canarytrap.net

[This was originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog]

I’ve been thinking a lot recently on audiences and audienceship, and what it means for media audiences and the communities they form when being part of an audience can increasingly involve collaborating on the (re)production, distribution, and curation of content.

One of the sites that for me really begins to touch upon the participatory potential of new media audienceship is Viikii.net, a collaborative translation and subtitling platform for streaming video that distributes that tasks of translating television shows and other media from around the world across an entire community of users.

The site has been around since early 2008, but I stumbled across it last December, when I realized that fans were joining in a distributed labor network to subtitle a popular Korean drama that was airing at the time within hours of it being broadcast in Asia. The astonishing speed, as well as the decentralized collaboration system caught my eye and I’ve been talking excitedly about the site to people ever since.

The way Viikii.net work is that people can register for the site and contribute to subtitling uploaded video files in over 200 languages, line by line. Users can also edit and revise each other’s translations, refine the timing of the subtitles, or upload new files and put in requests for translations. The subtitles are added then and there, so that viewers on the site can see files even when they’re partially translated, so that you may come across a Korea drama that has had 80% translated into English, 30% complete in Spanish, and so forth. The video files are sectioned, so that people can contribute as much or as little as they want, much like a wiki for adding subtitles rather than general information.

The idea behind the site, according to the articles on the viikii blog was to help generate cultural understanding and language education through the use of popular media, since popular media was a means through which people could come to understand “not only language, but also the social texture that harbors it, the people who use it.” While this idea isn’t particularly novel, what makes viikii.net compelling is its radically collaborative and decentralized structure. Collaboration and decentralization of power and participation is one of the fundamental principles behind the found of the site as well:

“We people are who make, use, and live in all these languages; we built language, and so its barriers, which means that we’re the ones to tear these walls down. No super-power can do this alone, we must come together to do this, hail the potential of joined force! We already see wonders created by collaboration, made possible by WWW” (about viikii)

A significant portion of transnational media audience are no strangers to the phenomenon of fansubbing — amateur, fan-made subtitles for foreign media content. But even though fansubbing is undertaken by people who consider themselves part of the fan audience, it nevertheless creates certain social hierarchies within the community. More importantly, the flow of content is shaped by what content fansubbers decide to translate. Despite the significantly increased ease of fansubbing with digital technology, the time, technical skill, and resource commitment needed to fansub full episodes or entire television series in a timely manner still limited who could contribute.

Viikii.net takes the notion of “by us for us” behind fansubbing to the next level, opening up participation and lowering the barriers of entry significantly for anyone who wants to try their hand at helping translate, and shape the meaning of, the media content that they are consuming. By breaking down the units of contribution into single lines of dialogue, as well as creating a platform through which people could collaborate without having to even know one another, it has opened up the practice to a far wider range of participants, broadening even more — and for more people — what it means to be part of an audience.

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.

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.

Sometimes the cultural ripples of globalization don’t have to be complicated to enjoy:

Sometimes, it can just be about trying to eat a surprisingly large hamburger with a few of your closest stylishly groomed pop star friends on national television while Bruce Springsteen plays in the background and you take turns wearing the leather jacket to match with your food.

[And okay, sometimes it's also about instances of audience-driven, unauthorized circulation of content across national boundaries and markets via fan communities online and transformative audience participation in the form of "amateur" subtitling. But that is one big hamburger.]