Sep 09
27
Making Money From Content – The Real Story
Last week I was on a panel at an AIMIA conference which was about commercializing video.
Through the day there were presentations from a whole bunch of people, as you would expect. But as they were talking I started thinking, “This is a bunch of hogwash”. Now there were some people there who presented some pretty interesting stuff, so I don't want to disparage all of them…
But the thinking led me to this conclusion:
The people presenting were all talking about themselves and how they make money, and none of them were providing any information of any kind that could be useful for anyone who wanted to get in on the game. Now that is probably all you expect at events like this.
Like the lawyer who was on a panel talking about rights issues. He was quite open about the fact that the way things are you need to have some very smart lawyers to understand the contracts relating to video exploitation in a digital environment, and how good that was for his profession. Nothing wrong with that idea – after all its just good old capitalism. But the reality was that he wanted to share with everyone how he was making money out of video by being a good lawyer, not how his clients were making money out of video by his work…
Now maybe I heard it wrong, but that is certainly the impression I had.
Then there was the guy from ABC Enterprises. He was pitching to all young film makers the benefit of getting the ABC to handle licensing – and giving them a big share of the revenue. Now I happen to think that this is a pretty good idea – a serious digital rights aggregation play that is.
Then there were the mobile operators. Their presentations were about how they were serving up video to people and writing cheques to the content owners. But it was actually all about them making money out of video – not about how they could help new media producers…
And then there were people such as the guy from NineMSN who bandied about how video was going to be the big driver behind NineMSN in the next year and well NineMSN was doing… While he was talking I pulled up the alexa.com numbers on NineMSN and what it looked like to me was that this business is on a slow downward trend in terms of page views, time spent on line and all the key indicators. So I'm not sure what growth means over there at NineMSN, but it didn't look too promising to me…
One guy on a panel talked about a rosy future when there would be devices that enable you to play content downloaded to your PC on your TV…. I was amazed that this was something that is going to happen in the future, because I have one of those thingies that Tom bought for me at Aldi for 99 bucks… Amazing how fast the future comes along these days isn't it.
When I got on my panel I talked a bit about how set top boxes were never going to be of consequence because people don't want to pay for yet another box unless it is really cheap, and how what people want is free movies and now, and how that is what they are already getting….
I talked about how content makers have to stop fantasizing about how to make direct revenue streams from video. And have to think about things in an holistic way, about what the overall entertainment offering is….
A good idea that captures people's attention is what makes exciting and successful content.
Making content free enables it to travel faster and further giving it the potential to create more excitement for its brand…