canarytrap.net

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.

[This post will also appear on the C3 blog]

Recently, a string of prominent vloggers on YouTube have been having a conversation about advertising, product promotion, and the notion of ’selling out’. This was triggered by their experiences with various companies who courted them to help promote their products amongst their viewers and community and generated a lot of great conversation around how to integrate brands into their videos.

The first video was one by UK vlogger Alex Day (nerimon), who called on vloggers to discuss the topic of “selling out” after turning down an offer from Sanyo for a free camera and 1000GBP (~1700 USD) in exchange for sticking a 15-second spot in one of his videos:

In it, Day makes the very compelling point “that advertising agencies think that putting commercial in the middle of stuff is how the world works. But on YouTube, it doesn’t work like that,” pointing out that he would much rather have made a whole video about him using the camera, in his own style, speaking to his viewers the way that he has always spoken to them, rather than inserting something he had nothing to do with in his videos for money.

Day then asked for other vloggers to share their opinions. There have been 29 video responses so far, among which are this video by AlanDistro (fallofautumndistro):

Alandistro elaborates on Day’s point, saying that it’s not that vloggers are or should be against bringing money into the equation altogether, but that they need to be allowed to do so in a way that respects the relationships they’ve built with their community:

“The people receiving these offers spent a lot of time building up their channels and their audiences, and I don’t think they’re going to accept just a couple of dollars to destroy that overnight . . . Until advertisers get their act together and realize this is a conversation, not me talking at you, they’re not going to find very many people to participate.”

Another vlogger, Kristina Horner (italktosnakes) responded explaining why she chose to work with Ford as part of their Fiesta Movement campaign:

In brief, the Fiesta Movement gave cars to a number of prominent vloggers to use as they liked, while occasionally going on themed “missions” and making videos about them. Horner points out that what makes the Fiesta Movement’s tactics different from the experience Day described is fundamentally that Ford is letting the vloggers do what vloggers do best, instead of trying to get them to do what mainstream media does. Rather than asking her to simply product place, they let her choose how to integrate the brand into her daily activities and her vlog in the way that she thought would be best-received by the community she’s a part of. As Horner explains:

“Instead of paying me some crazy lump sum and see how many times I would fit the words ‘Ford’ and ‘Fiesta’ into one of my videos, Ford has kind of adopted the model that our success is their success . . . Basically, the question, is which companies are doing it right, and which companies are doing is wrong, and when is it okay to say yes. And I do feel like it is okay to say yes if you don’t feel like you’re compromising what you’re personally trying to do on youtube with your videos.”

There are, I think, three major lessons to be learned from these insights:

1. You can’t stick an old model atop a new one

This is a point that I feel like I belabor to death, but it’s a mistake people keep making, so it’s a point worth remaking: communities and other groups and affinity spaces online have their own systems of value, with their own criteria for what is worthwhile and what isn’t. And more often than not, money isn’t the big headliner. So if you’re hoping to monetize or extract some form of value from their activities, you can’t just slap your revenue or promotional model atop their social system and hope for the best. It results in people feeling exploited, people feeling like someone has “sold out,” and general resentment because it asks that these communities compromise the things they value for the things advertisers think they should value. And at the end of the day, that isn’t good for anyone, because the relationship with your brand will be stronger if it’s associated with the things these communities already value.

2. Let your participants be intermediaries

One of the most telling statements in these videos is the idea that advertisers don’t seem to “get” how their communities work. This is always, always going to be true. In line with having to understand what these communities value, advertisers have to understand that their insight will never be as rich as the people in those communities. In much of our work over at the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), we talk about the way fans work as grassroots intermediaries, helping act as translators and promoters of media they love to others, and this is true for other types of communities online too. These vloggers are a great example. They have put in enormous amounts of time and labor building relationships with their viewers and community — give them the tools and let them show you how best to sell your brand to that community.

3. Not all “conversations” are the same (or equally valuable)

It’s become somewhat of a tired truism that brands need to be in “conversation” with their consumers. And while keeping the lines of dialogue open is very important, brands have to consider whether or not their conversation style is to join into a discussion, or try to hijack the discussion, potentially interrupting a more valuable conversation. As several of the vloggers pointed out, they’ve built relationships with their community. That is, they’re already in a conversation and the worst thing a brand can do is try to disrupt that with their own message. If brands want in, they have to be prepared to talk about what these people care about, because no one likes the guy who comes over just to talk about himself.

What this ultimately means for brands is that the best way to integrate your brand into communities online and launch campaigns that depend on social media participation is to offer yourself as a resource and let the participants decide how to make you valuable. It feels risky, but people build a more lasting relationship with your brand if you let them use your brand as a means to build relationships with one another, in their own voices, on their own terms. And at the end of the day, when you’re talking about vloggers or fan producers or other people who are remixing, remaking, and creating in these new media spaces, consider what vlogger Alandistro points out: “You really can’t go wrong asking creative people to be creative.”

[image from nicely85, licensed under creative commons]

Back in March, I wrote a piece critiquing Anderson’s model of the “Freeconomy,” calling it a fallacy. My critique was not necessarily of the models he was proposing, but the way he was conflating things that had no cost with things that were “free.” I argued that rather than being “free,” no-cost goods and services (such as YouTube, facebook, etc) in fact were not giving anything away, but rather exchanging services with its users for things such as data, labor, attention, and social capital.

The debate around “free” as ramped up since then, with Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Anderson’s book in the New Yorker, where Gladwell takes Anderson to task through a series of examples of services and information that are emphatically not free:

The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide . . . in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws. (Gladwell 2009)

Anderson then responded by explaining that “free” also encompasses other forms of non-monetary payment that may in the long run lead to monetary payment:

* Wired.com makes good money selling ads on GeekDad (it’s very popular with advertisers)
* Ken gets a nominal retainer, but has also managed to parlay GeekDad into a book deal and a lifelong dream of being a writer
* The other contributors largely write for free, although if one of their posts becomes insanely popular they’ll get a few bucks. None of them are doing it for the money, but instead for the fun, audience and satisfaction of writing about something they love and getting read by a lot of people.

So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc). (Anderson 2009)

Many others have since jumped in the fray, including Valleywag’s slightly meta take on the accuracy of some of the numbers cited by Gladwell as well as the perhaps ideological frame of the debate itself. Perhaps more interesting is the piece at continuations that attempts to disaggregate some of the fuzzy economics behind “free.”

I will probably have more in-depth and articulate thoughts in the near future, once I polish off a draft of some of the transnational television research I’m currently mired in. But for now, I’d simply like to suggest that part of the problem and part of why we can’t seem to come to an agreement about the complex economic models being build online is that “free” is simply the wrong way to talk about it.

This is similar to the way “viral” media masked the agency of the users, thus preventing us from thinking clearly beyond whether or not something “goes viral” to how and why and for what social and cultural reasons. “Free” masks the systems of value-exchange that are in place in all of these models. Moreover, as Gladwell points out, it is not a matter of information simply “wanting” to be free:

And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power. “Information wants to be free,” Anderson tells us, “in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.” But information can’t actually want anything, can it? Amazon wants the information in the Dallas paper to be free, because that way Amazon makes more money. Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle? But we are getting ahead of ourselves. (Gladwell 2009)

These so-called “free” services are entangled with a number of players: content creators, users, platforms, advertisers, etc. All of whom have different investment, different needs, and different desired outcomes. Rather than paying attention only to one criteria of value — monetary cost — by calling it free, and ignoring all the other criteria and social contracts that are in play, we have to start looking at what different systems of value exchange are being enacted every time something is offered for “free.”

In just looking at Youtube, you not only have the exchange between the service and the content, data, and attention provided by the users. You also have an exchange of those things with advertisers. You also have a number of social exchanges between the users themselves, as they build communities and social capital through uploading content, commenting, responding, and sharing. And these are just some of the most immediately visible forms of exhange, each of which follow their own criteria of value and parameters and regulations. And more importantly, the are all interconnected and dependent upon one another. To gloss over it all as “free” ignores the complexity and the deeply entangled nature of both monetary and non-monetary exchanges. The iron law of the digital world isn’t that everything is free, it is that everything is connected, including different forms and systems of exchange.

[Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog]

Apologies for the strange, late cross-post from C3. With the recent travel schedule, organization has escaped me. This post was originally written early last week, but somehow didn’t end up here. I should be returning to a more steady blogging schedule now that I’m back in Cambridge.

——-

Strange news from across the pond: due to a dispute over licensing, the Performing Rights Society (PRS) in the UK, YouTube is no longer going to host music videos in the UK. For a more detailed breakdown of the situation, cnet as a thorough write-up, but gist of it is that PRS want more licensing fees for the right to host the material, the costs of which YouTube considered “prohibitive.” There is also reported to be a lack of transparency about what content will be included in the licensing deal. Meanwhile, the PRS suggested that YouTube is not paying a fare share of their revenue.

It’s somewhat unclear as to what stands at the heart of the controversy, whether it is centrally a question of IP or of revenue share, though it does speak to the struggle and difficulty of finding models ownership and compensation in the digital space and takes us towards a much more complex problem of how to determine whether content drives people to YouTube or if the social relations on YouTube drive the circulation of content. According to the cnet article, there is also the question of if record companies are profiting from having their content on YouTube. Putting aside the issue of whether or not YouTube is sharing enough of its revenue, this issue of the “profitability” of putting music videos on YouTube seems, in my mind, to miss the point.

Music videos, to my knowledge, have generally been used as promotional materials. Attempting to charge google for high licensing fees in order to play videos seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of both music videos and of youtube. Youtube is a fantastic place to discover new artists that may not be able to get significant radio play. What’s more, with youtube videos, you can send links to your friends to spread the word directly about songs you enjoy, which you can’t do with a song on the radio. In short, record companies and license holders may not feel as if they’re making money by having their videos on Youtube, but the truth is that they’re certainly not making money from NOT having them there. Youtube isn’t diverting potential record-buyers, after all. Streaming online video isn’t exactly the most flexible or portable way to enjoy music. What Youtube does provide is a source of low-cost, high visibility, robust promotion that has the potential to engage audiences in a way that broadcast mediums, even ones that pay high licensing fees, can’t. We only have to look at examples such as Soulja Boy to see that.

This speaks also to another key issue, which is the fallacy of “free.” By not charging licensing fees, record companies feel that they’re giving away their music for “free.” This has been the dominant discourse overall when media producers and critics alike talk about putting content on sites like Youtube or Hulu or last.fm. But we have to remember that just because you’re not charging people doesn’t mean you’re not getting anything in return. Putting things on Youtube is giving content away for free if the only measure of value you have is money, and more specifically, direct payment. By pretending all of it is “free” of any form of return, any for of profit or benefit, we mask the crucial forms of exchange happening between media corporations and audiences. Non-monetary exchanges are, in fact, the exact opposite of “free” in the sense that they create social bonds, community, and a sense of goodwill and exchange. These may be implicit, they may be ambiguous and informal, but they do exist, and for musicians and entertainers, this is the kind of value they need, because this is the kind of value that translates into fans.

Or to put it another way, Youtube and networked social spaces where people share, create, and circulate content are growing increasingly central to how we consume and engage with media. As as result, the real questions companies need to ask themselves is this: whether or not they feel they are profiting from being in these spaces, can they afford to not be there?