Drew of Rocketboom writes a very lengthy post about the stats behind Rocketboom, trying to demystify the things he takes into account. Except towards the end (when he starts to take more and more pot shots at Ze Frank) he does a fantastic job. The thing I think is apparent in this and Ze’s view is that there is no real standard accounting method for hits. Everyone has some segment they can promote as indicative of their popularity, but the important part is to compare apples to apples, and handicap the results appropriately.
Definitely worth a read, and maybe someone out there can take a stab at creating a “video audience calculator” formula?
Drew of Rocketboom writes in his blog today about having to step away from some kind of deal with Microsoft about the Zune. While the details of the would-have-been agreement aren’t clear, the wording makes it clear it’s never easy dealing as a significant player in the media space. If you control eyeballs, those who want and need eyeballs will flock to you. I guess the difference between the Big EyeballSeekers and the Small ones is that the big ones carry a long list of conditions they want fulfilled before they’ll play ball. It’s up to you, as the gatekeeper to your eyeballs, to decide what conditions you can stomach. It sucks that sometimes (like this) you have to walk away, but I’m happy to see New Media folks buckling down and holding on to integrity over a quick buck.
Again, having no real info on any said deal, I wonder who stood to benefit the most, Zune or Rocketboom? On the one hand, getting mentioned by Microsoft might be worth a lot of eyeballs… but I’d think the credibility of probably THE major vidcast giving you a thumbs-up would have been golden for the Zune.
Anyway, kudos to Drew, regardless of how painful it was. Next time, the deal’ll feel better.
A fantastic TV show model that thrives in Japan is “get a bunch of stars together in one room and make them talk about random news for an hour or two”. It’s chaotic, silly, and usually terribly funny as each personality tries to become the most entertaining one in the room. It makes actors, comedians and musicians into real people for their fans, and gives semi-discovered talent a chance to impress a new audience.
Here in Hollywood-land-world, we’ve moved away from that motif, because stars have carefully-crafted auras they want to protect at all costs… and besides, no one’s able to get that many big names together anyway. A key prerequisite for this kind of entertainment is that the cost of engaging the participants has to be low enough that you can afford to have a room full of celebs in the first place. In a world with $20M+ pay days for ho-hum actors, it becomes less and less viable.
Vidcast stars are ideal for this model. They’re already humble, they’re already a bit unstable, and by and large they’re not paid enough to reasonably demand a lot of cash to appear. What they need is exposure, a chance to impress, and (bluntly put) another easy outlet they might turn into a second (or third, or fourth) hit show.
Right now these stars are working alone or in pairs, designing a unique look and feel that best showcases their talents, and doing the true Internet schtick by not deferring to some controlling entity. There is not, as of yet, an NBC of the web world. Every vidcaster is an island, and they like it that way. But perhaps the desire to build and maintain so many unique little stages has blinded people to the value of ALSO getting together on a common stage for a time. It’s not a question of replacing the independent streak, it’s a question of complementing it. Enhancing it.
Andrew Baron, producer of Rocketboom, likes to imagine that the objective of this New Media world should be to do one thing, charge a lot for it, and live a life of luxury… basically emulate Hollywood until you are Hollywood. But Hollywood’s current business model is in grave danger, and a smarter direction would be to embrace a sustainable plan that keeps everyone gainfully employed while doing things they enjoy. Otherwise you’re desperately scrambling to get aboard a sinking luxury cruise-ship. The pretty chandelier won’t look quite as glamourous at the bottom of the ocean.
The current stars of the vidcast world need to work together more often, in different combinations, with different themes, to create a viable alternative to TV. I currently watch over 3 hours of vidcasts a week, and that’s only because there isn’t much else that interests me right now. Stick Ze Frank, Alex Albrecht, the Ninja and others in a room with beer, and have Amanda Congdon as host… you’d make hours of great comedy with ease, and have a massive audience to boot.
The key to success in the New Media world is not simply to develop new styles that Hollywood hasn’t imagined yet… it’s to re-examine the styles they discarded as they became as bloated as they are today.
The Blogging Times has some fun doing silly commentary (that’s a compliment coming from me) and serious business analysis about the Ze Frank/Rocketboom hitcount war:
Last time I checked, no one gave an F$#@ about the people who walked out of movies after paying for a ticket. Just like Mickey D’s doesn’t care if you throw away the fries after purchase, the point is to get you in the door.
To which I wrote:
The question is how we count people who buy the fries in the first place. I believe Ze’s point is that he counts people that finish the fries and belch in appreciation, whereas Rocketboom is throwing them at people walking past on the sidewalk, and counting them as happy customers.
I quote my own reply here mostly so I can find it at a later date when I disregard my own opinion and do something stupid.
If someone out there would like to go to McDonalds, buy a bunch of small fries and throw them at people passing on the sidewalk (THROWING, please) and upload the video to Revver, I’m sure you’d make a lot of money. Or get arrested. Either way I’ll be amused.
Ze Frank is in the middle of a nerd fight about download stats, and it all boils down to Rocketbooming. I’m not going to get into the issue of whether or not Rocketboom’s reaction to this is justified or not, because the baseline issue is actually more interesting.
It’s about the metrics, really. Here’s the thing: when I wrote the blurb for the back cover of the Crow book, I said 225,000 people had downloaded the Pig book. I got that number by looking at the download stats of the original files (in all languages), and running a few filters. We started at something approaching 375,000. Take out bots and other such nonsense, and it drops a good amount. But then you look at the downloads and you see that someone downloaded it three times in the space of a minute… maybe their PDF viewer was wonky, they hit reload a few times to make it work. Whatever it was, I tried to filter by IP based on timeframe, so that I could arrive at actual downloads. After a lot of that, I trimmed the number down to about 225,000, which is still fantastically large.
I know if I wrote my initial stats (375,000) on the Crow book, it’d be much more impressive, and people would think I was super-1337. But I know in my heart that’s not a valid number (even 225,000 is iffy to me), and all it does is set up a standard that is unhealthy. People have to be dishonest or suffer the consequences.
Let’s say I, the author of the Crow book, am a different person. That book’s been downloaded less than 50,000 times (with filtering). Without filtering, about 70,000. So as an author of a similarly-targeted product, what do I announce as my stats? 70,000? If I don’t, I’m a small-fry, and advertisers will shy away from me (not that I’m looking for advertisers, but y’know). But if I say 70,000 and some advertiser wants to see results for that kind of audience, they won’t get it, because my actual number is likely only 50,000! I’m setting myself up for a fall, but I don’t have much choice because my competitor (the Pig book) is going around yelling huge numbers from the rooftops.
The thing is, Rocketboom needs to filter down their numbers not because they’re being dishonest (I don’t think you’d call it dishonest anyway). They have to do it because they’re pushing metrics in the wrong direction… we have the power and intelligence on the web to at least improve on the TV model, which is a lot of silly guesswork and extrapolation. We should be able to say: our downloads are X, and our likely real audience is X-Y. You don’t get numbers that compete with Grey’s Anatomy, but you get a better ROI. Advertisers will get more actual bang for the buck because your bang is reasonable. And if Rocketboom tapers their numbers, it will put less pressure on their competitors to fudge numbers to apppear to be in the same league.
What will happen in this kind of arms race is that one day, a vidcast that has a so-so audience will distribute it via every possible outlet, claim 1 million downloads a day (of which 10,000 are actually watched) and push the overall value per download on the web so low that Rocketboom, with their 300,000 downloads a day, will start to lose money. And then they’ll have to inflate their stats, and so on, until the only people that can play professionally are the ones that can sign deals with big distributors to help boost their download stats.
Transparency and admissions of imperfection are key to internet life, and it helps everyone to admit that their download stats are flawed. If we trim them back and try and present REALISTIC numbers rather than “competing with TV” numbers, advertisers will end up a lot happier.
