In April, ABC announced that some of their prime time shows will be available online the day after they first aired. Not for free, of course, they contain ads that you cannot skip. (This reminds me of the discussion that arose when bloggers found out that Philips is filing a patent for devices that won’t let you skip commercials.
This created a huge discussion in the last couple of week about the future of the (TV-) Networks in a world with perfect digital free distribution networks. Here and here, are two posts that discuss this.
Jeff Jarvis also writes an extensive Post on this topic and claims: Everybody’s a network:
And of course, the networks face no end of competitors in content, as well. Rocketboom now has twice the audience of many cable news shows because the stranglehold the networks had on distribution and audience is over. The audience is on stage. Your customers are your competitors.
So in a way, content is still king, but everyone can now create and distribute content. Distribution is no longer an added value for consumers. Organisations that built their business model around the distribution and ownershop of content need to change their business model now. One way could be, as Jeff writes, to use their expertise to show people where to find the best stuff.
A VC writes about the future of media, about how content needs to be unbundled, micro-chunked and freely distributed.
Jeff goes on:
In the old static-network world, it made no sense to send people to other networks; in the new, fluid world, they’re going to go there anyway, and so the best thing to do is to help them find the best stuff, redefining the value of a network.
In a way, it’s like Google: People go there, in order to be pointed to other websites. They don’t go to Google for „Google content“. Because there is none.
So content should be microchunked, freely distributed and then we need someone to help us find it.
Rebundling is where value capture will happen – at communities, reconstructors, markets, networks – that direct people’s attention to individualized ‚casts. This is where branding will be reborn – and where advertising is already being disrupted, ripped apart, and reborn (viz, Google, PPC, pay per call, etc)
It won’t happen overnight. But in the next few years, rebundling will be the future of connected consumption. Most often, it’s why consumers connect in the first place: why do you think people <3 MySpace, Last.fm, etc?
Newspapers like NYT and WPO made the same mistake Disney is make; ceding market power to players like Technorati, Memeorandum, Delicious, etc; record labels did it, ceding market power to players like Last.fm, Apple, and MySpace; and now, finally, we have TV guys doing it – ceding their market power because they don’t understand the new economics of media.
Content can be created and distributed by anone. But we will need an Audience Relationship Manager to help us through the jungle of information and find what’s relevant for us. At the end of the day, it’s about the scarcity of attention, a big topic nowadays and John Hagel writes:
That is one of the consequences of the growing relative scarcity of attention – anyone who can help audiences connect with the most relevant and engaging content will be richly rewarded.
I just followed a link from the Church of the Customer Blog to a movie on YouTube, which is currently highly popular. It had 9 million views on Friday, when the post was written – now it has 12 million. That is an amazingly quick growing number, if anything. But looking at the rest of the numbers, I started thinking about the numbers of participation.
The video has been viewed 12 Million times.
18245 people put it into their favourites, i.e. found it somewhat remarkable
9340 people bothered to rate it, i.e. even forming an opinion on it
2566 people even went through the effort of writing a comment (and some are just very short!)
These are amazing figures. The number of views in general, but also the number of comments. Heck, it’s a video about a guy doing dance moves to songs of about 20 years of pop&rock history – everyone will have done or seen a couple of these! In theory, there could be 12 million comments.
But of course, there are not that many. Because for any given subject, you will have a small, active audience, and a large, passive audience.
Hence this is one way of getting guestimates of „response rates“ on the web. Other than just responses via comments – because these always existed on many different sites.
I can’t think of too many other sites, where stats on viewings and following responses (favourites, ratings) are that readily available.
In this case, only 0,022% of the 12 million felt like leaving a comment. Nevermind the fact that there are almost 2600 comments for that one post, which is a huge number, the participation is relatively minimal. Or so it seems at first. But maybe this is just a very „normal“ number?
(Mind you, if we speak in marketing terms: there isn’t an offer nor an incentive attached to participating…)
A little bit strange at first, but then again very interesting – and very much inviting to watch it at least twice (which means exposure to this ad of at least 4×30 seconds).
A post at psfk pointed me to the fact that BBC 1 is doing a huge party in Dundee, Scotland, for real, and in Second Life, for virtual. They also pointed me to Wonderland who have some more detail on that party.
I myself stumbled upon that party just a few hours ago, however by accident. I tried Second Life for the first time today and tried to find places with lots of stuff happening.
Sofar, I noticed a lot of Casinos and places for „mature“ events, if you know what I mean. Having spent 2 hours in there, I could easily get the impression the whole place is a giant virtual red light district. On the other hand, I have seen a couple of places that look like good old suburbia, almost like Brookfield, Wisconsin, where I spent a year during a highschool exchange…
I saw many strange things in my first two hours in Second Life – may be I will open up a whole new blog category and write posts just on that.
But back to the topic: I noticed a lot of avatars spending their time at one single location, which turned out to be the BBC Site:
Now it looks rather empty, but when I first got there it was literally packed
I didn’t know at that time that this is a special event – instead I was quite impressed that the BBC does what I considered a sponsorship of a certain „party-location“.
Now, as I know the background, I am even more impressed: they take a real event online into a virtual world to let everyone outside Dundee, Scotland (i.e. everyone) take part in the event.
And they even get some advertising in there – at least some big circular billboards for artists that (I assume) they promote.
There is a new cool Tango Ad picking up the Sony Bravia Ad idea&style – and there even is a fake protest website by the people living in the streets shown in the ad, as Adrants writes.
Citizen reporting will continue to play a large role or even increase in importance with YouTubes new offer for users to upload videos from their mobile phones, as Adpulp tells us.
Sharing your OPML file can offer you a whole new perspective with this site. As you share the OPML of your favourite feeds, this tool can analyse who is reading what and start make recommendations to you based on what other people with similar interests (i.e. feeds in their OPML) read. Could be VERY interesting!
Wo ich sonst so bin...