It's hard out there for a pimp, and by a pimp I mean a television content aggregator.
It used to be content was about the transmission method, and infrastructure was king. Hence the "cable" company. "Dish" television. The "video" [cassette] store. The internet is all about divorcing content from a particular infrastructure. This is a good thing. It's not so good, however, for infrastructure-centric companies. And the cracks are starting to show.
A couple of recent content producer/content aggregator conflicts have made it into the news. It is instructive to observe how a couple of specific content producers have dealt with being cut off from a significant segment of their audience as a result of negotiations failing with one of their distributors.
In this corner, negotiations fell through between Viacom and DirecTV, resulting in Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, and a whole bunch of other channels going black for DirecTV subscribers. The general opinion online was that while Viacom was at least as much to blame for the failure of negotiations, customers were generally venting their ire at DirectTV on the general philosophy that they were DirectTV customers, not Viacom customers, and DirectTV was no longer providing the channels that had been included when they had signed up.
Unwilling to let this unearned bit of goodwill go unpunished, Viacom recently pushed itself into the news by cutting off online access to popular products like The Daily Show. It's a move most observers are viewing as a bid to push jonesing DirectTV customers into hassling DirectTV directly... an opinion supported by the unskippable video Viacom has pasted over the web pages for its popular shows, decrying DirectTV for dropping the shows and exhorting customers to, well, hassle them directly. It's interesting politics in the television content world but it's hard to see it generating anything other than general ill will in the customer base.
Contrast AMC's recent conflict with Dish Network. AMC has engaged in a bit of direct-action solicitation itself, airing a commercial during Mad Men telling viewers to protest to DirectTV over a (according to DirectTV, similarly cost-driven) drop. It has also engaged in some extracurricular activity online - announcing a special live stream of the season premier of Breaking Bad. Now I'm not claiming AMC is some sort of paragon here. I have no idea if there is merit to AMC's claims that DirectTV's actions are actually motivated by a desire to gain leverage in a semi-related lawsuit AMC initiated in 2008. AMC is a multibillion dollar valued publicly traded company, hardly a scrappy indie in the content world (though they are about a tenth the size of Viacom). And the no-opt-out disclaimer on their "sign up to learn about alternatives to Dish Network" box on that website - namely "AMC Networks may use this info or share it with TV providers to contact you about TV services or promotions in your area" - is some bullshit.
Still, the difference between shutting off content for everyone to try to drive ill will toward your opponent versus increasing access to content to generate goodwill for yourself is not a subtle one. The fight over the money in the inevitable shift towards on-demand and online is going to continue and it is going to be ugly. But I'm cautiously optimistic that content producers who err on the side of increasing rather than restricting access are going to win in the end.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Million Dollar Arcade
I've talked about Penny Arcade before, and Kickstarter as well.
The former has now offered a foray into the latter. And I can't help wondering if it represents a rare misstep for the broke-the-mold nerd media empire.
I'm really questioning the basic premise of the thing, which is that "People don't like advertising almost as a general rule". I don't like intrusive advertising, and I don't like my media experiences being literally interrupted by advertising. But Penny Arcade generally seemed to do it right - relevant advertising, with a well-publicized standard that they only advertised games they actually thought were worthwhile, and without any of the crummy pop-out rollover tricks or eye-mangling "full site skin" layover ads one tends to get in the video game advertising arena. It has literally never occurred to me to wish for an ad-free Penny Arcade and the feeling persisted, while watching their video, that what the whole thing was really about was the site's primary creators being the ones that thought doing their business without having to sell advertising space would be extra awesome. The economics of the whole thing are clearly generated by how much revenue ads generate and the issue to me seems to be, really, does anybody outside the business care about that? For me (and I sort of know better but it doesn't change how I feel about it any) it just feels like asking for an astonishing amount of money to get rid of a rather inconsequential component of a content experience I'm used to having for free.
The project itself is pushing all sorts of my Kickstarter pet peeve buttons. The rewards in particular are in large part profoundly lame. $15 for a "certificate". For god's sake at least make a sticker or a button or something, I'm supposed to frame this maybe? Add it to my portfolio? 25 bucks gets you an e-book. Seventy five dollars gets you digital downloads of "Tycho's Penny Arcade Singles." Setting aside the "value" of the e-book this boils down to asking for $50 for an ep by an amateur musician. The meaningful rewards start at $125 in the form of an original print (unlimited run). The things that stand out at me about the rewards is that there is a clear imperative not to step on any of the conventional merchandising lines (hence $25 electronic books of 14-year-old comics, or $1,000 for a dozen t-shirts...), and that they are fundamentally designed to minimize creating work in fulfillment. These are pretty deep restrictions.
The high tier rewards are largely of the "you get to have lunch with us" variety and fans being what fans are I suppose they will manage to sell most of them. I have my doubts about the externally handled (due to Kickstarter's $10K pledge limit) super-tier rewards. At the top of the heap $100,000 buys you a single custom "non-commercial" comic. This is just a flat-out bid for wealth patronage and I can't see it happening. Wealthy patrons expect a whole lot more ass-kissing than that. But then what do I know.
What do I know? I guess this remains to be seen. The project has already cleared nearly half its minimum goal in half a day, so maybe people aren't really about the rewards. To me the whole thing seems far too contrived, and calculated... Maybe it's sour grapes, I love the idea of Kickstarter... the lottery with a skill component... but have never conceived of a project idea that didn't seem boil down to "pay me to live in the manner to which I've become accustomed..." with some bullshit "product" nobody is asking for. Maybe I'm just envious that these guys could be famous and beloved enough to pull that one off. Clearly the rewards are not meant to be the deep point of this project. The deep point is reaching the "stretch goals", the promise of new original content on the site. Most of them are "locked" at this point, a videogame paradigm trick that basically means "we're going to do this amazingly cool shit we won't tell you about until you've promised us at least a quarter million dollars."
Penny Arcade's ascent has been characterized by blow-out successes - the ever-increasing heights of their admirable Child's Play charity, the lightning sellouts of their massive PAX conventions. I have a suspicion that this strangely thrown-together-feeling bid to crowd-finance an already-successful business might prove an exception. If I were a betting man I'd pick them to scrape the basic goal on general good will ("scraping" $250,000 of course would be a great day for many people) but fail most of the stretch goals. The real blow-out success stories on Kickstarter have uniformly been about providing a unique product that simply won't exist (or at least not in its fully realized form) without the success of the project, and offer a solid mid-cost reward tier where you get that unique product for a price at least in the appropriate ballpark for what it is. There's a reason for this. For people to show up in full force and put down real money for something that is not a bona fide charity, they expect a real return on their money. Something new, something special, something not everybody will have. Penny Arcade has been quick to repeatedly assert that if it doesn't work, nothing will change - they will go right back to business as usual. What's being offered as an alternative to this seems too ephemeral, and too conceptual, to me.
Now, who wants to pay $45,000 to take me out to lunch?
The former has now offered a foray into the latter. And I can't help wondering if it represents a rare misstep for the broke-the-mold nerd media empire.
I'm really questioning the basic premise of the thing, which is that "People don't like advertising almost as a general rule". I don't like intrusive advertising, and I don't like my media experiences being literally interrupted by advertising. But Penny Arcade generally seemed to do it right - relevant advertising, with a well-publicized standard that they only advertised games they actually thought were worthwhile, and without any of the crummy pop-out rollover tricks or eye-mangling "full site skin" layover ads one tends to get in the video game advertising arena. It has literally never occurred to me to wish for an ad-free Penny Arcade and the feeling persisted, while watching their video, that what the whole thing was really about was the site's primary creators being the ones that thought doing their business without having to sell advertising space would be extra awesome. The economics of the whole thing are clearly generated by how much revenue ads generate and the issue to me seems to be, really, does anybody outside the business care about that? For me (and I sort of know better but it doesn't change how I feel about it any) it just feels like asking for an astonishing amount of money to get rid of a rather inconsequential component of a content experience I'm used to having for free.
The project itself is pushing all sorts of my Kickstarter pet peeve buttons. The rewards in particular are in large part profoundly lame. $15 for a "certificate". For god's sake at least make a sticker or a button or something, I'm supposed to frame this maybe? Add it to my portfolio? 25 bucks gets you an e-book. Seventy five dollars gets you digital downloads of "Tycho's Penny Arcade Singles." Setting aside the "value" of the e-book this boils down to asking for $50 for an ep by an amateur musician. The meaningful rewards start at $125 in the form of an original print (unlimited run). The things that stand out at me about the rewards is that there is a clear imperative not to step on any of the conventional merchandising lines (hence $25 electronic books of 14-year-old comics, or $1,000 for a dozen t-shirts...), and that they are fundamentally designed to minimize creating work in fulfillment. These are pretty deep restrictions.
The high tier rewards are largely of the "you get to have lunch with us" variety and fans being what fans are I suppose they will manage to sell most of them. I have my doubts about the externally handled (due to Kickstarter's $10K pledge limit) super-tier rewards. At the top of the heap $100,000 buys you a single custom "non-commercial" comic. This is just a flat-out bid for wealth patronage and I can't see it happening. Wealthy patrons expect a whole lot more ass-kissing than that. But then what do I know.
What do I know? I guess this remains to be seen. The project has already cleared nearly half its minimum goal in half a day, so maybe people aren't really about the rewards. To me the whole thing seems far too contrived, and calculated... Maybe it's sour grapes, I love the idea of Kickstarter... the lottery with a skill component... but have never conceived of a project idea that didn't seem boil down to "pay me to live in the manner to which I've become accustomed..." with some bullshit "product" nobody is asking for. Maybe I'm just envious that these guys could be famous and beloved enough to pull that one off. Clearly the rewards are not meant to be the deep point of this project. The deep point is reaching the "stretch goals", the promise of new original content on the site. Most of them are "locked" at this point, a videogame paradigm trick that basically means "we're going to do this amazingly cool shit we won't tell you about until you've promised us at least a quarter million dollars."
Penny Arcade's ascent has been characterized by blow-out successes - the ever-increasing heights of their admirable Child's Play charity, the lightning sellouts of their massive PAX conventions. I have a suspicion that this strangely thrown-together-feeling bid to crowd-finance an already-successful business might prove an exception. If I were a betting man I'd pick them to scrape the basic goal on general good will ("scraping" $250,000 of course would be a great day for many people) but fail most of the stretch goals. The real blow-out success stories on Kickstarter have uniformly been about providing a unique product that simply won't exist (or at least not in its fully realized form) without the success of the project, and offer a solid mid-cost reward tier where you get that unique product for a price at least in the appropriate ballpark for what it is. There's a reason for this. For people to show up in full force and put down real money for something that is not a bona fide charity, they expect a real return on their money. Something new, something special, something not everybody will have. Penny Arcade has been quick to repeatedly assert that if it doesn't work, nothing will change - they will go right back to business as usual. What's being offered as an alternative to this seems too ephemeral, and too conceptual, to me.
Now, who wants to pay $45,000 to take me out to lunch?
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