Oh Good! The Amateurs are leaving!

[Andrew Kimery]

It was only a matter of time before YouTube delved deeper into ‘premium content’ because Google is losing money hand over first on all the UGC (User Generate Content). Hulu does like 2% of the traffic YT does but Hulu is actually profitable because it deals only in content that attracts advertisers, that people are willing to sit through ads for and/or pay a subscription fee for. Views without monetization is just money down the drain and the more popular it is the more money it sucks out since with streaming, unlike broadcast, each view costs you additional resources.

For the better part of the last six years I worked in house at MTV as part of team that primarily created original online content for various MTV brands (Spike.com, GameTrailers.com, ComedyCentral.com, etc.,) so I’ve got a lot of first hand experience of trying to successfully monetize web content. I’m not going to declare myself and expert but certainly experienced. The monetary hurdles are still pretty big. For example, an ad buy for the web is still peanuts compared to even lower end cable because there is no scarcity when it comes to on demand media. On the viewer side, people hate pre-roll ads, won’t stick around for a post roll ad and baulk at paying a subscription. Too many people used to ‘free’ media w/o realizing that it was never free but just subsidized by the ‘old media’ they like to b*tch about. Well, old media can no longer afford to subsidize new media so people will start having to pay if they want the content to keep coming.

The money the top YT earners is certainly good, but they are mostly solo acts with little to no overhead. $100k for a crew of one is very nice money pretty much anywhere in the US. $100k for a crew of 4 most likely means everyone has a day job and a roommate.

Growing up my parents had subscriptions to multiple magazines and the local paper and I think we are headed back down that path with people having multiple media subscriptions (I’m sure many people already do). I think future contracts between content creators and providers will include language that lets the creators sell directly to the public too. For example, HBO selling HBO Go subscriptions to non-cable subscribers with the cable company getting a percentage.

For content distributors the world is certainly shifting but for content creators the ground is moving much less.

[Bill Davis]

[Andrew Kimery] “Growing up my parents had subscriptions to multiple magazines and the local paper and I think we are headed back down that path with people having multiple media subscriptions (I’m sure many people already do). I think future contracts between content creators and providers will include language that lets the creators sell directly to the public too. For example, HBO selling HBO Go subscriptions to non-cable subscribers with the cable company getting a percentage.

For content distributors the world is certainly shifting but for content creators the ground is moving much less.”

Just an off the top of my head note:

The inescapable reality is that in a word increasingly defined by a glut of content – two factors seem to be increasingly important to me.

First, search is critical. And right behind that – curation.

The eventual winners will be those who can assemble resource libraries, not of a million mediocre videos. But the dozen BEST videos on any particular topic.

And I define “best” as videos that provide insight, expertise or entertainment (hopefully, all three) in the most condensed, viewer-respectful package possible.

Those will get bundled, somehow, into places that can charge access to a library that’s more time effective to use than the alternative of sifting through a million instances of crap to find the good stuff.

FWIW.

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[Andrew Kimery]

I definitely agree that curation is a key factor which is why we won’t see the role of media ‘gatekeeper’ disappear. Who performs that role can certainly change but the need to thin the media glut herd is certainly there (YouTube alone gets 72 hours of new content uploaded every minute).