me to a post on the Last100 blog (part of the excellent Read/Write Web network) written by Guinevere Orvis, an interactive producer with the CBC — that’s Canada’s national broadcaster, for any of my non-Canadian readers — about how the network came to distribute one of its shows using the BitTorrent peer-to-peer network. Guinevere says that the idea started with a post on BoingBoing about Norway’s state broadcaster doing the same thing with a show.
While it might have been nice to hear that the CBC got the idea from reading about it on my Globe blog (sorry, I couldn’t resist), it’s still nice to know that our national broadcaster is open to new ideas. And from the sounds of Norway’s experience, it should be one that they consider repeating. According to Eirik Solheim, who works for the Norwegian broadcaster, the show has been downloaded more than 90,000 times and the network has been “saving huge on bandwidth cost.”
That last part is important to note: BitTorrent may be known for piracy, but it is fundamentally a distribution method, plain and simple (ISPs argue that it is cheap because it piggybacks on their networks and sticks them with the bill, but that’s a topic for another day). Here’s hoping that the CBC decides to continue this experiment, and congratulations to Guinevere for helping them come to grips with the issues involved and spurring them on. Her full post on all the details is well worth a read.
There’s been lots of talk recently about the value of ad networks, including a recent piece in MediaWeek about how ESPN has decided to opt out of the ad network game. The central question seems to be: Are ad networks a great way to package up unsold Web inventory and monetize it, or do they take traffic away from a brand and potentially interfere with that brand’s ability to market effectively to its audience? It may not help, but I would say the answer is probably yes to both of those questions.
Aggregating space on blogs and other sites that could have value to advertisers makes sense, and that’s presumably why Forbes is setting up a blog network, and why Federated Media is also in that business — which John Battelle talks about in a Q&A here, and why large-scale blog networks like b5media exist as well (in the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I am part of the new Forbes blog network). At the same time, however, it’s not at all clear whether such networks can ever really compete with algorithm-based and search-targeted advertising.
If that’s the case, wouldn’t it be better for a brand — such as ESPN — to focus on building a better relationship with its core audience, rather than running ads from some ad network that may or may not be relevant, and could take eyeballs elsewhere, all in return for a crappy CPM rate? That’s obviously the conclusion that ESPN has come to, and others have as well. To some, chasing the low returns of ad network banners isn’t worth the investment. Others, however, will see it as better than nothing — particularly if it involves inventory that’s going to go stale anyway.
Maybe it’s just the spillover from the sub-prime mortgage meltdown, but in some cases packaging remnant inventory and selling it through an ad network reminds me of the Wall Street practice of bundling underperforming or questionable mortgages together, and “securitizing” them in order to unload them onto outside investors. That kind of strategy works really well — right up until it doesn’t.
It may not have achieved the 17.8 million views that Chris Crocker’s classic “Leave Britney Alone” video has — or even the 7 million views that the startled prairie dog known as “Dramatic Chipmunk” has gotten — but then, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s speech on racism has only been up on YouTube for less than 24 hours (as of mid-day Wednesday), and it already has over 1.2 million views.
That’s not bad. Another month or so and maybe it could get into the same territory as “The Evolution of Dance,” which has a mind-boggling 78 million views. Of course, Obama’s speech has an actual message that is somewhat deeper than the average YouTube video — hard to tell whether that will help or hinder its advance up the charts.
Mike Arrington has a lengthy post at TechCrunch about the evolution of the blogosphere — a topic he launches into with a roundup of some of the financing rumours that are swirling around properties like Silicon Alley Insider and PaidContent, both of which are reportedly looking for several million dollars. Both of those sites are also excellent examples of blog evolution in action: PaidContent.org started with Rafat Ali and has become a media entity that I would argue rivals any business magazine, and SIA began with Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget and has also become a force to be reckoned with.
I think PaidContent and Silicon Alley have set themselves apart primarily by writing excellent content, and focusing their efforts instead of trying to be all things to all people. Although Mike doesn’t mention Gawker (likely because he despises founder Nick Denton, who is the Darth Vader to Mike’s Obi-wan Kenobi), blogs like Gawker.com, Engadget — and yes, even Valleywag — have become success stories by doing the same thing, although in their case it’s more of a tabloid-style approach that takes advantage of controversy just as much as it does good content.
Mike makes the point that the blogs that are raising money now might be making a mistake, in part because the good old days of being able to build a blog empire with nothing but a few computers and some writing ability are largely gone — now, writers want to be paid a decent salary (imagine!) and then there’s the whole VC snakepit to navigate. And he also mentions how competitive and political the blogosphere has become, with pitched battles and people taking sides, and describes how he has tried to help B-list and C-list bloggers (including yours truly) by linking.
I appreciate Mike’s take on things, and the fact that he sees me as one of the “non-crazy influencers” (although I have criticized his point of view before, as many people know, and am more than willing to do so in the future if I think he is wrong on something). And as much as I would like to pretend that it isn’t a competitive game, there’s no question that it is. Are the good old days gone forever? Are we now where the Wild West was when the developers and the settlers and the banks took over and the gunslingers were put out to pasture? Perhaps.
Towards the end of his post, Mike suggests that he has a bigger picture in mind when he advises some of the other bloggers not to take investment money — he talks about how he would like to see the creation of a blogging “Dream Team” that could take on CNET (not really that difficult a task, I would argue). I for one would like to see that happen, mostly because I think it could be a lot of fun to watch, or even to take part in. And if it comes to that, I want to be Magic Johnson
Anil Dash of Six Apart has an interesting post up in which he proposes that instead of simply linking to or quoting from blog posts, bloggers could actually embed a segment of the post they are citing — in much the same way that people embed YouTube videos etc. by inserting some Javascript. I’ve included an excerpt of the post here as an experiment, in part because I’m wondering whether this idea (which I found via a Twitter post from Steve Rubel) makes any sense or not.
Like Anil, part of me finds this kind of thing appealing — but is it just the geek part of me? It’s elegant in a way, but I wonder whether it’s more trouble than is really necessary (Piers Fawkes at PSFK has written about it as well, and Anil has commented on that post). After all, I can quote from Anil’s post by simply cutting and pasting text, like this:
I want you to place the text of this blog post on your own site. But I don’t want you to do it just by copying and pasting it into your own blogging tool. I think there might be a different way to do it.
What benefits does using Anil’s method have? It includes a link to the comments on the post, which is nice (although it could get unwieldy if there were too many), but I’m not sure it’s a killer feature. And it has a nice colored border, of course. I experimented with Clipmarks.com as a way of doing something similar — since it allows you to clip and save a blog or web-page excerpt and then paste it into your blog automatically — but in the end it seemed too cumbersome.
I'm a technology writer with The Globe and Mail in Toronto, and this is where I blog about the collision between media and the Web. I also have a Globe blog, which is here. Send me email at mathew (at) mathewingram.com, or for more info, click the picture.
