10 Pushy Questions for Scott Karp
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Related Links:
- Publishing 2.0 (ongoing analysis of the convergence of media and digital technology) |
Q 1: In the current tug-of-war between content creators and platform providers/aggregators, who has the upper hand? The platforms, hands down. The content creation business faces a fundamental supply and demand problem. The supply of content that consumers value, across the full spectrum of programming, from serious, high quality professional content to amusing amateur content, is exploding, creating a massive overabundance. The proliferation of platform-based distribution channels, like YouTube, compounds the problem because there are few barriers to distributing all this new content on a mass scale. That doesn't mean that content creation isn't still a viable business -- it's just no longer a highly scalable business that lends itself to the creation of large monopolies, like newspapers or TV studios.
It's no accident that NBC Universal and News Corp formed a partnership to distribute video content on the web, rather than create original video content for the web -- there's already way too much content. That's why the distribution partnerships with AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and MySpace are what crystallized the deal. Few media companies are rushing to create more content -- the entire focus is on creating platforms for aggregation, distribution and discovery.
Q 2: On the heels of the recent Viacom lawsuit against YouTube/Google, do you think all social networking sites like YouTube should be required to filter copyrighted material?
Given the uncertainty over how this issue will play out in court, sites like YouTube undoubtedly need to be technologically prepared to filter at least some copyrighted material. Whether they should, in principle, be required to filter copyrighted material depends very much on what has been posted to the site. It’s hard to argue that posting the full version of video content, whether a music video, TV show, or movie, is not copyright infringement, given that reproducing the entirety of text content does not fit within the bounds of fair use.
The bigger issue is around video “clips,” e.g. whether YouTube should be required to filter a two-minute clip from the Daily Show. On the one hand, there must be some fair use equivalent for video to using one or two sentences from text content. On the other hand, if most or all of the funny clips from an episode of the Daily Show are posted to YouTube, such that the vale of watching the entire episode is significantly diminished, then a line has probably been crossed.
Q 3: Should online advertisers focus on particular content, or on sites that host a variety of content? It depends on the ad format and the marketing objective. Google has demonstrated pretty conclusively that direct response text ads can be optimized through contextual targeting. For display ads that can be generally characterized as "branding" ads, it's not clear that contextual placement is the best way to optimize. Of course, behavioral targeting turns the whole question on its head, by doing both, i.e. targeting based on the user's demonstrated interests, but serving the ads in completely irrelevant contexts.
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'The question for MySpace and Facebook is whether niche communities have specific needs that these one-size-fits-all platforms don't serve well.' |
In traditional ad targeting models, context has always been a secondary consideration, with audience profile being the principal criteria. Google's core search advertising model, which targets based on keywords and consumer intentions, without ever knowing who the consumers actually are, is a completely new paradigm -- or at least the success of the model on such a scale is new. When you throw into the mix online video, which does not have a text based context for automated targeting (outside of tags or other metadata attached to the video), I think it's safe to say that this is still very much a live issue. Q 4: Though MySpace and Facebook remain strong, do you think social networking will become more niche-oriented, or will a MySpace continue to – long term - keep high numbers of traffic and users by diversifying its product? The natural tendency of the Web is to fragment, because the Web makes it easy and cheap to serve niches in a customized fashion. The question for MySpace and Facebook is whether niche communities have specific needs that these one-size-fits-all platforms don't serve well. If the answer is yes, then specialized community platforms will start to draw niche communities away from MySpace and Facebook -- unless, of course, MySpace and Facebook can create new products to serve niche user needs.
It's also possible that the novelty of being "friends" with thousands of people will start to wear off, and users will only care what service their real friends are using. So groups of friends and other communities can migrate to new, "hipper" platforms en masse. Q 5: Will social media sites be stable enough over the long term to build a business on? That is, if a content creator established a business relationship with YouTube today, what are the odds that the relationship could become worthless because another site becomes the "hot" spot?
Independent content creators (AKA “users”) will choose the platform that best suits their needs. If attention is my goal, and I can reach the largest number of people through YouTube, then I'll use YouTube. If making money is more important, I'll use the platform that pays the most. Content creators exist along a spectrum, both in their ability to produce content that is "high quality," i.e. of value to others, and their motivations, i.e. attention, money, etc. Rather than apply the dopey, one-size-fits-all notion of “users” “generating” “content,” we should think of everyone as publishers, with the same range of motivations as traditional publishers.
Q 6: You've commented recently on the possibilities, pro and con, of a paid content model for blogging. What do you think is going to tip the scale, one way or the other, on this issue?
I'm not sure that I would ultimately separate the issue of a paid model for blogging from the issue of paid models for other forms of content. Consumers will pay for content they value, which they can't get anywhere else for free, or in a format that they can't get anywhere else for free.
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'Once you create a legal means with a reasonable price, then most will stop infringing, as has happened with iTune. The same is true of video.' |
To the degree that there is a meaningful distinction for blogging as paid content, it may be around the convention of blogging as the voice and commentary of a single individual. Many bloggers who write about business topics are in fact consultants that charge for their advice. It's not too big a stretch to draw a line between paid consulting and paid blogging. Q 7: How can old media evolve more efficiently in their purported shift to the digital world? Is making content 'free' still at the core of the issue? The real problem for "old media" is the legacy business models. The poster child right now is of course the newspaper industry. The old paper-based business is declining, while the new digital business is not offsetting the decline of the old business. The challenge is -- how do these companies shift the center of gravity to digital without going out of business? No one has yet demonstrated that this can be done without disastrous results for the company. (InfoWorld’s bold move to stop publishing in print will certainly be watched closely.)
Armchair commentators love to say that old media companies "don't get" digital media. But when they look at their P&Ls I think they get it just fine.
Q 8: Can a content owner or publisher extract value from content tagging and Digg-ing?Anything that makes a publisher’s content easier to find and discover has value, assuming the publisher is able to monetize the additional traffic,. That's why everyone has been forced to embrace search engine optimization. Increasingly, content owners do not control the modes of discovery for their content, e.g. search, Digg. So they have to help their content to live and thrive on the network by attaching metadata, e.g. tags, making it readable by machines, and by enabling their audiences to participate in new forms of content aggregation and discovery, e.g. adding the Digg This button.
Q 9: What's the ultimate market for mobile entertainment? Will consumers watch long form programming on a phone or portable? If so, how do the phones and service providers have to change to make that happen?
I have to confess that I have a trouble understanding all the fuss over the mobile entertainment market. In particular, I don't understand the value proposition of long-form programming on a tiny screen. I don't even understand the value proposition of long-form programming on a YouTube-sized screen -- maybe that's why there is so little of it.
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'The mobile market is being driven to a large degree by the assumption that just because something is technically possible on a mobile device, e.g. watch a half-hour TV show, it will have utility.' |
The mobile market is being driven to a large degree by the assumption that just because something is technically possible on a mobile device, e.g. watch a half-hour TV show, it will have utility. Personally, I'm waiting for the day when mobile carriers can eliminate the still pervasive problem of dead zones and dropped calls.First make my phone work well as a phone, then we’ll see about turning it into a TV.
Q 10: Is there an end-point to the current debate over the use of DRM?
It's been technologically possible to illegally copy and distribute various forms of intellectual property for decades (centuries, really). But it's always been at the consumer's discretion whether to abide by the law. The consumer's expectation based on prior technologies—books, CDs DVDs, etc.—is that they owned the content without technical restriction. By removing that outright ownership from consumers, by saying you can use it here but not there, IP owners have destroyed an equilibrium that has existed for decades. On the other hand, that equilibrium was already disrupted by new technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing and YouTube that exponentially increased the impact of any one act of copyright infringement.
Still, the equilibrium is not going to be restored by removing consumer control over the content they’ve purchased—nor by creating a tiered pricing system for DRM-free content, as EMI has done, which keeps lower priced DRM content on the market. The equilibrium will only be restored by creating an environment that allows consumers to generally respect intellectual property in a way that most are inherently inclined to do. When the music industry made it impossible for consumers to buy individual songs, consumers flocked to Napster to obtain them illegally. Once you create a legal means with a reasonable price, then most will stop infringing, as has happened with iTune. The same is true of video. If you limit consumer choices, it's more likely they will try to get what they want via means that infringe on copyrights. Click for more 10x9 Q&As©2008 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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