The big budget Webisodic “Afterlife” hopes to vindicate a fallen model?

Anyone remember Digital Entertainment Network? TheSpot? Those online reality series from AOL? Well, long after that original model for Webisodic entertainment crashed and burned, MySpace and Electric Farm Entertainment revive it in a big way this week with the $3 million “Afterworld” series. Fully animated and promising 130 episodes before it is done, “Afterworld" is a big bet from News Corp., if not in cash then in reputation. It is splitting the ad revenue with Electric Farm in lieu of licensing fees, reports Mediapost. For its part, Electric Farm is wisely spinning the sci-fi storyline into mobile and game rights. Sony, which helped underwrite the series, is leveraging the concept into a Sci-Fi Channel mini-series.

But a lot of this still rides on MySpace. Exactly how powerful is the social network in circulating content, building buzz and (perhaps most important) maintaining interest in such a long-winded series? The dearth of interest in Webisodics is too often blamed on the limited broadband penetration before 2003 or so. Now that users have the fat pipes and are also accustomed to watching video online, the serialized model for Web shows seems to be worth a second shot, many seem to think. I would argue that the fate of this content model has more to do with distribution and consumption patterns than it does with technology.

There were some very good Web series back in the day Aardman Studio made the Angry Kid shorts and Tim Burton made the Stainboy series. I always like the Mondo “Thugs on Film” episodes myself, and some of their classics are showing up now on iTunes. The problem is that unless the series are in your face, you forget it is there. Interest drops off after a few episodes. They are fun but not so much fun as to compel a user to seek out new chapters. These interesting ideas ended up with small cult followings on AtomFilms, which is nice but not a breakthrough business model. 

The hope is that hyper-distribution over social networks will be part of the cure. If MySpace can keep the interest up over time and keep the brand in front of a growing network of users through their personal pages and blogs then the model may have a chance. I am not one to doubt the possibilities of new entertainment models. But I think that MySpace has more riding on this project than a few million bucks. It will be a measure of the power of the network as a real media distribution and marketing vehicle.

Posted under Michael's Blog

Major media companies are on a buying spree, but are they cost-conscious?

"Do you know any companies we might be interested in?" This questions, or soemthing much like it, has beern posed to me on more than one occasion in recent months by the heads of digital units in large media companies. People are shopping, and the old media companies that once over-invested and then sniffed cynically at digital media are back to the table. Hearst puchased both Kaboodle and UGO in recent months, expanding both their audience into young male miches and their business into shopping directory. CNet has a good overview of recent activity in the space.

But are the big media shoppers themselves well-informed buyers? The article suggests that the NBCU buyout of iVillgae and Conde Nast’s purchase of Reddit have been disappointments. Even the News Corp. big buy-in of MySpace seems a little less promising now that Facebook is in ascendance. Well, that may be taking the point a bit too far. The success of the digital campaign for "The Simpsons Movie," much of which was fueled by innovative uses of MySpace, seems to show where the synergies can happen.

Mark Glaser has a good look at Hearst pursuing a start-up model in re-launching its magazine sites at his MediaShoft blog.

I think old media buying up new media is a good thing. If anything, the new companies help educate the old in the ways of interactivity. The moguls admit that the world is shifting beneath their feet and they need to acquire the audiences that smarter fledglings have amassed. While Web acquiaitions once were a matter of hubris, now they are a matter of humble necessity.

Posted under Michael's Blog

Once a fading also-ran in the social media arena, Facebook appears to be growing up

Today’s Newsweek cover will be a major feature on Newsweek and the ideals and ambitions of it young founder 23-year-old Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg. Once seen by digital media analysts as an also-ran to the bigger MySpace that lost is chance to sell-out big, Facebook is this season’s media darling. Zuckerberg eschews the label "social network," preferring his own notion of a "social graph" of connections among all of us around the globe that Facebook helps chart. As Newsweek described it "Each of us is a node radiating links to the people we know." Mmmm, okay. He is 23, so we’ll give him some slack.

Newsweek lifts the skirts a bit on an operation that generally stays pretty tight-lipped. Per its media tip sheet from this weekend: "Newsweek reports that 1 million people a week are flocking to Facebook. And the international push is only beginning. Zuckerberg told [author] Levy that Facebook is the top Web site in Canada, and that the geographic network with the most Facebookers is London. While the site is now available only in English, Zuckerberg says that versions in other languages will appear soon, making his goal of having Facebook become the center of online life, appear possible. But the question remains, can Facebook be as much a presence in the life of graduates and geezers as it is to college students? Zuckerberg can’t see why not. ‘Adults still communicate with the people they’re connected with.’

Indeed they do. My own introdcution to Facebook came when I reviewed its new application platform for Laptop Magazine recently and made a simple test page of my own. Within weeks, contacts throuhgout the digital media and advertising realm seemed to find my page and ask to be "friends." Without trying I had attracted a small cluster of professionals whom I now know better from their family photos and profiles. From what I can see, Newsweek may be a tad behind the curve on this one. What seems to be fueling Fabeook’s second act is its expansion into a professionals’ network far beyond the confines of collegians. Whether such a network can also be a platform for advertisers and media marketers in the same vein as MySpace remains to be seen. Do I really want to be marketed to by next weekend’s blockbuster opening in the same space I trade opinions with professional colleagues? I don’t know yet. I am still just making friends and trying to find my place on Zuckerberg’s "social graph."

See Also

• Facebook

Posted under Michael's Blog

The Nielsen and comScore broadband video numbers cut many ways

Despite industry and analyst worries that broadband video was undermining Americans’ taste for traditional TV, Nielsen and the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM) found in a new study that online video barely affects TV viewing time. “A Barometer of Broadband Content and Its Uses Report” saw in March 2007 a 16% jump in online video viewing overall in six months. The survey found 81 million people watching broadband video, about a third of whom say it actually increases their TV view time. Nielsen/CTAM claims that the top media brands also dominate online video usage, with ABC.com leading the TV brands and Yahoo Movies topping the movie category.

The CTAM report may be spinning the effect of online video viewing a bit too much the TV networks’ way, however. The latest comScore report on streaming video in May shows that Google/YouTube sites absolutely dominate the share of streams served to visitors (21.5%) compared to next-best Fox Interactive Media and its MySpace properties (8.1%). Viacom (2.8%), Time Warner (2.2%) ABC.com (1.2%) and NBCU (0.7%) are distant also-rans in terms of streams served, even if many of the TV-oriented videos come in longer lengths. It seems undeniable that online video does shift viewer loyalty and introduce new brands that ultimately can threaten traditional suppliers. comScore’s numbers underscore an inconvenient truth for cable and networks: social media, namely YouTube and MySpace, are the engines that really drive online video viewing. Unless the traditional companies tap into that current more effectively, they will be also-rans.

News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting is best positioned to merge social media and traditional TV with sister company MySpace. Yesterday, Fox and the Producers Guild of America announced a partnership to create “The Storyteller Challenge” on MySpace, which invites aspiring producers to submit 5-7 minute TV pilots on the social network to win cash and a possible development deal with Fox. The MySpace community will watch and respond to the pilots, of course. Big TV has to do more than just pour prime time onto the Web. The upcoming NBCU/Fox portal and CBS strategies seem to involve hyper-distribution, a determination to put their shows and their advertising everywhere on the Web. But even the ad media buyers who want to see more opportunities to advertise against reliable marquee brands want to see more creativity from the networks. Agency buyers tell me that they are looking for more unique online extensions of TV brands, iterations of prime time that make more sense in the interactive environment than just TV on the Web.

– Steve Smith

Posted under Michael's Blog

A friend of ours pulled her daughter off of MySpace after she discovered that the girl was publishing provocatively dressed pictures of herself labeled with "slut".

Now we learn of a prominent blogger who was forced to cancel an appearance at eTech in San Diego after receiving death threats. Programmer Kathy Sierra was guilty of no more provocative posts on her popular Creating Passionate Users blog than titles such as "Code Like a Girl" and  the "Hi-Res User Experience" might suggest.

Yet she was forced to stay "at home, with the windows locked, terrified” rather than attend the conference after she received death threats on her site — and even more alarmingly — on the sites of two other respected bloggers.

This is sobering for me. Two weeks ago, I spent two days at the Digital Media Summit promoting the role of media companies in the emerging social media and user-generated content revolutions.

The problem is, some of those users are going to be psychos. And others, like my friend’s daughter, are victims waiting to happen.

I’m not sure how closely the media giants at the vanguard of social media — companies like Fox (MySpace), Sony (Grouper) and Google (YouTube) — have thought through the implications of unleashing the public’s Dark Side. But I hope they spend more time thinking about it before people end up dead.

See Also

• Abuse, threats quiet bloggers’ keyboards

Posted under Uncategorized

Fox wants to protect media content and grow MySpace at the same time. Tough job!

MySpace’s apparent attempt to prevent users from embedding tools such as music, video players and ecommerce engines in their site doesn’t make compute financially or logically.

At stake, the New York Times reported today, is the ability of MySpace and parent News Corp. to ensure that only they  capitalize on the 90 million visitors to MySpace each month.

According to the Times, MySpace is already alienating some of its users, who are attracted to MySpace by its free-wheeling community. They don’t take kindly to an entertainment giant’s attempts to protect intellectual property, whether its copyrighted or not.

So when MySpace shut down popular MySpace blogger and singer Tila Tequila’s web store and music player on Sunday, it undoubtedly annoyed a lot of people.

The risk is that these users will flee MySpace for another site where these restrictions aren’t imposed. That’s not a far-fetched proposition. How many people visit the legalized Napster site today compared with a few years ago?

And of course, if MySpace’s visitors flee, so will advertisers.

That’s the financial piece.

The logical piece is this: embedding a tool on MySpace is as much an infringement of copyrights as embedding it on your own site. That is, not at all. The embedding only becomes a problem if you start playing uncopyrighted material. Presumably, Tequila was only playing her own work on the music player.

Is MySpace really going to prevent people  from getting creative on its site?

You could argue that Tequila may have had the right to play music on her site, but she had no right to sell it. Maybe not. But doesn’t it make a lot more sense for MySpace to approach her (and others) and work out a small "usage fee" than to banish them? That, in fact, is exactly what mobile carriers in Europe (and a few in the U.S.) do with people who want to sell using the carriers’ bandwidth: they charge them. And trust me, they’re making a fortune.

If News Corp. doesn’t want its MySpace asset to evaporate, it  needs to ensure that MySpace’s freewheeling community stays freewheeling.

See Also

• NYT: MySpace Restrictions Upset Some Users

Posted under Uncategorized