11
Apr 11Credible Advertising
Credibility has been making a slow but steady return to advertisement. It’s a return to the “brought-to-you-by” in-show endorsements of early television:
For a child of the 80′s like me, this seems like a ludicrous notion. Advertising in that decade was so transparently slick and false that we quickly grew inured to it and scorned it. It seems designed to trick people into buying things they didn’t need. Arguably that is still, at base, the aim of advertising. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With targeted ads there is a chance to serve the consumer with something that she actually *wants* to see. The ad becomes both a form of entertainment and a service to the consumer.
Media companies that accept advertising should become increasingly picky about the ads they accept. They will accept ads that align with their values and their mission.
As an example, look at Penny-Arcade: the creators of the popular web comic have stated that they will only accept advertising for products that they themselves believe in. That endorsement is a HUGE win for both the consumer, who is a fan of Penny-Arcade and of their values, and for the advertiser.
via Game Girl Advance: The Futures of Entertainment
08
Apr 11Why Ad Dollars on Youtube are Harder to Come By
Internet ad buyers track results and Return On Investment with a fine tooth comb. For lots of reasons (some good, some not-so-good), traditional ad buyers still buy on instinct.
What YouTube is missing is the “Great Irrationality of Marketing Spending,” something I’ve grown to understand even if I disdain. I’ve seen it closely from all three perspectives: as a content creator, a buyer, and an intermediary. While we direct-response oriented marketers (the ones who track A/B campaigns on Google OCD style) are about results, the vast majority of advertising spending is not rational or performance driven. There. I said it. Try to refute that fact.
26
Mar 11Film Festivals versus online distribution in 2011
Compared to a well-planned online push, the numbers aren’t looking good for real-world distribution.
[That said,] the online video world is not a meritocracy. If we thought this going in, we most definitely know it now. You can’t just put a film online and expect people to find it just because it’s a good film. You need a surge of traffic to get noticed.
via Short of the Week: How We Launched Our Film Online: The Thomas Beale Cipher
25
Mar 11The Internet Wants to Be Cable?
The idea behind Deluxis Entertainment is to create high-value, on-demand scripted content and to deliver it in serialized form to become a destination for exclusive original shows. In other words, Deluxis wants to be just like the major cable networks, except for one thing: It wants to deliver all of those shows online first…
Is it just me, or does the business model of “producing good content” seem pretty suspect to anyone else? “TV-quality shows exclusively for the web” already exist — in huge numbers as a matter of fact — and even the great ones don’t have TV-quality audience numbers.
Deluxis wanting to be like the “major cable networks” also seems like a huge red flag. It may be a step in the wrong direction when an Internet startup attempts to imitate the major cable networks, when everyday major networks are trying to imitate internet startups.
Showtime is already having problems getting people to subscribe to their content and they have shows with huge cache like Dexter, Weeds, and Californication. Even the NY Times, a newspaper that many consider to the best in the country, is struggling to get people to warm up to the idea of paying for an online subscription. The Deluxis strategy seems, at the very least, optimistic.
Deluxis CEO Christopher Kaminski told us in an interview that his plans for Deluxis were first hatched after he canceled cable and was unable to find the shows he wanted…
“I’m customer zero for this. Some of the best shows on cable were not coming online,” Kaminski said. “So I thought, rather than waiting for someone else to rescue me, why don’t I make this myself?”
I wish Mr. Kaminski all the success in the world and big dreams are the fuel of innovation, but am I the only one who thinks this reads like a press release from post-Atom-Films/pre-Youtube 2005?
via GigOM
24
Mar 11The “Viral Video” is a myth
With so many competing videos vying for attention, the odds that typical video will “go viral” aren’t good. Consider these statistics for videos in their first month on YouTube
- Seventy percent get at least 20 views
- Fifty percent get at least 100 views
- Fewer than 20 percent get more than 500 views
- Fewer than 10 percent get more than 1,500 views
- Three percent get more than 25,000 views
- Around 1 percent gets more than 500,000 views
Although these numbers are based on a study done in 2007, and they’re probably totally inaccurate now, these numbers do help prove points that are still valid.
For some… public relations managers, this might be considered perfectly normal results. And for a few early adopters and entrepreneurs, this might be considered a reasonably acceptable risk.
However, for most marketing managers, these ordinary outcomes don’t cost-justify creating a YouTube account. And for lots of new YouTubers, these modest benefits don’t seem to be worth the effort.
Marketers should be more aware that most videos on Youtube are ignored. Videos that do get views are a product of established fanbase, creator’s influence, careful planning for release date/schedule, time, money and luck. Oh, and you also need a compelling video.
Not every business needs a Youtube account. The type people you’ll reach and the cost it will take to reach may not be worth the effort expended.
Not every business needs a so-called “social media guru” charging them to tell them they desperately need a Youtube, Twitter and Facebook account to keep up with the times.
via Youtube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day by Greg Jarboe
20
Mar 11Rebecca Black Backlash
Inadvertent Youtube sensation Rebecca Black is our future. Twenty-seven million people on Youtube can’t be wrong.
It’s only been a week since Rebecca Black became a YouTube sensation with “Friday,” but the song remains full of mysteries. Who is Rebecca Black? How did this song happen? Is it a joke? Why does she find it so hard to decide whether to kick in the front seat or sit in the back seat? Why is she afraid we’ll get the days of the week in the wrong order? Could music possibly get any dippier? None of these questions have answers yet. (Except the last one: Fleet Foxes.) But maybe we’re not asking the right questions yet. Clearly, this song demands a deeper investigation.
All of the talk about how tasteless, artificial, and hollow the Friday video/song is seems a bit false to me. Why does the critical mass get the right to be so vicious at 13 year-old girl being creative and writing a song just because her song happens to be packaged as a slickly-produced commodity?
If Rebecca Black was 3 years younger and the video was shot with a home video camera, critics would see it as adorable and charming. Once you doll it up with high production values though, suddenly it’s okay to make pronouncements that one 13 year-old girl’s song is the harbinger for the end of music.
Young girls have been engineered into singing pop songs long before Youtube. Besides, perform any song that you wrote at 13 and we’ll see how it stands up to the scrutiny of the entire internet.
“If the lyrics to this song were in a Black Eyed Peas song, 20 million people would buy a copy and 89% of those mocking Rebecca Black would sing along.” – Justin Brown
via Rolling Stone, Why Rebecca Black is a Demon-Wizard Child Piper
02
Mar 11The Stories of the Youtube Gold Rush are Highly Exaggerated
Google’s success in wringing more ad revenue from YouTube is giving rise to a new class of dot-com millionaires…
Hundreds of YouTube stars are making more than six figures, and hundreds more are making more than $40,000 a year — roughly the median salary in the US. There are even stars who have topped a million dollars, although the company wouldn’t say how many…
“However well YouTube does, the partners are doing better,” said Kate Rose, a member of YouTube’s communications team.
That means a number of people are quitting their day jobs for a full-time stint on YouTube. They start as amateurs and when Google sees their stars rising, the company reaches out to them to join the YouTube Partners program. There is also a program for one-hit wonders to attach ads to their viral videos.
Articles like this tend to perpetuate the myth of how “easy” it is for people are “make money on Youtube” when in reality, only a small percentage of Youtube Partners make a liveable income.
Youtube neglects to mention that the small percentage of those who do make a living primarily through Youtube don’t make the bulk of their money through Youtube’s ad-revenue profit sharing program. Instead, these Partners make it primarily from third-party sponsorships that Youtube doesn’t have anything to do with.
Articles like this are big PR moves by Youtube. Youtube has every reason to make the public think that submitting content to Youtube is part of the new, Internet gold rush because that means a whole new crop of speculators will start submitting videos trying to cash in on the Youtube Partner lotto ticket. Seeding misinformation like this also makes Youtube look benevolent, as if the company is sharing all the wealth it makes with the little guys — the individual filmmakers and content creators.
It’s the same thing Second Life did in its heyday. Everyone is ready to find the next quick score, and Youtube and Second Life are more than happy to pretend that they’ve already found it.
Neither Second Life nor Youtube are “bad guys” by encouraging news stories like this, but for anyone thinking about the easy “millions” to be made on Youtube, you may want to do more research before you spend lots of time, money and energy on your Youtube Channel.
via Nypost
07
Feb 11Two Million Middle Schoolers Can’t Be Wrong
Today, Youtube sensation Fred has 2,126,918 Youtube subscribers. His videos have been viewed 708,273,871 times.
Here’s an article, from all the way back in 2008 about about why Fred is so important, written way before everybody realized how important he was… Before he got his own Nickelodeon movie and the Disney Channel farmed his charm to harvest cold-hard cash.
So yes, it’s a time capsule in terms of content, but it’s still right-on when it talks about the way that the generation of kids in middle school consume entertainment and understand celebrity.
One day we’ll all have our own personal celebrities.
That an act with millions of fans could escape the popular attention is more evidence of the digital fissuring of our culture. As we ensconce ourselves ever further in our respective demographics, personal and professional, we continue to drift apart from the people right next to us, until even an iceberg holding 4 million tweens can float by unnoticed.
So here we are at a moment when for all its cash and talent, the best of Hollywood’s online efforts slide off the wall like penne al dente, while a Nebraska kid with a $100 camera can attract a giant, hugely valuable audience by jumping in a baby pool with his clothes on. What does he know that we don’t?
Cruikshank’s generation is the first one never to have known a world without the Internet. These kids speak the language of computers and technology as well as they speak English — if not better. So it figures that one of them would be the first to produce a hit show for his peers — one that adults did not help produce and are equally not meant to watch. This is a new model: for kids, by kids.
via La Times
Yes Virginia, people really watched this video 49 million times.