What else can YouTube do besides pre-rolls?
I disagree with Fred's assertion that YouTube could be making a ton of money on pre-rolls.
Pre-rolls, in their current form, suck.
No, really suck.
The other day I was watching some great wiffleball footage. Anyone who ever grew up playing would be really jealous of these guys who seemed to record every single pitch on video over eight seasons. Man, I pitched this one game where I gave up one hit and whiffed 25... of course I walked 11, but still... Anyway, repurposed TV car commercials and mortgage ads would have completely ruined the experience for me.... and that's all YouTube really is... its an entertainment experience.
We put up with TV commercials because, they're more than just entertainment. There's social capital being built. We're watching the same shows as our friends... the price for knowing what happens on Nip Tuck is that you have to watch some commercials... but socially, being in the Nip Tuck "know" is very valuable. Plus, we're planted in front of the TV... not much on... the value of switching is pretty low.
But when I watch these wiffleball clips, I may send them to a couple of friends, but its mostly a solitary experience... just pure entertainment value. I don't need to watch them, and there are a million other distracting entertaining things on the web to choose from. If I had to watch a 10 second preroll in front of each one, I'd quickly lose interest, because the entertainment value would suffer.
So how else can YouTube monetize these videos? Rather than a full pre-roll... how about just a "Sponsored by, around the player.... re-skin the player." Maybe not the same CPM, but that wouldn't really ruin my viewing experience.
More interesting would be the idea of a user selected theme of some sort... How about breaking down the elements of a brand and allowing the user to mix them in. So, with the wiffleball videos, the user could be given a little editor that allows him to stick a logo and some text right on the corner of the screen... they select from a menu of choices... they might pick Nike or Adidas or Gatorade or something. Or, let ESPN sponsor the sports videos, pull them onto their site, throw in the SportsCenter theme song, etc. In that scenario, the owner of the video knows something about the content and the audience that allows them to select an ad that fits, in a way that's not obtrusive. Plus, knowing that the owner selected it also makes it part of the content, versus something YouTube tacked on at the beginning.
Plus, the breadth and quality of video advertising has to get a lot better... maybe companies should be putting live offers out on YouTube for people to create advertising for them and make the videos themselves the advertising.
Pre-rolls are non-contextual. They degrade the user experience. They degrade the quality of the content. They are not expressive the way the content itself is.
I know its hard to be creative with your advertising and scale at the same time, but I don't think you'll ever see anyone put up with 10 second prerolls on half the videos they see on YouTube.
Timeoutnewyork.tv Contest on Flickr!
Timeoutnewyork.tv is having a photo contest to have your NYC photos featured on the front page of their site. Just tag your best NYC photos (horizontal only) timeoutnewyork.tv on Flickr and you're automatically entered. There might be a free magazine subscription in there or something, too... not sure... the details aren't up yet. Technically, it starts tomorrow, but here's your chance to get a head start.
Check out their site, too.... its pretty cool.
Doing your best when you're ready to do your best
GothamGal has a though provoking post up about the insanity of carefully crafting over acheivers and getting kids into college today. She says that we should drop the current system and look for a new way to screen students... fewer tests, less pressure.
I do think that what is going on is insane, but anytime there's insanity, you don't have to get caught up in it.
When I was in high school, the average graduating SAT score for my class was 1350. Now I hear its up over 1400... average... 1400! I was lucky because we all seemed to take a pretty healthy approach to it, but one could go nuts trying to test prep your way to a score like that.
If you need to take two test prep courses and hire a private tutor to get your kid to score a 1520, then, well, sorry, that kid just isn't a 1520 student. I remember this guy in my freshmen year of college who used to study in the lounge about 10 hours a day to get a 3.7 and I just remember heading out the door with my baseball glove to have a catch and enjoy a nice day while he was studying. If that was what it took to get the really high grades, well then I just wasn't going to be a great student... simple as that.
It was that kind of approach that I had in high school. In hindsight, I probably could have worked harder, I admit, but it was where my head was at the time. Pushing me wouldn't have helped.. .I had to push myself... which I did, big time, when I got to Fordham. Yeah, so I went to Fordham, which was a good school, but it wasn't Harvard or Yale or Princeton. However, I wouldn't be where I am today at another school. Being at Fordham, close to the city, enabled me to intern at the GM pension fund during school. It also meant that another Fordham grad who was at GM sort of took me under his wing, rather than the Harvard intern we had, because he felt like this guy would get everything he wanted anyway. That led directly to my job in the private equity group, which led to Union Square Ventures, which led to Oddcast.
If I was coming out of Harvard in '01, it wouldn't have been enough for me to just go to Harvard... I would have had to beat out all my own classmates for jobs. When you go to a top school, you almost have to be the best there, too, because there will already be 5 or 6 Harvard resumes in for a job, and they're not going to interview all of you.
You don't have to go to a top ten school and you don't have to be a Goldman Sachs investment banker to be successful either. Teach your kids to follow their own way at their own pace. Of course, give them all the tools and encouragement to be their best, but don't push them to be more than they're mentally ready to handle. I wasn't ready to take the lead in high school and I would have burned out very early had I tried. I'm lucky that my parents were just happy I was in a good school and supportive of whatever I did. They let me come around on my own terms.
Oh, and I wound up doing better than that kid who studied ten hours a day... and I really do owe it mostly to my mental health. In college, I really believe its really not about how hard you work, but more about how smart you work and how you handle stress. Oh, and networking, too. You'll never make good contacts in your field, which can take you a lot further than your GPA, if you're a big ball of stress that seems mentally unstable.
The Political Power of Social Networks
Facebook recently released an Elections section giving political candidates an opportunity to present themselves to the college audience in their own way with Facebook profiles.
Hmm... let's see... 85% penetration among 4 year colleges+candidate profiles=best opportunity to increase voter turnout ever!
Let's not underestimate what an impact this could be... if it wasn't for how incredibly difficult it is to get election information.
In an ideal world, since they already know my address, it should be one click to find out who my current reps are, who's running against them, and where they stand. I mentioned that to them and they said that would be great if they could find a "find your district" site...
...At first I was kind of annoyed, like they weren't trying... but, actuallly... it is really hard.
Way too hard actually.
I found one here, but you need to know your 9-digit zip, which requires going offsite to the US Postal Service and typing in my address. You can't even find this district info on the US Gov't's own website. Its ridiculous.
Google the word "vote" and see if you learn anything useful. Its doubtful. Until we leverage the web to make staying informed about elections less than a second job, we're going to have a very uninformed voter base.
One Goddamn Hit? Post game subway thumbing...
"That's all we got? One goddamn hit?"
You can't say goddamn on the air."
"Don't worry... nobody's listening anyway." (Click my avatar to hear the movie quote.)
Is it me, or when a no name rookie comes to town, doesn't that usually spell trouble for the Mets? I vaguely remember getting shutout by Chris Reitsma somewhere along the line, too, a year or two ago. Rotoheads, time to short Chuck James, because once you dominate the Mets, you're unlikely to be heard of again.
On the subject of Steve Trachsel, what's the record for the highest number of wins in a season for a picher who fails to make the post season roster? Because, right now, my rotation is Pedro, Glavine, Maine and El Duque, with the pen lining up as Wagner, Feliciano, Heilman, Bradford, Mota, Oliver, Hernandez and then either Bell or Ring if you take 12.
This team could use a righthanded bat. Oh, that's right, we had one and traded him for Roberto Hernandez, who we now don't really need because of Mota. Heath Bell could have gotten a shot at moving up the ladder, too. Oh well.
Having a lead this big in the East gives us too much time to worry.
Oh and I forgot to mention... A couple of weeks ago, it was Beatles night at Shea. When Chad Bradford took the mound, they played Yellow Submarine. It was hilarious. That should play everytime Underhandford takes the mound.
Both Pujos and Howard homered again last night...and so did Bonds, actually. Barry, where were you all year when my fantasy team needed ya?
Actually, Randy's take on Biz Dev 2.0 sounds about right... except for the BS part...
Randy, who won't let me comment without signing in, doesn't really buy Biz Dev 2.0.
He thinks its "Nice for a business that has a handful of employees and no expenses, but it isn’t sustainable."
Handful of employees?
Low on the expense side?
Sounds like these guys. Yeah... definitely not sustainable.
Here are the problems, as he sees them:
"No barriers to entry. Anyone can copy your business."
How many web businesses out there aren't able to be copied? How many offline businesses out there can't be copied, other than regulated monopolies, like the electric company? (Although, I'm pretty sure I can buy my power from somewhere else, too, which I don't quite understand.) Anyone can copy anybody else's business, yes, but that doesn't mean they'll do it better.
"No barriers to exit. Users can easily leave your business for the next big thing."
Did I mention Randy works for Verizon? I guess he'd like us to sign two year contracts with all of our web services. I can leave Skype anytime I want to use Google Talk, too... but I won't, b/c Skype provides a better service, allowing me to make domestic phonecalls for free. Oh, you could see Craigslist for that, too. I think, in the future, we won't see very many businesses that lock in their users at all... hopefully even wireless... and just compete on making them not want to leave.
"Nothing of value is owned."
So Feedburner owns nothing of value? Except, well... most of the rights to run RSS for major publishers, and, um, all the RSS ad relationships they signed up... the blogger relationships. Yes, they could quit anytime, but its not like anyone else could just replicate that overnight. Granted its not a bunch of fiber in the ground or rooftop towers, but who wants to own that stuff anyway?
"No control over your own destiny. Being completely
dependent on “partners” (I use this term loosely) that have no
contractual obligations to each other is dangerous."
Google, believe it or not, isn't in control of its own destiny. We could all decide tomorrow that we'd rather not have Google crawl our content. Advertisers could all say online advertising isn't worth it... and the company would be dead in the water. You're always dependent upon someone else... even if its just your customers. You can't force anyone to do anything forever.
So, I basically agree with all of his depictions of the landscape, but I look at them as reality, not a list of problems.
Taking Web 2.0 to Fordham undergrads
I'll be teaching a class to undergraduates at Fordham this Spring called "Managing in the MySpace Generation". Basically, it will catch these students up on all the things the rest of us tagheads have been talking about for the last couple of years... open, distributed, lightweight, social, etc... how it effects the way businesses are being run and how they should be running their careers.
I've slowly started saving links that I'll be using in my class somehow, tagging them "fordhamclass".
If anyone is doing anything similar... taking "Web 2.0", from a business and career perspective, to college students, I'd love to hear from you.
Fast Track to My Sidebar
Fred posted yesterday about the brilliance of the MySpace "add" feature on their music player, and how most widgets lack the immediacy of this feature.
Most of them provide a landing page, then they have a conversion issue. Eventually you wind up with some embed code and then its all about hacking your template. There's no universal "add this to my sidebar/blog" etc.
Or is there?
XML-RPC is what allows services like Flickr to autopost my Moblogged photos directly to my Typepad blog. All I needed to do was to tell them where to post it, give them my password, and poof, automatic.
Can the same thing be used for my sidebar?
How hard would it be for some social widget to have a "Get this" link that pops up a window, lets you configure, and then all you have to do is give them your blog password and poof, its there up at the top of your sidebar.
Is this possible through XML-RPC?
nextNY Dodgeball League: Signup now! Teams or individuals
Are you a digital media young professional in NYC?
Do you have aggressive tendencies?
Do you want to throw things at other people?
Or, do you just want to come, try not to get hit, and meet lots of other cool people in the NYC digital media and technology community?
Join our nextNY Dodgeball league now! (Starts 9/18... signup ASAP before spots run out)
Longest Day
This was my Tuesday... I was too tired to blog about it yesterday.
5AM Wake up.
5:40AM Get in car in Bay Ridge.
6:05AM Enter LaGuardia Airport parking lot.
6:13AM Check in to 7AM flight, which has now been pushed back to 7:25.
7:10AM Board plane.
8:48AM Land in Dulles, VA.
9:30AM Finish Cosi parfait. Get cab.
9:54AM Arrive at biz dev meeting.
11:45AM Leave campus for lunch with fun potential partner team.
12:15PM Get seated for lunch at local microbrewery/grill.
12:26PM Chicken sandwich arrives.
1:26PM Return from lunch to continue meetings.
3:33PM Leave for airport with chatty cab driver.
3:56PM Arrive at airport and check in for 5:35 flight.
3:57PM Black cat crosses path. Cat cannot get wifi connection either.
4:49PM Flight pushed back to 6PM.
5:30PM Flight pushed back to 6:30PM.
6:01PM Flight pushed back to 7:05PM.
6:39PM Flight pushed back to 7:35PM.
6:58PM Announcement that LaGuardia Airport has been closed due to visability.
6:59PM Check NYC weather on phone... 66. Rain. Yes, seems like that should close an airport.
7:30PM Flight cancelled. 9PM flight full. Please go to the customer service line.
7:31PM Customer service line has 6,000 people on it. Break for Avis.
7:55PM Arrive at Avis.
"Carkeep, give me the world handling car you have...something that corners like a whitewater raft. An Impala? Oh yes, that will do fine."
8:08PM
"Its 250 miles to LaGuardia. I've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of overpriced airport trailmix. Its dark, and I'm wearing khakis.
Hit it."
12:38AM Arrive at LaGuardia Avis, located close to the airport in downtown Saskachawan by the Marine Aviation Terminal.
12:52AM Start waiting for the Avis Shuttle, which comes every five minutes, to get back to the parking lot.
1:15AM Avis shuttle arrives.
1:33AM Exit Laguardia parking lot, peeling out in Mustang, because I was used to Impala's pickup, or lack thereof.
1:52AM Park in Bay Ridge.
2:01AM Sleep in my own bed...zzzzzzz
A tale of two virtual worlds...
The term "avatar space" or "avatar market" is sort of a misnomer to me.
I think there are really two spaces here... the gaming/virtual world space and the personalization/expression space. On one end of the spectrum is Second Life and on the other end are ringtones.
The immersive, virtual world that is Second Life and all these MMPORGs will have far less users and a very high ARPU (Average Revenue Per User). I'd also bet that the overall ROI in the whole space will be much less, and the volitility among the bets will be high, because when they score, they score big, but they also require a lot of capital to get off the ground and maintain. I'm sure one or two virtual worlds will totally tank after swalling up lots of VC money.
The more immersive and time consuming the experience is, the more binary your userbase will be. Do you know any "casual" Second Life users? Most people either love it or get overwhelmed by it in the first few minutes... and at a $20 monthly price point, its hard to be casual. Building a whole virtual world is like building a web service and also building the underlying database backend, instead of just using what's out there and off the shelf. I already have a "virtual world"... and its loose bits and pieces of my blog, MySpace, Flickr, AIM and Facebook. That's why I like MyBlogLog, if it has the potential to tie these together. (You'll notice that your face now appears next your comments if you're a MBL user.... btw... does anyone know any good templates for MT Comments? I botched mine and would like to fix it, containing the whole comment in an individual box.)
On the other end of the spectrum, for less than a third of what it takes to build the average MMPORG, whole companies are being built around taking advantage of more lightweight users of avatars... like as a visual representation on chat clients or as a way to be expressive on a profile. You could look at these avatars as "virtual lite", but I think of them as "ringtones plus"... or "MeTones".
There are a lot of people integrating avatars and virtual stuff into their offerings... everybody "want's in" and doesn't want to miss out. I think the key is knowing how this fits into your community. If you're doing an ad supported strategy and you touch a lot of users a little at a time, a whole virtual world doesn't make much sense for your audience. If you've blown out a demographic and you see these people for long periods at a time, and there's a very strong sense of community loyality... you might offer more than just a little personalization. Either way, the key is to realize that users should be able to take their identities out of your world and play on other places on the web, and that you need ways for your users to interact with others outside of the world. I may not spent a lot of time in Second Life, but it would be cool to receive e-mails and instant messages from people with their characters, or do the same with a character of my own, even if I'm not in the actual world itself. Because, if I need my whole network to be in this virtual world, just like a bad social network, its just not going to work.
Sunday Morning Shows: August 20, 2006
I'm realizing a really bad flaw exists in the GMail setup. How do you find old mail where you know the contact, but don't know the words. I e-mailed myself a photo sometime in February of last year, but I have like 2000 e-mails to scroll through to get back to it. Gmail doesn't allow you to select a set of dates to go back to, or isolate messages by sender. Its all about search (of course, because if I'm not searching then they can't place as many ads against it). Now that I think about it, searching my endless archive of mail is just as inefficient as searching the internet with Google. There's no context to anything... dates or otherwise.
Now... perhaps if there was a technology that adds user generated context to content... [cough] ta-ahhem...tag-ahem... tags [cough] [cough].
Brands are commitment-phobes...
I dated a brand once.
We had a great time... lots of fun... got really close right away, but then, suddenly, I got this note:
"Dear Charlie,
You've been great to me and I really enjoyed the time we spent together... the money you spent on me... all the friends you've introduced me to, but now this marketing campaign is over and I feel like I need a change. I'm afraid of just being the same brand all my life. I'm not ready for this kind of commitment... I hope you understand.
Love,
Brand-y"
I should have realized it would happen. Marketing slogans change. Products get redesigned, usually, for the worse--alienating loyal users. Its so hard to maintain a consistent relationship with a brand, because they're always changing... looking upstream, downstream, diversifying, etc.
Its even worse in a world of sell side advertising where you pick the ads you want to run, because they're brands you like. Then, they just get yanked from you when a campaign runs out. That's because marketing is campaign driven. It has an end. It is seasonal... driven by television lineups, upfronts, etc. Brands aren't consistent, and so users have little loyalty to the message. Its only a matter of time before I stop obeying my thirst to drink Sprite or quenching my thirst to drink Gatorade (Is Gatorade even the "thirst quencher" anymore? I don't remember.) and I'm doing some other action besides just drinking it.
So at some point, Careerbuilder is going to stop paying us to maintain Careerbuilder Monk-e-mails, even though consumers still want to send them. I mean, are they supposed to run this forever? Well, maybe... Its an interesting problem... certainly it will be a messy breakup... just one day the "send to a friend" button disappears and your consumer says, "You won't make monkey for me anymore... we haven't monkeyed around in weeks... are you seeing another consumer??"
Persistence in branding is going to be an issue in a sell-side MeVertised world where the consumers think they own the brand and they have to be told they were just "borrowing" it.... unless we see longer term commitments on the parts of brands. Like, what happens if American Apparel loses interest in Second Life? Will they close the store?
Gene clue to prematurity risk
I remember hearing Basketcase for the first time. My mom and I were on our way back from visiting my grandparents in Staten Island. She had to stop at the Staten Island Mall to exchange an item and I was waiting in the car. I was 14 and too cool to walk around the mall with my mom if I didn't have to. I remember how cool I thought the song was, and remember thinking (maybe not at that exact moment, but not long after) that I hoped Green Day wouldn't be one of those one-hit wonder bands. Eleven years later, I'm eating breakfast, watching the video for Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Its so great to see them still going and I had this sudden urge to go see them in concert. I checked their website and they don't have any NYC dates left, but they do have dates in April in Atlantic City, Albany, Norfolk (could take a DC trip to go see friends from college...). Boy, do I wish I had a car. Maybe I'd make a real trip out of it and go somewhere interesting. July 1st... Belgium? Now that would be interest. Werchter festival anyone? Is it hot in the summer in Belgium? Atlantic City or Belgium? hmm.
Can there ever be a successful calendaring startup?
So Kiko got sold off, and Skobee slips silently beneath the sea DiCaprio style... but we still hold out hope in the face of tractionless attempts at fixing what we perceive to be a real problem. Calendaring and invitations, obviously going hand in hand, seem to work far from efficiently GigaLiz puts it perfectly...
"Every time we have to click through an Evite, we cringe. We can’t say we use Skobee, Renkoo, or even aggregator sites like EVDB’s Eventful, Zvents, and Upcoming on a regular basis — that would require a mass migration by the people we do stuff with. But we do hope that someone makes it easier and more efficient to make social plans online."
Web 2.0 purists feel like Evite sucks, but you know what... most mainstream tech users I know have one of two opinions of Evite...
It does the job...
... or they just don't like public RSVPs.
I've never heard anyone on my softball team tell me that its unfortunate that Evite doesn't have more functionality. In fact, the only thing I use that seems to work even better than Evite is a numbered list on the nextNY wiki... which has even less functionality.
The problem isn't client side... in the invitation interaction itself, its server side and its on multiple levels. Google Calendar didn't kill Kiko. I don't know anyone that actively uses it. In fact, I hardly know anyone who uses any calendar other than one their job forced them to... and less than half of the Outlook users I know put personal items on their work calendar.
Here are the nearly insurmountable hurdles anyone in this space needs to get over:
1) Most importantly, most people just don't want a calendar. It makes them feel too structured, under pressure, etc. All these attempts in the "scheduling" space come from people like me who live by their calendar and whose life would be so much easier if everyone else did, too. We keep thinking that, if there was only a good enough tool out there, we could get everyone using a calander, and that's just unrealistic.
2) Events drive calendar use, and only a minority of events are formatted to work with a calendar. Think of the average family... the biggest drivers of the family schedule--the kids' school and after school activities--are not in iCal, hCal, vCal, or any kind of call. They're on a paper flyer or on a printed e-mail on the fridge.... or maybe written onto the fridge calendar. Until schools get into Microformats, don't expect mainstream users to either.
3) You never know if the person you're inviting uses a calendar. The beauty of Evite is that even if the other people never check the Evite again, it works for you when they click yes. Try doing that to 100 people with an Outlook invite. Half of the e-mail programs that open the message won't know what to do with it. It was like when text messaging first took off here. You didn't just randomly text everyone... b/c you didn't know if they could get texts. It took a critical mass of texting enabled phones for people to really get into texting here in the US, and reaching that critical mass took a long time.
4) People don't want to let you know what they're doing. What would really drive a lot of calendar usage is if you could negotiate for people's time based on levels of trust, open times in their calendar, etc. For example, when I schedule a game of pool with my friend Brian, he's pretty much always going to accept an invite as long as he's free. I should be "ok'd" to book a certain amount of pool in the empty spots in his schedule. But, how can he expose his schedule to me w/o exposing it to the world, but also not come off like a complete loser if he doesn't happen to have anything booked yet for his Saturday night? People share bits... music, videos.. they don't like sharing information about how they spend their time... b/c it makes them feel committed, locked in.
In the face of this behavior, what kind of scheduling service could ever be successful?
The Lost Art of Answering the Phone
So, Adi Sideman, the CEO of Oddcast, just came into the office as he usually does late Sunday mornings and something he did just reminded me something interesting about the culture here.
He picked up the phone.
Not his phone number... the main line.
"Good morning, Oddcast".
We often talk about the "no touch" style of Google AdSense and other self-serve applications, but something I noticed from the first day I walked into Oddcast always strikes me. Our phone number is on the website, and people here always pickup that main line. If the CFO is at my desk and she hears the main line go off, she grabs the nearest phone possible to answer.
Its usually someone who needs a password reset or something silly, particularly if its on the weekend... and I'll bet few of the people who call release they're getting the CEO of the CFO of the company.
A personal touch is something that's really important to the people here and its sort of refreshing. Admittedly, I don't rush to grab that line if I'm here by myself, but maybe I'll start.