– musings by Scott Walker

September, 2009

Digital Content Creation / Free Economy / New Media — No Comments
24
Sep 09

Q: What’s the Value of Content?

A: Whatever someone is willing to pay for it.

Not what it cost you to produce or acquire it.

Not what you feel or believe it is worth.

Not what you sold it for yesterday, last week, last month, or last year.

After watching a series of comments on a “hey, here’s how to make free content work!” post yesterday, I was reminded of two things:

  • no demand means no money (simple economics)
  • for a business to be profitable, it must bring something to the market that sells for more than it cost to produce

If the market you operate in changes, especially due to external conditions (consider IBM, Kodak, newspapers), you must change and adapt if you want to remain relevant. If the market no longer values your product/service at a level above your expenses, you have a problem.

There are lots of opinions and statements surrounding the concept of free, but at the end of the day, you have to adjust your business model to accommodate both intra-industrial and external market conditions. Legislated subsidization, complaining that no one understands your value to the world, and suing your customers do nothing to better position your business in the long run.

Yes, for many companies, these are incredibly tough, scary times. Dropping prices, attention fragmentation, and increased competition are a serious combination of challenges to deal with. If companies don’t adapt, some of them won’t be around next year, or they’ll be a former shadow of themselves. But only if they stop adapting.

Change brings both risk and opportunity. You can play defensively and manage risk, act progressively and reach for opportunity, or use a little of both strategies. But ignoring the realities of economics and fundamental business concepts is a recipe for obsolescence.

Copyright / New Media — No Comments
17
Sep 09

Living in a Derivative World

I recently viewed a presentation by The Alchemists (here’s their blog) which included a mashup they made from a Brazilian film. I’ve never seen the film, but having watched the mashup – a hilarious sendup in which the characters are searching for the mysterious “Henry Jenkins” – I have a definite perspective about the original film.

We all approach new media with a unique set of filters, preconditions, and beliefs. These are predominantly the accumulation of a lifetime of our personal experiences, but they also include direct/referential input about the media in question: critical reviews, recommendations from friends, trailers, commercials, etc.

Up to now, it’s practically a given that you experience a new piece of media first through the original/source version, even as you bring your unique perspective to it. Later, you may view a mashup, a satire, a commentary, or some other derivative/referential version (a new media in it’s own right but whose message is framed by the source material it references).

The experience I had, however, was reversed: I saw the mashup first. In fact, I still haven’t seen the movie.

And it’s not the first time this has happened. The World War II film, Downfall, sparked a series of seemingly never-ending mashups, showing Hitler going ballistic over everything from the Watchmen movie to BluRay’s success over HD. I’ve seen and enjoyed several instances of this Internet meme, but I still haven’t seen the original film.

No doubt, my viewing of the original will be affected by this. Instead of watching the bunker scene with tense anticipation, I’ll be trying to recall the exact lines from the mashups.

While experiencing original source media will likely continue to be the norm, first exposure to new media through derivative versions will grow. I believe this will encourage an already frenetic culture of content remixing, even if that means the remixer is creating a derivative work from a derivative work (and on), never using or experiecing the original/source material.

This is, from a very big picture view, nothing new.

Several people (Lessig, Boyle, etc.) have pointed to the current copyright climate as a stranglehold on innovation, a freezing of cultural growth, and a perverse interpretation of physical property rights through the lens of intellectual property. A common refrain is that – until the last century – all culture was derivative in some form.

Changes in copyright law have extended the protection of material well beyond the death of the creator, and the current lack of an effective system for cataloging who owns what rights to what content essentially sentences almost all content to an unending, unprofitable purgatory. Even if you wanted to pay a rights owner for the use of their content, finding them is challenging at best. It’s easier to just move on to another piece of content.

With the advent of technology, people are easily able to remix and share content. And they will continue to do so, even if it’s illegal (even if they don’t commercially profit from it).

No matter what side of the legal fence you find yourself on, the reality is that people are experiencing media in ways content creators no longer control.

Miscellaneous — No Comments
11
Sep 09

Fan-Forced Reader Behavior: DOA

Charlie Anders at io9 recently posted a rant about the segmentation of the science fiction genre, specifically how everyone’s seen the same movies, but it’s hard to find a handful of SF fans who have recently read the same book.

Anders asks:

“So how do you start making particular books into “must reads” for all science fiction readers, regardless of their individual tastes? How do you fashion a “book club” out of the mass of science fiction readers?”

At face value, this seems like a noble goal. The increase in content being generated will continue to grow, but time remains finite. People can only consume so much in a day, but their choices for what, when, and how to consume content continue to grow. Further segmentation of attention and asynchronous niche consumption of content is inevitable.

Anders final comment (“it’s up to us, as readers, to help move the books that move us.”) takes a downstream, grass-roots approach to his question. It’s true, and it’s a great idea.

But isn’t this already happening? Don’t people already talk about what they like with their friends? Don’t people check out Amazon for reviews (and post their own)? Don’t people discuss things online already? Isn’t that why Facebook is working to better integrate personal recommendations to bolster its online network (and trounce Google in the process)? Hasn’t the conversations around certain books simply moved online?

If increasing face-to-face discussions of a particular book is the goal, however, a better and more effective way is likely to come upstream from authors and publishers.

You want to have your novel stand out from the rest and gain simultaneous readership? Here are four good places to start:

1) Write a GOOD novel. Not a decent novel, a good one.

2) Do something different that separates your novel from the others crammed on the same shelf.

3) Give your readers a reason to engage with the book besides reading it and talking about it.

4) Make the book available to as broad a market as possible (consider offering free digital copies).

If authors and publishers did these four things, the fans will take care of the rest – both offline and online.

Digital Content Creation / Free Economy / New Media — No Comments
11
Sep 09

Piracy is Advertising

Two things happened Wednesday that got me thinking about piracy, digital content, and advertising.

The first was meeting Faris Yakob at Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling class at USC. Yakob talked about his experiences incorporating transmedial approaches in his job as the EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson New York and gave this presentation about transmedia storytelling in a converged culture.

The second thing was seeing a post on techdirt.com about Kevin Smith’s take on digital piracy of his products. When asked, “How much money do you think your projects have lost to piracy?” Smith replied:

See, I think “How many more converts did I get from piracy?”

Smith’s comment echoed my own thoughts about digital piracy: it’s a never-ending game of Internet whack-a-mole. I was pleased to see that someone who had achieved success in the entertainment machine agreed with that view.

So, what does transmedial advertising and digital piracy have in common?

I’d like to suggest that piracy is advertising (I won’t go on record and say the reverse is true).

People can’t buy what they’re not exposed to. Piracy gets your product exposure.

Now, the catch is determining whether you make up your “lost” sales (the people who consume the pirated content and never buy) with the “found” sales (the people who purchased your product because they were exposed to it through piracy). There are no hard numbers either way (though there’s some initial research that appears to indicate digital piracy isn’t the death knell of books), but the reality is that if content is good, it will be digitized. If not by the creator, then by someone else.

Even if you don’t buy my argument about piracy and advertising, you’re only alternative is to pick up the mallet and start whacking.

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