Media'ZBiz!

The content industry is worried about distribution becoming free. This is a global phenomenon. The more broadband we have the better devices, the more the push towards sharing without payment is clearly there.

BBC News in their yesterday’s Q&A, Internet Piracy Plans highlights the principal issues:

The creative industries estimate that six million people in the UK regularly file-share copyright content without permission, costing the industries revenue that they cannot recoup.

In 2007, an estimated one billion music tracks and 98 million movies were shared illegally. A report by analyst firm Forrester recently reported that 10% of all internet users in the UK share files illegally. The figure for Europe is 14%.

Will banning persistent file-sharers work?

The creative industries believe illegal file-sharing is almost endemic while the government has set a target of reducing the problem by at least 70% in the next two or three years.

The difficulty is that the problem is a moving target. More persistent illegal file-sharers are already beginning to use software which masks their IP address while online, and the files being exchanged are encrypted, so it is harder for ISPs to use DPI technology.

Stephen Garrett from Kudos, the firm behind Spooks and Ashes to Ashes, warns that illegal file sharing threatens the existence of hit and quality TV shows.

Gerd Leonhard, from MediaFuturist, said in a recent interview:

… On the other hand, the content industry has, to a very large degree, refused to license the content in so many new ways that are being asked for, starting with imeem and YouTube, and MySpace originally. The refusal to license has essentially created a vacuum to where everyone rightly then also says if we can’t actually do it legally, we have two choices which is to quit or to do it without permission. Then you have companies like imeem and MySpace and YouTube initially doing it without permission.

…The discussion about solving this problem with technology is nothing but a fig leaf because it will never work. In a democracy, it’s not actually technically feasible. If you imagine this, then I get disconnected from the web for downloading and I go to my neighbor and use his Wi-Fi.

….It’s basically not a technology problem. It’s a structural and licensing problem. It’s basically a business problem. Whenever you try to solve a business problem with technology, like we have with DVD region coding, and those kinds of things, you end up really going against the consumer and sacrificing things that otherwise the consumer will hate you for.

The key question really is this; does any of this make any money for anyone? Does kicking people off the web because they have downloaded without permission make any money for anyone?

In a perfectly timed article for Contagious Magazine, Faris Yakob (Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson) debunks the “Content is King” aphorism in favor of “Content is the Republic.”

At the heart of Yakob’s thesis are two ideas:

1) As more consumers produce content, traditional content monetization models (paid, advertising) are challenged. Because digital content is platform agnostic (no distinction between video, news, articles – it’s all content online) it creates room for different monetization models based on context and consumer desire.

2) Align servicing next to content: iTunes has been successful because it made buying music simple and cheap enough. Youtube is experimenting with a new monetization model by allowing users to offer high-quality downloads of videos for low prices.

So is Content 2.0 Content as a Service…

The leading social media company, Demand Media seems to think such wise and offers it.

The company is currently the 15th most visited property in the US according to comScore. Demand Media has created more than one million pieces of content (artciles and videoas), making it one of the largest producers of content on the web today. The content is distributed to an audience of more than 80 million via Demand Media’s network which include LIVESTRONG.COM, eHow.com, Trails.com, Golflink.com and others.

Demand Media seems to have found a new stable and profitable business model, that fits into consumers’ video on demand needs. Here is an extract from a great article published by WIRED MAGAZINE explaining the Demand Media business model:

Volume is also crucial to Demand’s top distribution partner, Google. The search engine has struggled to make money from the 19 billion videos on YouTube, only about 10 percent of which carry ads. Advertisers don’t want to pay to appear next to videos that hijack copyrighted material or that contain swear words, but YouTube doesn’t have the personnel to comb through every user-generated clip. Last year, though, YouTube executives noticed that Demand was uploading hundreds of videos every day — pre-scrubbed by Demand’s own editors, explicitly designed to appeal to advertisers, and cheap enough to benefit from Google’s revenue-sharing business model. YouTube executives approached Demand, asked the company to join its revenue-sharing program, and encouraged it to produce as many videos as possible.

Few days ago, Tom Smith, Managing Director of The Global Web Index, has presented  his company’s insights to the IAB Europe Social Media Research Showcase. The presentation focused on Social Media involvement across Europe, motivations to get online, the impact of social media and the evolution needed from companies and brands. The Global Web Index is a unique research service providing leading edge data, insights and thinking on web behaviour, social media, motivations and impact from 16 key markets and 32,000 consumer surveys.

Tom Smith looked at three big future trends:

The first big trend is that the passive impact of social media is bigger than the active one. By passive we mean the exposure and aggregation of opinions, reviews, ratings and recommendations to impact every web user, regardless of their personal social media involvement. In the short term this is through search; already in 2009, 85% have “searched last month” for information about specific products and 49% for “product recommendations”.  Increasingly these searches are dominated by consumer generated reviews or recommendations. Just try searching for a brand or specific product and you can see this impact. As the volume of consumer content continues to outpace professional, this trend will only increase.

Ultimately this means that consumers will increasingly define the first perception of a brand. In the future this will be dictated by social data being overlaid onto mobile devices through Social Augmented Reality, meaning every consumer getting geo relevant recommendations from their immediate network, distant network and people like them. Social will impact every decision we make.

The next big trends is that we increasingly consume content and information based on the consumer network of recommendation and consumer meta data rather than a professionally dictated decision. A consumer recommendation was the top ranked factor for consumers choosing music or videos. For news it was narrowly behind ‘professional’, ‘from a site I know’ and unsurprisingly along way behind ‘it’s recent’.

The future of content will not necessarily be ‘consumer’ created or ‘professionally’ created; it will however be dictated and controlled by the social environment. Take for example your current television service; the likelihood is that you access it via an Electronic Programme Guide. In ten years this EPG will have recommendations from consumers, top viewed programmes and programming tagged with key words. Viewing will be unpredictable and consumer driven. This will also happen with e-readers in the next 10-20 years, meaning that the “social” will eventually impact all aspects of media.

The last big trend we explored was how our digital networks are much now bigger than our face to face ones, for example in the US, the average face to face network is 21.4 and a Social Network one is 49.3. This changes the nature of our social groups and influences to include people we would have lost touch with, distant friends and people complete unknown to us in real life. This is a first in human history and has a significant impact by familiarising us with strangers and broad networks. This is important as we begin to build trust with other consumers and make big decisions based on what they say and we place less emphasis on what the traditional pillars of society say.

According to a report “Europeans Have Adopted Social Computing Differently” by Forrester Research, 60% of European online consumers are taking part in Social Computing activities such as reading or writing blogs, listening to podcasts, setting up RSS feeds, reading and writing online customer reviews, or taking part in social networking sites.

Highlights from the report include:

• Reading peer reviews is the No. 1 Social Computing activity, with nearly 1/3 of European online consumers taking part in that activity.
• Consumers in the UK and Sweden are embracing social networking sites, while users in Germany and France are far less impressed. More than 1/3 of UK consumers take part in social networking sites, double the European average.
• 9% of all Europeans maintain blogs or publish Web pages. The Dutch are the most prolific, with 15% of users in the Netherlands taking part in this activity.
• The Spanish actively comment on Web sites, while Germans are, by and large, reluctant to offer their opinions online.

There are many reasons for the differing behaviour in Social Computing, according to Forrester Research as countries are at different stages of internet adoption. Only 40% of Spanish consumers and 44% of Italians are online regularly.

Google Social Search is an experimental feature that helps you find relevant public web content from people in your social circle, when you’re signed in to your Google Account. For example, imagine searching for pictures of St Tropez in France and getting a set of photos from your best friend from last summer. It just means more.

Social search, demoed at the Web 2.0 Summit by Google’s VP of Search Marissa Mayer, combines results from your friend’s blogs, Flickr (Flickr), Twitter (Twitter), FriendFeed (FriendFeed), and a wide variety of other social media sites (so long as your friends have connected their social accounts to their Google (Google) profiles) with Google’s regular search results. The feature will go live this afternoon, and can be found within Google Labs.

Here’s a demo of social search from Google:

The social revolution for search is launched. After Microsoft’s Bing announcing last week its search deals with both Twitter and Facebook, Google fired back immediately annoucing its own deal with Twitter and this new ‘Social Search’ feature, on which they seem betting on it in a big way.

Real-time and hyperlocal search are the new battle fronts for search companies, who are trying to make results more personalised and relevant for users.

An additional video is as well available here.

Read Write Web ran last month a series of posts outlining the 5 biggest Internet trends of the year: Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, which main points have been compiled into a single presentation available below and on Slideshare. They think these trends show that we are indeed at an inflexion point of the Web, as Tim O’Reilly noted at the Web 2.0 Summit this week.

ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends in 2009

View more presentations from Richard MacManus.

Like every year, Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker does her presentation of Internet trends. Like last year, mobile is a big trend this year. The overall message was that financial markets have rebounded now and that tehnology is relatively impressive. Here are some highlights from Meeker’s presentation (full report here):

Find out all the news coverage from the Web 2.0 Summit here.

Screen Digest pointed out that the ad load (number of ads shown per programme) on web VoD services is approaching broadcast levels.
‘VOD on cable TV is an opt-in medium and that means viewers are engaged’ says Daisy Whitney in her New Media Minute video report:

Simon McGrath, CMO of SeaChange International has said the following in February:

Relevance is the key to success here, as in so many other areas of marketing. It’s possible for marketers to place ads in context for a viewer by mining viewing information available from operators using advanced VOD advertising platforms to source the right ads for the right viewer, down to zip codes. Content owners – the networks and cable operators – have opportunities to work more closely with media buying agencies and their advertising clients to reach audiences on what is arguably the best screen in the house, the TV. VOD ad platforms support a variety of ad formats, from traditional embedded ad spots to ad overlays, bookends and even long-form, on-demand ’showcase’ ads that deliver information and some degree of interaction. And it won’t be long before an AdWords-type clickable link can take the viewer from a traditional ad to a showcase spot that delivers deep information about a product the viewer is really interested in.

But wait – don’t time-shifting viewers skip the ads?

Reports vary widely on the percentage of viewers who use their DVRs to skip ads. The good news here for marketers, according to Capgemini’s 2008 report on addressable advertising, is that many viewers who watch VOD appear to be willing to watch ads inserted into VOD programming (76% prefer to watch ad-supported content as opposed to 23% who prefer to watch paid content).

VoD will most probably shake up the TV ad market, but will ultimately lead to a better viewing experience and a highly targeted, accountable medium for advertisers. The advanced targeting methods and interactivity used around VoD on the web cannot be ignored by broadcasters or advertisers and will set the standards as VoD becomes more prevalent in our living rooms.

As many of us, more and more we are relying on Twitter as our source of news and article links. A new site, The Twitter Times had the idea of filtering all those news and links from tweets of the many people you’re following and have put them in an easy-to-digest newspaper-style form. Watch their video. Their service is currently in beta.

Basically, The Twitter Times looks at all the people you follow on Twitter, finds their tweets with links in them, and creates a custom newspaper for you based on those links. But it’s not just a straight stream of stories based on how recent they are, instead the service looks at how many people have linked to the article, both in your social circle and outside of it.

I found this great little Flash App (which is in constant development) on Gary Hayes‘ blog, showing how active & dynamic the Social Web is.

The social web has exploded in the last year and below are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’  is based on (many will be updated!).

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Some might still wonder why using Social Media will help businesses to better communicate.

The evolution of technology, social tools, and ease of access are driving rapid advancements in communication. People like to play, create, share, and comment about companies and their brands. The fear about letting people “in” to their brand, so to speak, can be looked at one of two ways. Companies can either be fearful of what people may do to their brand, which “they” will do anyways, or, companies can celebrate that people are interested in their brand, products, and services. Companies should listen to what people have to say, they may learn something. Companies should engage people in their business challenges, they may solve them for them.

In her latest presentation Laurence Borel reminds us of what Chris Anderson Editor of Wired Magazine have said: ‘Your brand is what Google says it is, not what you say your brand is.’ Laurence points at the 4 Ps of social media marketing: People, Participation, Publishing and Page rank.

David Cushman thinks that the phrase ’social media’ should be deconstructed into two words social + media, as the focus should be 90% on the social and 10% on media.

That doesn’t mean there’s no role for the media side. It plays a critical one, without which the social doesn’t get to happen – but it does reflect where the value lays, who creates it and how.

Social =

• The social technologies that connect us
• People
• Groups
• Hands and feet
• Action
• What we choose to do together

Media =

• That which flows through social technologies
• Content
• Distribution
• Mouths and ears
• Conversation
• What they would seek to do to us/get us to do

…

So broadening the listening for what’s wrong with your brand, as experienced by end-users, effectively delivers crowd-sourced improvements – R&D and NPD – in rapid iteration and at small cost.

Make no mistake – there is much more to this than reputation management.

Social + Media generates low-cost NPD, R&D, P2P Marketing, Advertising, Recruitment and all that reputation management warmth, too.

The process adapts the org to the expressed needs of the network (people) – it transforms your organisation into one in which the greater part of its energy is generated from beyond the organisation – and one in which that increased energy nourishes a growing, changing and responding org.

In the wake of her high profile promotion of AMC’s “Mad Men” show on Twitter, Carri Bugbee has built a Twitter-based ad agency (Big Deal PR) for entertainment clients.

Last February, the first annual Shorty Awards honored Mrs. Bugbee’s “MadMen’ character tweets as the year’s best Twitter advertising campaign. Find out more about the details of how she did it in this video interview by AdvertisingAge.

Has the digital revolution got you a little worried? Confounded? Hopeful? Uh…RUINED? Watch The Chaos Scenario video on thriving in the Post-Media Age.

The Chaos Scenario from Greg Stielstra on Vimeo.