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Here then is part 3 of the full interview transcript with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the founders of the Asian Media streaming site Dramafever.This section deals with issues of audience measurement and engagement metric, as well as the challenges and opportunities licensed online video platforms face in light of the many unofficial sources of content out there.

Part 1 and part 2 of the interview are available, and the rest will be up soon.

And again, for an introduction to this case check here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: One of the big questions that always comes up is how do you measure audience engagement for advertisers?

Seung: Actually, that’s very easy for us. We have a video platform, so we know basically when people hit play and when they drop out. Mind you, all of our videos are pretty long, about an hour long each. And looking at all the aggregate stuff from traffic to date it was shocking. About half the people stay on until about the 90% of the video. On most video sites I think people drop off after about the first minute or so, but what we’re finding is that our drop off rate is very minimal, every 10 minutes 10% drop off, every five minutes another 2% drop off. We’re finding that about half the people are watching the whole episode every given time. So that’s just on the per drama episode basis and we’ll have to do more research but based on what we’re seeing now, our engagement rate is one of the highest on the internet from a video site perspective. These are very addictive dramas from what you’ve probably personally experienced.

Suk: When you talk about how do you measure audience engagement, what sort of advertisement are you referring to? Banners? Or TV ads? Or mostly online or other platforms?

Xiaochang: I mean, whatever you guys are using. Part of the question is just what sort of numbers are you presenting to your advertisers to tell them ‘this is the amount of people who are paying attention’ to your content?

Suk: It’s interesting because different metrics apply to different advertising platforms, so when you’re talking about impressions on a banner it gets tricky because it depends on the clicking of the banner and so forth. That’s when click-through rates when click through rates become a measure of ROI. When we’re talking about video ads, the conversation with the agency changes a little bit because although click-through rates are asked because they’re curious about what the regular click-through rates are, but what’s understood it that when these ads show up, 100% of the attention is focused on the ads. You cannot click forward, you cannot stop the ads, and if you want to watch the content — and 50% remain until the 95th percentile — you are watching the bulk of the ads. For branding opportunities, it’s as good as it gets in terms of getting attention and relate that particular advertisement to that particular audience.

Seung: Just to add to that, the way we’re distributing videos right now is pure streaming. This is not one of those things where you click play and you wait for the whole thing to download and you go away. Our site doesn’t work like that. It’s only streaming the bit of information you’re looking at at the moment, so if you click pause, that’s not getting accounted for in the engagement metrics. That’s why we’re very pleasantly surprised at the level of engagement that we’re having because these are long videos and to have 50% of the people stick through the end is pretty interesting.

Xiaochang: Where do you think the appeal of this content is for your audience? What makes Asian dramas, or Korean dramas, different from what else is out there?

Seung: I think for the most part, the stuff that we’re showing isn’t just any type of content. We’re curating some of the blockbusters from Korea, and certainly it’s heavily geared towards content that’s proven pretty popular throughout Asia. I think the common thread through Asian dramas and telenovelas and so forth is that it’s somewhat of a refreshing change from what you’re getting in American media. The story lines tend to be, for the most part, wholesome. They’re very engaging and it’s very linear — you can’t start from episode 24, you have to start at episode one and the story kind of pulls you in so that you watch the whole thing. The content itself has proven throughout the world that there’s tremendous appeal in it. What we’re proving here is that in the US where this content hasn’t been distributed in a way where the mainstream has been exposed to it and we’re hoping to be the platform that does that.

Suk: I would that it’s not that the content is better or worse. It is what it is. But we know that there’s a demand for it and we want to make it available in a legal way.

Seung: We had some initial assumptions before we launched our beta, and the whole idea was always to take information as we were getting it and be able to adapt and add new features. So when we lauched beta, we basically had one goal and that was to prove that there is a market for this by providing by far the best experience for viewing Korean dramas online right now. As you can see it’s pretty high quality. There’s almost no wait time. We feel pretty good about the results we’ve seen. It’s only been about a month and we’ve kept it pretty under the radar. We’ve only engaged the select sort of bloggers that cater to this audience. Very niche blogs. And while working with them, we got about 13,000 beta registrations within the first month, which is pretty good. And there’s an additional 20,000 – 30,000 people who came to our site who didn’t register and I think that’s the experience with closed beta in general. I think it shows that even with minimal marketing to date, and with a very small base of content, we were able to prove that there is a demand for all of this. I don’t want to extrapolate too much from a limited sample pool, but we’re getting lots of feedback from people and we feel good that this could easily spill over into somewhat of a mainstream audience based on what we’ve seen so far.

Xiaochang: If the does spill over into a mainstream audience, do you see it going on to some broadcast channels? Do you think will be different sorts of distribution channels for the content that’s not just online?

Seung: That could be. What our content licensers decide to do on their own is ultimately up to them. What we’re focusing on with Asian media companies is to offer them new audiences, to create a platform for them to monetize existing content. So we’re fundamentally web-focused. We want to create a destination site where people can experience the best content from Asia in an english-supported format so people can understand it.

Xiaochang: One of the appeals of sites like Mysoju and sites like d-addicts is that there’s such a wide array of content and this is one of the things that limited the rental circuit and certainly limited the broadcast channels in terms of limiting their audience, so where do you think you guys fit in with that? I mean, it does take time to get licensing deals and you can’t provide the range of content and be as responsive as the fansubbing groups who can turn around content in a day after it airs on TV in Korea.

Seung: That was one of our biggest concerns going into this. We started up the site with basically 10 titles. Even now we only have 14 titles and all of our titles are stuff that’s already been aired and a lot of people have already consumed it throughout the web. But in spite of the fact we have a very limited selection, we’re still able to get 13,000 beta registrations in month one. We’re getting consistent traffic everyday and we’re getting consistent feedback. A lot of this is people who’ve already watched the same content on mysoju but they want to watch it again. There’s also a lot of people who always felt a little weird going to an illegal pirated site, so they come to our site.

Suk: Your question is very interesting. There are other sites that have a wider variety of content, and immediate content that is broadcasting right now. How can we compete in that market? What Seung said it’s right — there are people who come to our site because of the better quality and because we’re a legal site. It’s exponentially harder to do things legally. The assumption that we made in the beginning, that we still hold to this day, is that going forward, maintaining these illegal sites will be harder and harder to do. From two different points: the first one is the advertising model. When you have an illegal site, you cannot bring direct sponsors to that site. You have to live by the advertising network that is willing to sponsor sites that infringe on intellectual property laws and so forth. The second one is that most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, they have to base a lot of their infrastructure on existing platforms. Mysoju loads all of their videos onto Veoh, youtube, etc. These companies also need to abide by much more stringent rules and regulations meant to protect IP, so if there is a site that consistently uploads material that doesn’t belong to them, it is their responsibility upon notification to take it down immediately.

Seung: I think Suk is addressing very good long term considerations that ultimately favor out business. You’re addressing very real concerns that we have, which is that we’re competing with these guys that basically have none of the hurdles that we face because they’re doing it illegally. But in the first month of our beta, we’re competing head-on with these guys. The illegal sites are still up and running, they’re running the same content that we have, and yet in spite of it we’re getting consistent traffic. And in fact, we’re adding new content every week and we’re noticing that every time we add content, we’re getting a spike in traffic. For all these reasons we feel pretty good that even though we’re at a competetive disadvantage when it comes to content selection, the simple fact that we’re offering an experience that is clearly superior to the illegal sites out there, that’s winning over an audience. And we feel that as we add more content, the audience will come, because they’re already coming with just 12, 13 titles.

[Screencap from hugely popular Korean Drama "Boys Over Flowers"]

Here then is part 2 of a multipart full interview transcript with Seung Bak and Suk Park, the founders of the Asian Media streaming site Dramafever. In this section, Seung and Suk talk about surprising audience demographics that reveal that the audience for Korean dramas might be more broad and more diverse in the US than previously imagined by the Broadcast networks.

Part 1 of the interview was posted last week. Keep an eye out for more of the interview in coming weeks as I get around to transcribing the recording.

And again, for an introduction to this case check here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: How did you go about approaching advertisers about this?

Suk Park: Advertising: it’s tricky. Right now, we’re using a bigger agency because our traffic is still small, being a closed beta. What we’re doing right now is we’re using the revenue from the Ad Network for the beta stage, and when we launch the full site later this year, we’re building direct relationship with the agencies and the advertisers to bring them in. We actually don’t need that many advertisers now because in the first couple of months the traffic won’t be that substantial.

Xiaochang: Along those lines, what do you tell your advertisers your target audience is? Who do you see as being the bulk of dramafever viewers?

Suk Park: That’s a great question because there’s current a couple of ways to analyze our current traffic. The licensing partners really care, as 40% of our audience is non-Asian. It’s a very easy way for individuals, without premium international TV satellite channel, or without having to go to sketchy Koreatown supermarkets to rent these DVDs, to access this type of content. So as a way of introducing their content into mainstream America, it’s a very low-risk offer for them.

Seung Bak: The current state of the market we found for the Korean broadcasters in this country is that their primary audience is basically Koreans, Koreans who are heavily geared toward the first generation. And their distribution, like Suk mentioned, are basically cable channels and supermarket DVD rentals. And here we’re coming out with this interesting concept and telling them that we’re going to take all the stuff they’ve already aired, to start with, and then we’re going to bring and introduce them to all this new potential audience, which is a very exciting prospect for someone like MBC. We’re talking about people who normally don’t consume this content, or if they do consume it it’s through illegal channels which they have no control over whatsoever. So one of the strongest value propositions we bring to the table is that we are broadening and expanding the audience in ways that they couldn’t in the current state. And as Suk just mentioned, we’re looking at the beta registrations and even we were somewhat surprised. We expected a lot of non-Koreans to sign up for this service, but I’ll say a very small minority are Korean-Americans, with the vast majority being other Asians and a lot of non-Asians.

Xiaochang: So the previous distribution channels seem to be limited in that they could only target what they already knew existed as an audience.

Suk Park: Now, mind you, because these are numbers based on a closed beta, there’s also a discrepancy with small numbers when we do any type of analysis. What’s interesting is that we can clearly assume that people who are registered for the beta are enthusiasts for this content. It turns out there was a lot of demand for this product outside of the first-generation Korean demographic, which brings us to what do we tell the advertisers? Our first iteration that was you would be able to brand yourself within the Asian-American population, or the Asian immigrant community in the US. And now we have upgraded to two basic concepts. One is the female audience — over 75% percent of the audience is female. So everybody who wants to attract a female audience, we would be a very good destination for branding and advertising. The second is an audience that we call Asian-content enthusiasts, but it’s an audience that watches international movies and international content outside of what would be classified as mainstream in the US.

Xiaochang: So you’re slightly changing the message to advertisers as you’ve seen a lot more non-Asian audience share come in, or was that the plan form the beginning that you would broaden it?

Suk Park: There was only a certain degree of what we could plan for from the beginning and a certain need for adaptability. We’re now adapting to what the reality is. The audience isn’t 90% or 100% Asian, it’s a wide spectrum of individuals. A lot of them female, that’s for sure, but a wide spectrum of age and race.

Xiaochang: Can I ask how you measure your audience?

Seung Bak: At the most direct level, we know how many people are registering and the information they use to register. Right now, we’re not asking people for a whole lot of info, just their gender and their birth date. But there’s a lot to be learned from the type of feedback they’re giving us and we’re getting a lot of feedback. And you notice that just by looking at names — and this is a very imperfect way of looking at it — but based on our sample, there are a lot of non-Asian last names in there. And even account for people having either been adopted, or interracially married and there’s still an overwhelming number. And we have a facebook group, which has around five hundred members right now, and if you look at the images of people who are leaving comments, we’re seeing caucausian ladies from the midwest. There’s a lot of non-Asian people in the facebook group as far as people writing on our walls. We’re still seeing a lot of Kim’s, Li’s, and Park’s, but they’re definitely in the minority.

[interviewer's note: this next bit is from a little later in the interview, but I decided to put it here for thematic continuity]

Seung Bak: We knew that there were a lot of Chinese and Filipinos and Asian demographics interested in this, but we really didn’t expect non-Asians to be big fans. We were hoping that we could get a lot of these people to watch this, but we were pretty surprised that even in the initial beta that there were people who you wouldn’t expect to consume this stuff who were actively consuming dramas. And they’re consuming dramas right now in a way where you kind of have to jump through hoops to watch them. Mysoju.com is a good example. I mean, these guys are blatantly ripping content left and right from every major Asian company out there, and if you notice they break stuff off into parts and if you’re watching something, there’s parts missing, the subtitles are weird, the quality is different because one part is on Veoh and another part is on Youtube and so forth. Yet people are still watching it. And there’s another set of people who are basically downloading through bittorrent. You click download before you go to bed and when you wake up you have a new drama to watch and then they go and find some fansub on a different site and figure out how to merge the two. So in spite of all these problems, there’s still a fair number of people who are consuming content this way. So the assumption was, what if you make this site very easy to use, what if you make it very high quality, and what if you just make the overall experience great. You could probably grab that audience and get more, and we’re starting to see some of that even at this very early stage.

I’ve been a somewhat inconsistent updater since I started this blog and this is due almost entirely to the research vortex that has consumed my life, which is more commonly known as my MIT master’s thesis. As some of you may (or may not) know, a significant portion of my energies right now are devoted to project that looks at the circulation of Japanese and Korean dramas through fan-organized (and frequently unauthorized) channels as a way to talk about trends in globalization, the transnational movement of media, and emergent forms of audienceship and participatory practice.

I will be presenting some of the work very soon, both at a CMS internal review, and at Media in Transition 6. While a lot of the work may be a little too involved and theoretical to be of immediate use to most, I’m putting the abstract here in case anyone is interested.

It is commonly accepted that media and communication technologies play one of the most pivotal roles in the complex system of practices and developments broadly termed “globalization.” Similarly, the increasing speed, volume, and scale of transnational circulation has been one of the most dramatic shifts in the media landscape, creating what Appadurai has dubbed global “mediascapes” that are reshaping the way we understand audiences and cultural formation. While the rise of massive global commercial media enterprises lead to renewed vigor around discussions of the dominance of the “West” upon the “Rest,” the increasing portability, transmitability, and reproducibility of media has helped to generate a grassroots globalization often discussed in terms of diasporic media audiences and all the ways, formal and informal, authorized and unauthorized, that migrant populations circulate and engage with media from the “homeland,” create deterritorialized social imaginaries that transcend national boundaries and form complex hybrid cultural identities.
However, with the emergence of internet technologies and increasing participatory audience practices online, these mediascapes have now become networked. Increasingly, individuals are radically participating and collaborating in the selection, (re)production, and circulation of texts and images that shape the very social imaginaries they inhabit, making them not only collective, but collaborative, and opening the space up to greater range of motivations and practice that can no longer be sufficiently described using old models of diaspora or imperialism. How the increased visibility and complexity of transnational media flows and the audience practices around them complicate the models of diaspora and globalism. What new (hybrid) models emerge when we take into consideration the interplay between diasporic communities and fan communities and how do the circulation and consumption practices afforded by new media technologies inform, and can in turn be informed by, the conditions of diasporic media audienceship?

In examining the flourishing online fandom around the circulation of East Asian television drama, we may begin to address some of these questions. While more traditional channels of distribution targeting diasporic audiences are floundering, the popularity of these dramas through unauthorized fan networks has grown exponentially. Rather than filtering content based on a strictly diasporic audience target, these communities are formed around the content itself rather than a pre-determined motivation and are involved in every step of the distribution process, from subtitling and selecting content to the speed or torrent downloads and promotion. Within this space, a diverse range of audience conditions and practice — diasporic populations, fans, pop cosmopolitans — come into contact with one another simultaneously shape the types of content available which, in turn, shape the “community of sentiment” they inhabit. What results is a mash of hybrids that, rather than signaling a sort of unproblematic fusion, maintains the productive tensions and contentions, creating more amorphous, conflicted, complex systems of identity and community formation.

My purpose is not to undermine the significance of historical conditions in relation to media and cultural consumption, nor to replace discourses of diaspora and media globalization, but rather to ask how other models of participation and fandom might intervene and aid in describing audience practices that do not so neatly fit within any pregiven category or single axis of identity. From there we may begin to map some of complex social, technological, and textual entanglements of cultural negotiation in an increasingly global media age.

(credit: images used under CC license from cayusa)

“The idea of a pure gift is a contradiction.”
– Mary Douglas

“Free” is a term that has come into vogue in recent years to describe many of the systems of information and services made available in the so-called new media landscape. In 2008, Wired.com editor Chris Anderson proclaimed “free” to be “the future of business” (Anderson 2008) on the web. But the word “free” means to be exempt from something, so in calling these things free, we need to be able to answer the implicit questions of what, exactly, are they free from?

“Free,” in many cases, has been conflated with “no-cost,” with the suggestion that the web is rife with free goods and services — free email, free social networks and video hosting sites, free content and information — because we don’t have to pay for them. The Free Software movement is a great example of a thoroughly-considered use of the term that addresses its multiple implications, both economic and ideological. But for the most part, “free” in popular marketing discourse is commonly assumed to be a measure of monetary value. And though the specific uses of “free” deployed by Free Software is outside the focus of this piece, there’s certainly an important lesson to be learned from an old joke amongst users of Linux: it’s only free if your time isn’t worth anything. This joke gets to the heart of why the term “free” is problematic for describing the new economic and social models emerging online: to continue to call these things “free” implies that money remains the only thing of value to be given or gained, a proposition that runs counter to how most of these systems are regulated.

As we suggested in “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead,” the flow of information and services online is in many cases regulated in ways similar to those of gift economies, in which things like social prestige, reputation, and cultural capital are the central tokens of value and exchange. These types of exchanges are the ones typically referred to as “free.” However, as Mary Douglas reminds us in her foreward to Marcel Mauss’ foundational text on Gift economies:

“the whole idea of a free gift is based on a misunderstanding. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. The public is not deceived by free gift vouches. For all the ongoing commitment the free-gift gesture has created, it might as well never have happened. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does not to enhance solidarity is a contradiction” (Douglas 2000: vii)

In other words, something that is totally free — something given completely exempt of both cost and social obligation — is extremely undesirable in the context of any economy because it precisely does not enable any form of exchange, monetary or otherwise. A totally free gift — a true give away — is a unidirectional, one-time action, in which nothing is returned.

In monetary, commercial market exchanges, the exchange is “free” in the sense that it’s discrete and does not insist on future ties and obligations to the vendor because I pay for the thing being exchanged. If I get a cup of coffee from a Starbucks, in paying for my coffee, I have severed all further obligation to the place and the person selling me the coffee. In fact, it would be incredibly strange for me to bring my barista a cup of coffee the following day. In non-monetary, non-market (or “gift”) exchanges, the content of the exchange is “free,” but the exchange itself comes with social ties. So if my neighbor invites me over for a cup of coffee and I accept, I don’t have the pay for the coffee, but it would be considered rude if I totally ignore my neighbor later if we were to pass in the hall.

Thus non-monetary — so-called “free” — exchanges are actually the opposite of free in the sense that they actually create ties and obligations between the parties involved in the exchange. These ties may be informal, such as a set of implicit social protocols of behavior such as acknowledging the presence of something you’ve shared food with, or they might be formalized within a Terms of Service agreement. Thus, if I contribute a photo to a flickr community, or upload a video onto Youtube, or write and share a piece of fanfiction, I have given away my work for “free,” but I have opened the door to form social ties with the communities I am engaging in. Similarly, sites like Youtube and Flickr are offering me a “free” service, but establishing an ongoing exchange with me for the contribution of content, audience-draw, and data. That we continue to call these exchanges free suggest that we need to expand our definition of what is valuable.

The fallacy of “free” therefore, comes down in many ways, to a problem of language. However, as we showed in “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead” with the use of the term “viral,” language is never a small matter because it both describes and enacts power. That is to say, the words we use to describe things also influence how we understand them. In the case of “viral” marketing, as we persisting in talking about it as such, we continually obscured user-agency in the passing of content, which prevented people from asking the crucial question of why and for what purposes content circulated. Similarly, if we continue to talk about these systems as “free” or “give away,” we perpetuate the perception that there is nothing being given back, that there is no exchange. In short, it makes it difficult to analyze the changing terms of transactions between businesses and users in so-called “free” models if we persist in speaking as if there is no transaction taking place.

Anderson’s proposed models are a perfect example of the difficulty the language of “free” presents. Anderson himself clearly understands and acknowledges the need to expand the definition of value, concluding that “[Attention and reputation] are the new scarcities . . . Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.” However, he suggests that some of the most successful web companies, such as Facebook and Google, are instances of a two-sided market wherein “the minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that’s two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free” (Anderson 2009).

The problem here is that even as Anderson pushes for moving the economic focus away from monetary value, the suggestion that advertisers are paying in the place of the users puts the emphasis back on money as the only measure of compensation, when in fact the users are paying — they are paying in data and labor that makes services like Google and Facebook work. So advertisers are, in fact, paying for users, not in the sense of paying in place of them, but paying for the value they have handed over to the web company in exchange for services.

My point here then is not to pass judgement on the models that “free” seeks to describe, but rather to point out that the discourse of “free” is locking us into a very limited definition of value that is insufficient in describing the complex and evolving sets of social and economic relations that characterize a significant portion of what generates worth in a digital, networked economy. In continuing to frame these increasing complicated and multi-party exchanges as “free,” we inherently devalue everything that is not money, everything that does not fit within the previously established criteria and business models that we have already proven to be out of date and in many way insupportable in the current media landscape. And in doing so, we continue to speak as if social worth, brand goodwill, fan advocacy, is still somehow “surplus,” just a byproduct or precursor to the real return, when what we need to do is recognize that these things are the exchange. What is happening is not a giveaway, it is another form of exchange operated under a new set of standards and regulations, and it is not until we recognize this that we can begin to examine what those standards and regulations are, and how they are formed and negotiated.

References

This was later cross-posted to the Convergence Culture Consortium blog

A funny thing happened on my way to check out the new Skittles homepage-as-social-media-experiment that’s been generating all sorts of attention over my twitter feed. I went to the homepage, and in my sleep deprived idiocy, entered today’s date in their terms of service agreement instead of my birthdate.
And since Skittles decided to take my word for it that I was born today, it deemed me underage and thus not the appropriate audience for it’s free-for-all social media aggregation scheme.

While it was indeed my own oversight that got me blocked from their page, the block speaks to the underlying problem with this stunt, which is that while the idea seems interesting, the execution and practical application might fall somewhat short of potential.

There is, of course, the technical side in which their terms didn’t manage to catch that I’d entered an impossible birth date. But beyond that, there are other practical issues, such as the overlarge navigation console pointed out by Stan Schroeder at Mashable. Moreover, as Christopher Carfi astutely observes in his blog, with no way to regulate the signal/noise ratio, the site runs the risk of people loosing interest because of the sheer volume of content.

However, what interests me is that my mistake this morning presents a dilemma that has yet to be discussed in the first flush of interest and excitement over Skittles.com’s new strategy. For all intents and purposes, in aggregating this content through their site, and thereby putting it under their terms of service, they are effectively taking content that is otherwise open to and created by the public — what is essentially public discourse — and branding it as their own, then resetting the parameters for access.

What in one way appears to be a handing over of control to the consumers to discuss and use the brand as they wish, is in another way an assertion of a measure of ownership. Skittles owns the site and set the regulations and protocols of interaction there, but the site is composed of content created totally outside of those regulations, content created through social relations that did not agree to the boundaries that Skittles requires for its site. In other words, by asserting their right to not only aggregate, but then redefine the conditions through which the content can be viewed, Skittles is suggesting that they have some claim over the content by virtue of it being about them.

Of course, though this echoes of the notion of “fan labor,” Skittles’ incursion is fairly minor . After all, your content is still available openly elsewhere, and the terms Skittles has imposed on it seem to only be limited to age to prevent minors from open access to potentially objectionable content, which is a perfectly understandable, if somewhat ironic, concern. But it makes you think: in talking about Spreadable media, we had always been so focused on instances of individuals and communities appropriating and claiming ownership of the content of corporations for their own ends, but media spread is by nature multi-directional, so we can only expect that it would work in the other way as well. Is it different when companies appropriate content created by individuals for their own purposes?

And while this stunt certainly generated the attention it was looking for, is any of that sustainable? It is merely a flash of PR hand-waving or does Skittles actually have an idea of how they want to begin facilitating relationships between both the brand and its audience and between audience members through the brand? And more importantly, is this really the right step towards the kind of relationships they will want to cultivate?

After nearly a year since Henry Jenkins, Ana Domb, and I first unveiled the “Spreadable Media” research in a lengthy and dense (read: we talk fast) presentation at the Convergence Culture Consortium Partner’s Retreat last spring, we’re finally able to begin sharing our efforts in dismantling the faulty metaphor of viral media and moving towards a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how and why media content spreads online.

A condensed version of the roughly 100-page C3 white paper — drafted by Henry Jenkins, myself, and fellow C3 researcher Ana Domb, along with C3 Post-doc researcher Joshua Green — will be running in enormous 2,000 – 4,000 word chunks in Henry’s blog and on the C3 blog. I won’t be running it here, given that it’s already being posted to a blog that I contribute regularly to, but if my very tight pre-Brazil schedule in the next few weeks permits, I will be following along with additional links, insights, and commentary both on the development of the ideas we outline in the white paper as well as new thoughts and contributions from the work we have been doing this year as we dig deeper and wider with the spreadable media model, looking at new ways of thinking about commodity culture, audiences and audienceship, and global medial flows.

The first part of the condensed paper is already up at Henry’s blog here, and focuses on taking apart the current models and metaphors of so-called “viral media”:

“Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture. Arguably, those ideas which survive are those which can be most easily appropriated and reworked by a range of different communities . . . Rather than emphasizing the direct replication of “memes,” a spreadable model assumes that the repurposing and transformation of media content adds value, allowing media content to be localized to diverse contexts of use. This notion of spreadability is intended as a contrast to older models of stickiness which emphasize centralized control over distribution and attempts to maintain ‘purity’ of message . . . The metaphor of “infection” reduces consumers to the involuntary “hosts” of media viruses, while holding onto the idea that media producers can design “killer” texts which can ensure circulation by being injected directly into the cultural “bloodstream.” While attractive, such a notion doesn’t reflect the complexity of cultural and communicative processes. A continued dependency on terms based in biological phenomena dramatically limits our ability to adequately describe media circulation as a complex system of social, technological, textual, and economic practices and relations.”

While it may at first seem like an issue of “mere” language, the decision to analyze “viral” media by first taking apart the metaphor served as a turning point in our research last year, after agonizing months of collecting countless and increasingly slippery definitions of “viral” while constructing increasingly elaborate schema to account for all the various social, cultural, economic, technological, and aesthetic dimensions of the phenomenon. Ultimately, what we came to realize was that “viral” content so often seemed like the product of snake-oil and voodoo because we kept talking about it as if it were. That is, so long as we kept thinking of it as “viral” — and thus totally out of the hands of those who circulated it — we weren’t focusing on the real source and torque behind the circulation: individuals and communities of users with their own motivations and goals.

In discussions that followed a presentation and consequent paper I wrote entitled “From Pathogen to Pass-Along: Towards a Participatory Poetics of Viral Video,” Henry made a note of the slippage between the use of “viral” and its metaphor of infection, and “pass-along,” a concept that handed over greater agency to individual users and we began to think about “viral” videos as a mark of the this transitional phase in the digital media landscape, wherein content “producers” were eager to reap the benefits of user-driven content circulation, but not yet ready to accept the implications of the fact that people were beginning to pass content for their own purposes.

Anyway, for those who don’t want they eyestrain of reading the posts in their entirity, Henry’s first post includes a brief video introduction that Henry gave as the opening remarks at the Futures of Entertainment 3 conference this year. Additionally, you can see a very streamlined version of the original presentation that was retailored for an indie film industry audience that Ana and I gave at DIYDAYS Boston back in October.

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium

Last week I introduced Dramafever, a new content-distribution and community platform dedicated to bringing Asian entertainment content to the US (currently in closed beta) that is posing some interesting questions about engaging niche audiences in an increasingly global media landscape. This week, I had a chance to sit down for an informative phone conversation with the Dramafever founders, Suk Park and Seung Bak, about their goals, their tactics, and how they’re negotiating the space between fan communities and commercial interests.

Expect the full interview transcript in the near future, though for now (and for those of us pressed tight for reading time), after the cut is a brief summation of some of the stand-out revelations on how to approach established communities, unexpected surplus audiences and the broadening appeal of Asian entertainment, and what the future holds for global media flows online.

Asian Drama and Audience Engagement
One of the most provocative and compelling finding Park and Bak shared from their early data, was the fact that there was an unexpectedly large proportion of Asian drama fans and site visitors who were not of any sort of Asian decent. When the two first developed the idea for dramafever.com — they had noticed the enormous popularity of Korean dramas throughout Asia and in parts of the rest of the world, but there appeared to be a gap in the US market, where a majority of licensed Asian content (with Anime being a notable exception) was being distributed predominantly on premium satellite television stations and ethnic grocery stores. Even after taking stock of the flourishing online communities around the unauthorized circulation of Korean and Japanese dramas, they had expected their audience to be primarily Asian-American, and heavily Korean due to their currently all-Korean content and positioned themselves to advertisers accordingly.

What they discovered was that nearly half of their subscribers and fans were not of any discernible Asian lineage, and that the audience for Asian media was far broader than what the limited targeting of broadcast channels and grocery-store rentals suggested.
This finding, though preliminary and not strictly scientific, given the limited numbers of beta-subscribers (estimated around 13,000), fits in line with much of what I’ve found in my own research, regarding the much more ambiguous and diverse audiences in Asian drama communities that cannot be addressed by broadcast channels that target audiences based on a predetermined demographic. Furthermore, it suggests that online platforms are an ideal means to “test the waters” of new national markets and build a following for content without large capital investments, much in the way that unauthorized fan circulation of Anime in the 80s and 90s primed the market for its present mainstream popularity.

Community Relations
One of the seemingly obvious and yet refreshing tactics taken by Park and Bak when launching the project involved extensive familiarity with and observation of some of the central hubs of distribution and discussion around Korean dramas. They realized quickly that there was vast amounts of information available in terms of what dramas were popular with English-speaking audiences and why — they simply had to pay attention.
As a result, they’ve built a philosophy around being open with their audience, and highly responsive, listening to and soliciting suggestions from their users and from existing discussion forums.

Moreover, they seem to have taken on the controversy of monetizing fansubbed content in a straight-forward and thoughtful manner. The problem that other sites have faced with fansubbers, they suggest, is that they’re not in open communication with fansubbers when their fansubbed content is uploaded. The fact that these sites then make money from that content then exposes fansubbers to legal risk, without any consent or benefits on the part of the fansubbers. Dramafever.com seeks to avoid these problems, which often stir up bad blood between distribution sites and their audience base, by not only having licenses for the content (thereby negating the legal risk), but also opening up negotiations with fansubbers from the very start in regards to compensation and use of materials.

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

The future of global content
When asked about where they fit in between struggling satellite TV stations with their premium prices and limited content and fan-organized drama communities able to offer an immense range of unauthorized content, the pair stressed sustainability and quality as goal. They point out that unauthorized sites are wildly popular in part because they are filling a very real market need that wasn’t being seen to by licensed distributors. In comparing the situation to American mainstream media before readily available legal download sources like hulu.com, apple, and netflix, they suggest that the audience will follow the availability of content and the quality of experience.

“Even though we are at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to of content selection, we’re offering an experience that’s clearly superior to the illegal sites out there that’s winning over an audience,” Bak says, noting that they’re already seeing consistent traffic even in the closed beta stage, with significant spikes whenever there is new content uploaded.

More to the point, they suggest that these illegal distribution sources might not be sustainable in the long run. Not only does their unauthorized status prevent sites like mysoju.com from developing major sponsor relationships for revenue, “Most of these sites, because they are smaller operations, have to base their existing infrastructure on existing platforms” says Park. As a result, as sites such as Veoh and Youtube crack down on IP violations, content is lost, creating inconsistent user experiences.

Ultimately though, as much of what we discuss at C3 has shown, the audiences aren’t just getting content from any single distributor. “I think if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game,” says Park. Emails from viewers and other observation suggest that people who have already seen dramas from one site will watch them again on dramafever.com, thanks to the quality of video and the ease of use. “We’re not trying to become d-addicts or mysoju or these other places where people are hanging out. We’re trying to compliment the overall ecosystem of Asian entertainment consumption in this country.”

Some thoughts as Dramafever develops
The platform, of course, is still in development. They’re working out some bugs and implementing community-oriented interactive features. A couple of things on my wishlist as they move forward:

– Ability to share and embed clips and images taken from the videos, and easy screenshot tools to use while watching in order to facilitate what are known as “pimp posts” and recaps (like this one for the Korean version of Boys Over Flowers) that play a significant role promoting content.

– Places for fans to add their own self-created ancillary content: recaps, reviews, fanvids, fiction, etc.

– Tools or interfaces to schedule viewings with friends to share the experience, and possibly collaboration with services such as the open-source Boxee that Sheila just posted about recently.

Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium

On of the fascinating results of the increasing speed and accessibility of the present media landscape is that as the global reach of media content broadens, companies are becoming aware of increasingly fragmented, niched, and narrow audience segments. Such as the case with a new online VOD platform, dramafever.com, a hulu-esque service dedicated to providing high-quality streams of television content from East Asia to US audiences with small commercial interruptions from sponsoring advertisers. What makes this site a particularly interesting case to follow, beyond the explicitly transnational dynamic of the media content and audience (though due to licensing, dramafever.com can currently only provide content to users in the US), is the site’s ability and willingness to engage in the fandom as well as the history of the circulation of Asian drama content itself in relation to IP.

While still in beta, the service currently provides over a dozen of the most popular Korean dramas in recent years (including the shamelessly addictive Coffee Prince and My Lovely Sam Soon, the latter of which has been licensed for a remake by NBC), all subtitled in English, with plans to expand into a broader range of television content from across Asia. At the outset, they seem to be taking the right steps in engaging with the fandom at large, having announced the beta through a number of korean pop culture and drama fan blogs and encouraging people to submit requests for dramas that they would like to see the site host. In addition, though most of their subtitles are provided professionally by the content producers and broadcasters, they are also said to be in talks with popular kdrama fansubbing group With S2 to provide subtitles for less established dramas.

This move to collaborate with fansubbers is particularly inspired as fansubbers determine what is available and when, thus determining in many ways which dramas become popular with international audiences. In addition, fansubbing itself and the social protocols around circulating fansubs are taken very seriously within fandom. There has been some controversy in the past with sites such as crunchyroll.com which charges for certain services on the site, hosting user-uploaded fansubs that explicitly state they are not intended for any sort of commercial use.

Dramafever.com is also an interesting step in the well-established legacy of piracy “grey” markets for East Asian drama outside the countries of broadcast, which rose with the circulation of pirated VCDs and then moved online through fansubbing, torrents, and direct download providers such as megaupload and the Korean service Clubbox. While we have seen more traditional, broadcast efforts at tapping diasporic Asian-American audiences struggle in recent years, the online grey market circulation of streaming video and Asian drama torrents and downloads have been flourishing. Dramafever.com seems to seek to create a bridge between the two, bringing the appropriate broadcasting licenses and video quality together with the flexibility and responsiveness of the online environment expected by Asian drama fandom, and how it all plays out will provide critical insight into engaging and monetizing niche audience appeal.