Will People Pay for Short Content on the Web?
In a video on Big Think, Bill Wasik of Harper’s magazine argues that short-form content on the Web will always be free because there is so much of it. He says that the glut of content, much of it user-generated, makes people unwilling to pay.
For the most part, I agree. The Web is bursting with so much content that if you can’t find information on one site, you can usually find it somewhere else.
Say I wanted to learn how to deep-fry a turkey. I’m sure there are thousands of videos, blogs, and recipes dedicated to the topic. But say I had tried to make said turkey before and failed–putting a little damper on Thanksgiving–then I might be willing to pay for content I knew I could trust, like from a well-regarded chef like Emeril or Alton Brown.
I might pay for short content on the Web if it fills a want or need that can’t otherwise be met. Or a want/need I didn’t know I had. In most cases, this won’t be for a technique for deep-fried turkey. With the Web, information is in abundance. Content that stands out through its story or point-of-view or insights is a rarer commodity.
Hulu and the Cost of Free TV
I’m one of the few, I guess, who hasn’t used Hulu much. We get DIRECTV at our house, at a cost of about $55 a month. I watch TV on TV, not at my desk. When I have used Hulu–to watch “Arrested Development, for instance–I found my TV reverie interrupted by the choppy playback.
But Hulu obviously has a lot going for it. The ready access to a huge catalog of shows, the ability to watch TV almost anywhere, the user rating systems, the ease of spreading content virally. And the free-ness. If I were better at reining in the family budget, I would spend less on a subscription service and take advantage of the bounty right in front of me.
Hulu was founded with the idea that it could be supported by advertising. It has a large and growing audience. It is making money–an estimated $164 million this year–but it is losing money, too. As the former chief of CBS Digital Quincy Smith said, the advertising dollars are still, by and large, on the air, not online.
If Hulu’s audience continues to grow, would advertising eventually cover its costs? Maybe. I still think Hulu should charge for some of its content. Good programs cost money. The cable/satellite TV models show that people are willing to pay for quality TV and to have more TV choices. Even in this economy, cable networks like Showtime and HBO are adding subscribers. Why not take advantage of a model that is working?
Perhaps Hulu could charge to stream the programs most in demand, such as new or original programs. Older programs could be streamed for less or for free, with ad support. There could be an option to pay per stream, as well as a range of monthly subscription packages. The success of Apple’s App Store shows that if the price is reasonable, people will pay with a quick click.
To counter Hulu, Comcast and Time Warner are teaming up on an initiative called TV Everywhere, which would allow people with cable or satellite subscriptions to watch their programs online. If this initiative moves forward, it only makes sense that Hulu would follow suit with a paid model. In fact, there are rumors that Hulu has already has a subscription model in beta. The web has tried giving everything away for free, but at a cost to content creators. My hunch is that it’s about to try the paid model again.
The Anti-Narrativity of the Web
My 1st-grade son is learning how to read. If he can’t sound out a word, he guesses based on the pictures. He still “reads” by pictures, taking them in first. I do the opposite, reading the words first and sometimes not even noticing the pictures.
Of course, the way my son reads a story is a reflection of where he is developmentally. But it wasn’t surprising to see in the article on the Nielsen study that kids are such rabid consumers of online video. Even after they begin to read, many kids find picture-based stories–whether it be videos or video games–to be compelling in a way that text alone isn’t. As Marie-Laure Ryan says, an image doesn’t tell a story; it evokes it. It’s a more immediate and powerful experience.
For kids growing up with the Web, the book will no longer be the standard-bearer of how stories are told. That generation is internalizing new ways of assimilating information. A website does not have the cohesiveness or narrativity of a book. In fact, it’s anti-narrative. A website like Webkinz is designed so kids want to look everywhere at once. Images compete for their attention. Without a prescribed order for exploring, kids make sense of things however they choose.
Even content on the Web that is intentionally narrative, like a blog or a video, is not necessarily experienced that way. You can jump in or get out at any point–or, with a video, mash it up to tell a different story.
Because anyone can be a content creator, the Web elevates content of weak narrativity. YouTube is full of videos of cats on keyboards or kids building snowmen. These are moments rather than stories–sometimes pregnant moments, but often everyday ones. But the accumulation of these discrete, everyday moments, linked together through tags, might begin to feel like a larger story.
The currency of storytelling on the Web is not text or pictures but multimedia. Da Vinci wrote that painting was “mute poetry” and poetry “blind painting,” implying the limitations of each medium. Is multimedia an opportunity to transcend the limitations of text, images, and audio on their own? I don’t know; that sounds lofty. But if done well, it’s hard to resist the impact of this combination.
What Next?
Unlike many of the students in the MCDM program, I am not Generation Text. Let’s just say I have been working long enough to remember the days before email and when the Rolodex reigned the desktop.
On my first day at Microsoft, in 1993, I barely knew how to use a PC. Microsoft was like a cold water dunk into technology. I worked there 12 years. I can’t even recall the number of operating systems I installed and products I saw come and go. I loved that technology was dynamic but merciless, too, in its constant push forward. Even the product I worked on, Encarta, gave way to that momentum, becoming irrelevant with the rise of Wikipedia.
I decided to leave Microsoft, and after three years taking care of the kids, I was looking to prepare myself to return to work. I wanted to understand the changes happening in communications because of technology and social media. That’s how I found MCDM.
What do I want to do next with my MCDM degree? I don’t know yet; I’m enjoying exploring the possibilities. At Microsoft I worked as an editor and project manager on educational products. In a MCDM video games class, I became interested in serious games–games that are engaging and fun to play but have an educational purpose. With a classmate I worked on a proposal for a superheroes game would teach kids the benefits of good food choices. With 97 percent of kids playing video games, serious games have serious potential.
I enjoy making content engaging, accessible, and effective. That could mean work in areas as diverse as games and simulations, interactive education materials, advertising and marketing, or museum education. Although I don’t know what my next job will be, MCDM continues to open up my options.
Review of Video on Wired.com
Wired is an award-winning magazine that covers trends in technology and their impacts on business, science, art, and culture. For this week’s assignment I thought it would be interesting to see how much Wired “walks the walk” and uses technology–specifically video–to supplement the magazine’s coverage.
Wired is a relative newcomer as far as magazines go, having been around only since in 1993. In 1998 it was bought by Conde Nast. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Wired has a circulation of 704,000, while its Web site (www.wired.com) gets 11 million unique visitors a month.
Wired.com is a mix of articles from the magazine and additional original content, posted almost daily. In fact, the magazine content is played down. It’s not on the front page of the Web site but behind a separate tab. Of the dozens of articles posted from the October 2009 issue, only two–an article on Scientology and another about the Wild Things movie–had videos. But none of the videos was produced in-house. The Scientology article had a video from the Church of Scientology with Tom Cruise and the troll video response. The Wild Things video seemed to be a promotional piece.
While the magazine articles skimped on video content, I came across hundreds of videos behind the Videos tab, categorized into channels such as Gadgets, How-To, Interviews, Science, and Culture. The videos are an eclectic, sometimes-surprising mix, ranging from reports from tech conventions and stories about cars of the future to videos on how to build a kegerator or make a pretzel.
Among my favorite videos were those by the comedian Lore Sjoberg, who did a series of humorous rants on topics like Guilt-Inducing Games (how Animal Crossing makes you feel guilty for not playing it, for instance) and the weirdly elaborate Star Wars canon. A video with the art director chronicles the laborious process behind the creation of the January 2009 Manga cover. One of the more informative clips I came across was “Why Data is the Future of the Music Biz,” an interview with Topspin CEO Ian Rogers on how musicians can use Internet traffic and other data to their advantage.
Some of of the Wired.com videos take a deliberately corny or quirky approach, which to me seemed self-conscious but others might find entertaining and just part of the magazine’s hip geekiness. The video on on how to do Michael Jackson’s moonwalk in set on a moon landscape, and the tour of the sci-fi costumes on display at the California Museum stops to point out Captain Kirk’s armpit stains and Batman’s nipples.
There is no shortage of videos on Wired.com. though there is opportunity to better integrate the video content with the article content and vice-versa. The magazine and the Web site feel separate, and that’s no accident. Chris Anderson is only in charge of the magazine, and according to the New York Times piece, his idea for the future is not about melding the magazine and Wired.com or adding more video or other digital content. His idea is to “do something that doesn’t exist online, and do it in a superior way.” As magazines fold around him, that will be interesting to watch.
To Be Free, or Not to Be Free?
Chris Anderson’s first book, The Long Tail, described how the Internet enabled niche markets (“the long tail”) to flourish by reducing the costs of distribution. It was about the upside of the new digital economy: Somewhere out on the Internet, there was a market for everything. It was like the heralding of a new gold rush.
In Anderson’s latest book, Free, some people will also find limitless opportunity in his idea of a digital economy based around free. But for others the book goes to the core of anxieties about how content providers can make money on the Internet when so much is given away for nothing.
According to Malcolm Gladwell, one of the holes in Anderson’s argument is that the things he calls free are not really free. Is Gladwell just splitting hairs? Well, businesses don’t run on air; they must have some means of supporting themselves. YouTube on the face of it is free, but it may lose nearly half a billion dollars this year. If YouTube wasn’t owned by Google, which regards it as an asset to search and advertising, could it still absorb this loss without going out of business? Bigger companies can write off this kind of shortfall as a strategic investment; smaller companies won’t have that luxury.
Anderson seems to be arguing that these financial matters will somehow work themselves out. The old economy will lose some jobs, but the new economy will gain some. That sounds reasonable, except the new economy is still in search of a business model. Advertising has not been the magic bullet. The fact that YouTube is registering 1 billion hits a day but is still in the red shows how challenging the whole free paradigm is.
I don’t think we’ve seen the last of attempts to charge for content on the Web. The popularity of iPhone apps and cable shows like “Mad Men” prove that people will pay for high-quality content they value. What does that say about the future of Web-based storytelling? People may pay for content if it is compelling enough; the challenge will be to get their attention with all the competing content on the Web.
Project Proposal: Series of Videos about Seattle
For our class topic, I propose that we make a series of videos about Seattle. It’s an obvious topic, but a natural one, too. It lets the newcomers in the class become acquainted in a small way with their new home, and the natives or not-so-newcomers explore something that intrigues them or endears them or irritates them about their city.
Like any place, Seattle has its own personality and many stories to tell. This topic could easily be split into categories. There’s people, places, and history. There’s old Seattle and new Seattle. There are the icons of Seattle culture like the painted cyclists of the Fremont Solstice Parade. There are hot-button issues like transportation and development. The possibilities are numerous. The trick seems not so much to find the topic, but to find the story. And to be able to tell that story in one-and-a-half to two minutes.
Is there a story about Seattle you’d want to tell?
