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TechCrunch reported this morning that YouTube has added two new video-blocking features to their arsenal for sponsoring partners.

Youtube's new blocking features

The first is a button that allows to easy blocking of duplicate content. By selecting it, partners can automatically block other users from uploading another version of the same content. The second is a geo-blocking tool that effectively allows partners to choose where each video can and can’t be seen based on geopolitical borders (or, more importantly, geographic markets).

While I understand that the move is meant to appease anxious copyright holders, the whole thing still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. These new features might make who has access to content and the context of viewing much easier to control, but doesn’t address the question of what the control is good for in the first place.

The entire point of posting content on YouTube is to get it viewed, linked to, circulated. To generate buzz, conversation, to insert it into popular cultural discourse and make it spreadable. And, simply put, things can’t become spreadable if you don’t let people spread it.

In the paper If it Doesn’t Spread, it’s Dead which I co-wrote with Henry Jenkins and my C3 colleagues Ana Domb and Joshua Green, we explained that content doesn’t spread itself like a virus. Rather, people pass it to one another to communicate things, and in doing so, often have to replicate, repurpose, and reframe the content. However,

Such repurposing doesn’t necessarily blunt or distort the goals of the original communicator. Rather, it may allow the message to reach new constituencies where it would otherwise have gone unheard. C3 affiliated researcher Grant McCracken (2005) points towards such a model when he suggests that the word consumer should be replaced by a new term, multiplier, to reflect the fact consumers expand the potential meanings that get attached to a brand by inserting it into a range of unpredicted contexts of use.

By blocking duplicate versions, content creators are in fact potentially subverting their own interests, blocking out the potential for new markets and constituencies and hindering enthusiastic content promoters that could help broaden their audience.

Moreover, as I found in my research on the rich online circulation community around East Asian TV dramas, with the sheer scope and volume of content available online, even in a niche subject, sites of third-party aggregation and curation are crucial nodes in the circulation process. With the amount of content available, consumers need these site to help filter and organize content according to their interests, and copyright holders can’t always anticipate what the affinity categories might be. By not allowing people to duplicate and curate content, they’re crippling a key activity that helps promote their content.

And finally, nothing makes less sense than geo-blocking. Timed releases into international markets is an invitation for rich unauthorized markets to rise. The transnational flow of media is more and more in hands of audiences. People are coming together to select, reproduce, and distribute the not only collective, but radically collaborative imaginaries that they inhabit. And it’s changing the way media control works, and no one-click feature is going to stop that.

• I’m going to start by carrying over a topic from the last weekly round-up: Waern over at Pervasive Games does a great break down of what went wrong with Toyota’s Your Other You campaign, tracking its development history and explaining some of the problems in the campaign’s assumptions about its target audience.
• CMS alum and C3 colleague Sam Ford explains the 10 Thing Corporations Can Learn from Pro Wrestling. Much of his advice focuses on insights on how (and why) to understand and respect your audience and their practices in order to engage their loyalty and energy around your product or services.
• Speaking of audiences, Jim Louderback wrote a piece in Ad Age calling for more scrutiny online viewership metrics. The article calls for both a better sense of proportion over what counts as notable numbers, as well as more clarity and transparency over what is getting counted, how, and how numbers are evolving over time. This pairs well with a couple of pieces that came out last month, one by Kristina Grifantini in the MIT Technology Review on distortion in online recommendation systems and the other by MG Siegler for TechCrunch about how useless YouTube ratings are.

• In miscellaneous reading, I’m just now getting around to cracking Sakia Sassen’s now-classic book, The global city: New York, London, Tokyo, which looks at the structural dynamics and strategic formations of transnational centers of commerce and policy.
• And on the topic of globalization, I found the Gizmodo piece explaining the origin of the approximately dozen or so different types of electrical plugs totally delightful and engaging. I learned that all that post-colonial reading really is good for practical knowledge (if a few steps removed) and that El Salvador is the best place to chill if I want a good excuse for never answering my phone or email.
• That little armchair theoretical physicist in me is totally fascinated by all this talk about how the Hadron Collider is being affected by a “malign influence from the future”. While still a theory, I do love the possibility that one day comic book artists and speculative fiction writers will get to go “seriously, what have we been telling you?”
• And speaking of the genres, I just started Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.

Two things for future consumption:

• First a free webinar on November 6th on Moving from Sticky to Spreadable with Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford. The three of them are currently working on a book on Spreadable Media, coming out of the white paper I co-wrote in 2007 along with Henry Jenkins and C3 colleague Ana Domb and Joshua Green. The book is set to feature contributions from a laundry list of C3 researchers and affiliates (myself included), but in the meantime, check out the free webinar for a taste of what’s to come.
• I also just read the first part of a new 3-part play entitled Miraculous Lives by my close friend Trystan Trazon. It’s utterly mesmerizing and densely textured and some of the best work I’ve seen from this amazing young playwright, and I say that not just because we’ve been BFF for nearly a decade. He’ll be having a reading of part 1 at the Bridge Theater Company next week, though I’m not sure yet if it’s open to the public.
• What is open to the public is a reading of Psychomachia by Jennifer Lane tonight, also at Bridge Theater Company, which I will be attending. I’m generally not a theater person, but I’ve heard great things about this piece.
  

In the 5th, final installment of my interview, the founders of dramafever.com discuss their monetization plans for the site, and the unique offering to the kdrama fan community.

Previous parts: Part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

The introduction to the site is here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Xiaochang: How did you come to decide on an add-supported monetization model rather than a subscription model?

Suk Park: Given our research on the existing illegal platforms, the issue was about capturing market share. It seems unrealistic to come out with a pay-per-view model, which was the other alternative, when all this content was being offered for free. So the best approach to capture market-share fast, and away from the free sites seemed to be to offer an equally free site, but with much higher quality and a better user experience to get our brand out. Now does that mean that going forward we might or might not include a premium site without ads? That’s still to be discussed. But given what we’re seeing in the market, we’ve adapted our business model according to that.

Seung Bak: Let me just add to that — I think over time we will offer a variety of ways for people to consume this content because there’s a bunch of people who want to watch for free and will watch ads, and there’s a lot of people who want to will pay for it without ads, and it’s just a function of us trying to figure out how we can provide packages and offerings with people in a variety of spectrums. The real costs associated with different sorts of models — it doesn’t have to be an either/or kind of thing. The right answer is probably something in between and something we have to figure out in the coming months.

Suk Park: One thing’s for sure: we will not get rid of our free offering.

Seung Bak: Yes, there will always be a substantial free offering. This is not a bait-and-switch game. We’re trying to build a real destination site, and there’s always going to be a free component. But there might be an opportunity for us to create some premium offerings that complement what we have.

Xiaochang: So coming out of beta, what sort of tactics will you be taking to get the word out about Dramafever?

Seung Bak: Let me just recap what we’ve been doing. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, our first priority was engaging the early adopters. The early adopters are people who are going to dramabeans and they other sorts of blogs and going to d-addicts and consuming on mysoju and so forth. Our main priority in the beta phase was to make sure that the site works perfectly. So right now, we still have some kinks to work out, there’s lot of little things we have to fix and we’re also developing new features so that the site will be more robust than what we have now. We’re also trying to line up some anchoring sponsors to go with the initial launch. So there’s a lot of moving pieces that we have right now. But I think that the goal is to have a very PR-driven campaign. So in the early phase, in the beta phase, there was a lot of working with the niche fan-oriented blogs. When we officially launch, we’re going to engage a lot of the mainstream blogs and the mainstream blogs and the mainstream media to really kick it off with a big bang. I think the thing that we’re getting right is that we got to make sure that we have a very good user experience and we reply to every single feedback that we get from people, which I think is unheard of. I think if you try to write mysoju and email, they probably never get back. WE’re offering people a very high level of service even though it’s a very free site. We’re actively engaging the users and actively engaging the community and I think we’re just going to build on that as we move toward our formal launch.

Xiaochang: Out of curiosity, how many people are you right now?

Seung Bak: There’s a core team of 5 people: Suk and myself, and we have a CTO, and a developer and a graphic designer. And then we have an additional group of 10 people who are helping us in different freelance and consulting capacities who bring in different skill-sets. Some could be finance, some could be on licensing and sales or more strategic stuff. So, a fully staffed team and we’ll just get bigger and bigger as we go along.

Xiaochang: Okay, one last question, which about the community you’re planning on building. How do you see this community on your site as any way different than the communities that are on the sites like d-addicts that are already built elsewhere that are already talking about this content? What’s going to make them want to do the same thing on your site?

Seung Bak: I mean, if you just look at the web in general, it’s not a zero-sum game. Just because you have a community about a particular subject doesn’t mean that no one else could have it. The approach that we’re taking is that we’re not trying to become d-addicts nor are we trying to become mysoju or soompie or any of these other existing places where people are hanging out. What we’re doing is that we’re hoping to ultimately compliment the sort of ecosystem of Asian entertainment in this country, so the features that we’re building are very dramafever centric — they’ll be around the dramas that we carry, they’ll be around the way people are experiencing content. It’ll be around stuff that we’re creating for people. So, we’re not going to go out and create a wiki because that’s already being very well addressed by d-addicts, and the people who are going to d-addicts are also our audience members and the people who are running it are potentially our friends and our partners. So when we talk community, we’re talking offering features unique to our site.

The 4th installment of my interview with the founders of Dramafever.com delves into their relationship with fans and efforts to fulfill what they viewed as a clear market need. Of particular interest is the discussion on how they select content based on observing audience-enagement on fan-driven sites and the site’s success in collaborating with the fansubbing community.

Part 1, part 2, and part 3 of the interview are available.

The introduction to the site is here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

[images screencapped from dramabeans.com]

Xiaochang: It’s interesting that you mentioned earlier that people who are already on these illegal sites are coming and rewatching content on your site. It almost seems like you guys aren’t so much direct competitors since you offer a different sort of audience experience.

Seung Bak: To be totally candid with you, we don’t really look at Mysoju or some of these illegal sites as real competitive threats because they’re filling a market need at this moment and the market need is that there’s a demand for this content. If a legal provider isn’t going to put it together in a way that’s accessible, someone is going to put a simple HTML site together where you can watch it illegally. And the experience is the same as with American mainstream media. Before Hulu and Apple and a lot of these other places started distributing digital content in a legitimate way, there was stuff all over Youtube and other illegal sites. And as soon as legal platforms started taking off, that stuff started disappearing. Mostly organically, some of it due to DMCA notices, but it’s not a sustainable model in the long run, when you’re operating a media site in a completely illegal way. Quality wins in the long run, that’s what we believe.

Xiaochang: How engaged or involved are you guys in the drama-watching experience? Are you guys drama fans as well?

Seung Bak: It’s funny that you say that because before we launched the beta, we used to watch dramas. But now that we’re running a site for dramas, there’s just so much stuff to do. We try to watch when we can and at least click through some of the episodes of the ones we carry, but because we’re doing this, it’s taking away our time to watch dramas.

Xiaochang: But prior to that, you were fans . . . ?

Seung Bak: Well, we watched enough to know that this content was really high quality and we could see why people would be really engaged in this content. Suk and I both watched a bunch of dramas, obviously not everything that came out, but the ones that were really popular. And we were like wow, this is great, why isn’t it available in the US? That was the most basic question that we asked. Why do I have to do to the supermarket to watch this? Which is the experience that a lot of people have here.

Xiaochang: Going back to the features you haven’t rolled out yet, are you guys planning on having anything to enhance community engagement? Forums, or anything of that nature?

Seung Bak: Yes, yes. We’re definitely going to have those. The forums will come when we get a little bit more traffic. It will come in due time.

Suk Park: There’s nothing more sad than an empty forum.

Xiaochang: So going back to your personal relationship with drama for a moment, how did you guys personally get into drama? What was that history like?

Seung Bak: As Suk mentioned, we’ve noticed that Korean dramas are pretty popular. Something we’ve been keeping an eye on and it’s pretty easy to see. Everytime I see my parents they’re watching a Korean drama. Your friends are watching this stuff. You go to some hotel room in China and you have nothing to watch and I think CCTV 9 has Korean dramas running 24/7. You go to Mexico, there’s some international channel showing Korean dramas in Spanish. It’s everywhere, except in the US in a very accessible way. So clearly we saw a business need for this, so the next step was trying to figure out if there was a real demand for this. That was the research process where we took just basically took a look at every drama-related site out there and we were pleasantly surprised at the amount of traffic going to mysoju and a lot of places. And so we decided to do something about it and built a site where people could really consume this stuff in a much higher quality way.

Xiaochang: So what sort of criteria do you look at when you’re deciding which dramas to host on your site? Is it just based on popularity in Asia or are there other considerations?

Seung Bak: It’s interesting you bring that up, because we are addressing the market that’s in the US right now, so it’s driven by popularity in the US channels right now. So we’re looking at what seems to be working on places like d-addicts, where people are talking about this. We’re getting very good feedback from bloggers about what’s popular. And it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going to stick. There are some shows that were not that popular in Korea per se, but a lot of people were engaged by it here.

Xiaochang: Can you give me an example?

Seung Bak: La Dolce Vita was an interesting example. It didn’t do all that well in Korea when it was airing. But here, there’s a certain about of people watching that.

Suk Park: Relative to how many people are watching the other things on out site. For instance, we know that one of the dramas we want to get right now is Boys Before Flowers as we’ve gotten a ton of request for that Drama.

Seung Bak: Every day, every hour . . .

Xiaochang: Related to that, actually, how soon after they air in Korea and in Asia are you looking to get things onto your site?

Suk Park: In the beginning, for a lot of the content owners — you can understand the site hadn’t launched yet when we wanted to sign contracts with them — they wanted to give us some of the older stuff first. And from the older stuff, we focused on the blockbusters. Going forward, once this model has been proven to the content owners, we expect to launch their content as soon after broadcast as possible.

Xiaochang: So going on that, I’ve read rumors in the drama blogosphere that you guys are talking about working with fansubbers in order to subtitle content.

Seung Bak: Well, I mean, the basic mindset is that the fansubbers exist because there’s a void in the market that isn’t addressed. So these are true fans. These are people who are very passionate about being able to enjoy this content and being able to share with others. And once you look at them in that light, they’re your best allies. So a lot of the content that’s coming out of Asia, [major producers] are only creating English subtitles for the ones that are selling through DVDs and it’s only a small subset of the content that’s being produced. So over time, as we start ramping up our site with a pretty broad selection of content, it only makes sense to work with these fansubbers because they’re also the audience. So the key point that I want to emphasize is that we want this to be a very community-driven site. We’re making our content selection, we’re making our functionality development choices really based on what we’re observing out there. We’re simply reacting to a market need and what the market is telling us.

Suk Park: We can talk a little bit about how fansubbers would sub not always dramas, but anime and so forth and they never got credit and they’re looking for a platform.

Seung Bak: Yeah, if you look at the fan community sort of as the Open Software development community, these are very talented, passionate individuals. And for the most part, they’re looking for some recognition for the work that they’re doing. And we think we could be a platform that could provide them with that, while addressing a very real need, which is creating a place where people can consume Asian content with English subtitles so that they can understand it.

Xiaochang: So traditionally fansubs were originally created with the idea that it could be widely shared throughout the community so long as no one is making off of it. How are you going to renegotiate that relationship now that money does enter into it.

Seung Bak: First of all, one of our key principles is that we do everything right. So we always ask permission before we do anything. And anyone (? This part was a little unclear on the recording) that we start working with in terms of putting our product out there is after we have conversations with them about the best way to work together. So when we say that we work with fansubbers, it’s not that we go to d-addicts and download fansubs and putting it up on the site. It’s going to be done in a way where we talk to them and set down some business terms that are acceptable and that both parties can be happy about.

Suk Park: So, one of the problems was that the minute the fansubbed material is included in sites like mysoju or crunchyroll and we start to make money off the fansubs, the fansubbers can be persecuted for infringement. Now, in our completely legal platform, the fact that we make money off the site, that doesn’t become an issue as long as we ask permission and, depending on what the fansubbers want, come to an agreement. In our experience, it seems that what the fansubbers want is recognition for what they’ve done.

[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.

[Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog]

This weekend, as some of you might know, is the 6th Media in Transition conference here at MIT. The theme this year is “Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission” and centers on question around the preservation, circulation, and migration of media between places, formats, platforms, and text and the cultural implications these changes carry:

What are the implications of these trends for historians who seek to understand the place of media in our own culture? What challenges confront librarians and archivists who must supervise the migration of print culture to digital formats and who must also find ways to preserve and catalogue the vast and increasing range of words and images generated by new technologies? How are shifts in distribution and circulation affecting the stories we tell, the art we produce, the social structures and policies we construct? What are the implications of this tension between storage and transmission for education, for individual and national identities, for notions of what is public and what is private?

I will myself be speaking on transnational audiences and fan-driven circulation of East Asian television dramas on Saturday.

Though the bulk of activities begins today, the conference has its official launch last night, with a communications forum on Global Media featuring C3 consulting researchers Jonathan Gray and Aswin Punathambekar alongside University of Georgia professor Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and award-winning African filmmaker Abderrahamane Sissako, moderated by our own Henry Jenkins.

A few of the key points and provocations brought up during the panel:

Looking carefully at the flows of media circulation in addition to production and consumption, provides us with a new and important means to understanding media on a global scale.
Brought up by Aswin towards the beginning of the panel but echoed in different ways by all of the speakers, the importance of circulation as a site of media power was one of the central problematics discussed. The question of how media gets from one place to another, through what channels, at whose behest (or against whose wishes) reappeared in different forms throughout the talk. Aswin discussed the varied, criss-crossing flows of Bollywood content. Carolina’s discussed different national forms of the telenovela throughout Latin America and which ones travels with the help of or despite national governments. Jonathan described the almost entirely pirate-led circulation of VCD and DVD films in Malawi and how media circulation into spaces neglected by corporations due to their unprofitability forces us to rethink the temporality, as well as the spatiality of global media. And Abderrahamane linked the power of distribution, of being able to show and export your media, to representation. He suggested that the unevenness in the transmission of media perpetuated the cultural domination upon Africa because as a place that often receives media from the outside but does not produce and distribute its own images, Africa is constructed as a place that has no culture to share.

Not just a question of legal versus illegal circulation
Another key issue was that role of piracy in global media, since illegal distribution channels are often the only means through which much of this media can move. Aswin was first quick to point out that illegal/extralegal versus legal was a false binary, that in actuality the systems are far more complex and overlapping. Jonathan added that, in a case such as Malawi, piracy takes multiple forms, the first being that piracy is the only way to bring outside media in because there is so little profit to be made in Malawi that media corporations never address the area. The second is that piracy stops production of local media because it makes it incredibly difficult for Malawian musicians to make money. In the case of telenovelas, piracy can also be an act of resistance, when national governments crack down on the export of media through official channels. And in Africa, the routes of media circulation are so complex and it is often difficult to trace where any given film comes from. Ultimately, the false binary between legal and illegal circulation makes us overlook the fact that cultures of distribution are simultaneously cultures of production

Down with “industry lore”
Finally, coming out of a discussion of which genres of media circulate, the panelists warned against the trap of “industry lore.” As Jonathan points out in the case of Malawi, that even as general patterns emerge as to what genres and forms are popular, there are constantly exceptions to every rule. Thus we must be careful not to make too broad of generalizations about what audiences want to see and why based on assumptions and speculations.

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.

So I have been lax on blogging lately because I am currently in the deepest depths of thesis crunch time, with some 80-100 pages to produce in the next three weeks. I do have a number of hopefully interesting pieces in the works, including one on hybrid and divergence economies that will be a deeper glimpse into some of the C3 work I’ve been doing that is sort of a follow-up to the post on the Fallacy of Free, as well as a rundown of the Transmedia as narrative entanglement and platform co-dependence presentation I gave while in Brazil.

In the mean time I thought I’d share the full transcript of my Dramafever.com interview from earlier this year. For anyone not yet aware, Dramafever.com is an ad-supported, fully-licensed online video platform dedicated to full-length Asian media content, in particular Korean TV dramas. For more details, I wrote an introduction to this case here and a summary of the key points of the interview can be found here.

Part 1 of the full interview (which will run roughly 4 or 5 parts) focuses on how the company came to exist and the goals and motivations behind it, including the presence of a very visible and undercatered (at least, through authorized channels) audience.

Xiaochang Li: Can you remind me when you were planning on launching officially?

Seung Bak: It’s sort of a floating date right now, but we’re targeting end of Q1, beginning of Q2, so I guess around a March/April time frame. And the reason we’re in closed beta right now is to work through some kinks and develop some cool new features. We want to fully vet those things and have more content before we open it up so everyone can see it.

Xiaochang Li: Can you tell me about these ‘cool new features’ you’re planning on developing?

Seung Bak: Sure. Right now when we launched the beta, it’s essentially to make sure we get the core experience right — to put it simply: that you can watch dramas and [the experience] is high quality and enjoyable. And we for the most part accomplished that. Some of the features we want to build on are really to build on the experience. So you’re watching a Korean drama and you want to know everything about it, so there will be ancillary assets like pictures. You could have fun playing with, maybe with simple downloads, or you could add your pictures to pictures with actors. There’s also an opportunity to become an aggregator for news related to Asian entertainment that’ll help people save time and discover all these cool blogs that are out there that you would know if you spent all your time hanging out at Soompi, but which for the most part are sort of obscure. We would be a place that brings all of these good blogs to light and help people discover them. And there’s all kinds of stuff we could do around adding all this meta-data to dramas and actors and a lot of people could really engage in the storylines and really be able to discover new stories and really feel like they’re getting to know a certain celebrity. So, lot’s of ideas.

Suk Park: To add to what Seung said, basically we want to be able to create a community for people who enjoy this content as well as an information site for all the content relevant to the dramas, the actors, and so forth.

Xiaochang Li: So you guys see yourself as more of an Asian media content hub, instead of just a distribution platform?

Suk Park: Exactly. We wanted to build a place where you can watch the best of what Asia has to offer in terms of videos. We started out with kdramas, but it doesn’t have to be just kdramas. We’re going to get dramas from other parts of Asia, as well as other types of video content including TV variety shows and potentially movies and material related to music. And then we want to build all these tools for people not just to consume media but also have some fun on the site and be able to engage with other users.

Xiaochang Li: So what made you start out with kdrama?

Suk Park: So Seung and I met in college a long time ago — 1995, 1996—

Seung Bak: We’re both Korean, by the way.

Suk Park: And we always talked about doing something together. Because of our prior jobs, we had traveled across Asia and we noticed about two years ago that throughout East Asia — China, Japan, and Korea — and Southeast Asia —a lot of the Korean dramas were being played in prime time, either dubbed or subtitled. The Korean wave was taking over in a very obvious fashion. We came back to New York and we spent some time doing research to see if people in the US were consuming this type of content. And we saw the regular mediums: the television broadcasts, the DVD rentals, but it just didn’t seem like those were the only two distribution channels. We go online and we find about a dozen or two sites that feature this content, with very strong traffic numbers and every single one of these sites illegally using this content. My background is in international business and licensing so I jumped on a flight back to Korea to meet with the broadcasters, followed by trips bySeung and I to LA to visit the [Korean] broadcaster headquarters in the US and after going back and forth a couple of times, we were able to get the licensing for the for the dramas we have now.

Xiaochang Li: Can you give me a sense of when this was happening?

Suk Park: We went to China around the end of ‘07 and we started conversations with the broadcasters in the beginning of ‘08 which lasted for about eight or nine months before we signed the first contract.

Xiaochang Li: And why did you start out with MBC? And not KBS or SBS, for example?

Suk Park: Those guys were very forward thinking. They’re a group from LA. The other two companies were also very supportive of this idea. KBS is a little more cautious because they have to work within a strong hierarchy from Korea, and because they are government owned. MBC was really supportive and we were able to actually sign a contract with MBC to launch the beta site and move forward to the formal launch. From there we expect the other broadcasters to join us.

Seung Bak: We have active conversations with the other media companies right now. We just happen to have all the MBC stuff already done and prepared. But we’re going to be rolling out content from other sources throughout the year.

Xiaochang Li: So when you say that MBC was really forward thinking, what sort of reaction did you get when you guys first approached them?

Suk Park: There was a certain unfamiliarity with licensing for the online space. A couple of things we noticed with all the broadcasters were that everybody was struggling with online piracyand they were faced with serious doubt about the existing business model from cable and DVD rentals. Both of them were declining — television because the CPMs you get for television ads have been hurting badly and DVD rentals because it’s an obsolete form of consumption. We were able to address those issues with our business model, which presented to them a new revenue channel. Of course, by having a free product which is advertiser-supported and better than the existing pirated product, it becomes a strong weapon against piracy. That’s why all the broadcasters were actually very supportive of our model. The second question that came up though was “who the hell are you guys?” Because all we had was a powerpoint and a lot of passion. We had to prove to them that through our network of advisors and through our career history that we could pull this off. I managed the licensing aspect and Seung managed the operational aspect.Concurrently, I approaching and establishing a strong relationship with the licensing sources while Seung was building something that we could show them. And towards the end of last year we were able to launch the beta site and everyone was very happy with the results.

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.