What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [70]
What about revenue? Louderback said that by the middle of 2008, a show the size of Diggnation was selling three sponsorships per episode at a cost of $80–$100 per thousand viewers (the standard measurement for advertising). By contrast, banner ads on web sites can sell for as little as a few dollars or even cents per thousand. How can Diggnation command that premium? Once more: relationships. The hosts deliver the commercials and viewers remember them. Louderback said 100 percent of audience members could recall the name of one sponsor without help and 93 percent could name two. That is unheard of on television, where commercials are ignored or skipped. So do the math: With an audience of 250,000 per week, that could work out to as much as $4 million a year and growing. Not bad for two guys on a couch.
Revision3 moved past tech to shows on magic and comic books. Louderback finds talent not on TV but online inviting viewers to submit their own pilots. The internet is an amazing source of new voices if you know how to listen for them. Talent may not be everywhere, but it’s not as scarce as once thought.
The key, Louderback said, is to realize that the internet “is a new medium. It’s completely different. Think how Ted Turner created CNN. He didn’t just think about plopping a broadcast network on cable. He thought about creating an entirely new medium.” So did Kevin Rose. His shows are communities. He is the new Turner, Murdoch, Hearst—or Oprah. He is the next-generation media mogul because he thinks differently.
This new relationship we have with—in the words of New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen—“the people formerly known as the audience” is collaborative. I don’t mean we’ll each end up picking our own endings to a movie. I don’t want that. Writing the ending is the job of the author. Still, entertainment is becoming collaborative. When LonelyGirl15—the saga of a pretty teen girl talking about her odd life via a webcam in her bedroom—became an entertainment phenom on YouTube, what was most fascinating was not the LonelyGirl videos but the videos viewers made around them, responding to her, asking questions, affecting the course of the narrative. When it turned out that LonelyGirl was not real but an act of fiction, the audience’s videos—many exhibiting anger and disappointment—were captivating. The art was the collection of everyone’s work, creators and audience. The art was interactive. Something similar happens on discussion forums such as Television Without Pity, where producers take advice about plotlines and characters in series that threaten to jump the shark. These producers realize that the audience owns a show as much as its creators.
Entertainment can now break out of its old forms. Comedy doesn’t need to be 22 minutes long (plus eight minutes of ads). Movies can become serials. Shows can be collaborative. Talent can come from anywhere. Audiences are distributors. We can watch entertainment anywhere.
Hollywood—particularly TV—has not been blind to this change and learned from the music industry as it imploded trying to maintain control in an uncontrollable world. TV networks might just save themselves because they broke their own rules. ABC was willing to hurt its distributors—local stations—when it streamed shows on the internet and sold them on iTunes. NBC and Fox created an impressive player called Hulu; in the U.K., the BBC started its equivalent in the popular iPlayer. Like Google, they learned to think distributed.
What will Hollywood studios and TV networks look like in the Google age? At one level, they won’t change: They will still pray for blockbusters and the stars that make them. At the top, the celebrity economy is largely immutable because there can be only so many big stars at once. But from the bottom, we will see more, if smaller, celebrities in many variations on Warhol