Archive for the ‘Free Content’ Category

Gary Vaynerchuk: Insights from a Successful Web Entrepreneur

Audience Engagement, Branding, Free Content, Internet, Media, Online Video, Social Media | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Jul 30 2010

If you didn’t attend the July 28 NY Video Meetup, I recommend watching the following James Lipton-style interview that group founder Yaron Samid conducted with Gary Vaynerchuk.

nyvideo on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

A key discussion topic:  What can content producers learn from the 34-year-old Vaynerchuk’s Wine Library TV, a daily video blog about wine that he started in February 2006 and which now enjoys more than 90,000 daily viewers?

In 1997, before the emergence of such social networking platforms as Twitter and Facebook, Vaynerchuk used the web to rebrand his father’s wine business.  With the launch of Wine Library, a retail site, he increased the company’s annual revenue from $4 million to $60 million as of 2008.  Success begat success for Vaynerchuk, with the release of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on your Passion, in 2009, numerous national television appearances including Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and the co-founding with his brother AJ of VaynerMedia, a boutique agency that works with personal brands, consumer brands, and startups. He is also an angel investor in various startups.

“There’s no overnight success,” Vaynerchuk told the NY Video audience, which consisted of about 200 video producers, entrepreneurs and other industry professionals.  Building an audience is a “marathon,” in which expertise is “massively important” and the traditional concept that ‘content is king’ is “really a big deal.”

He also said that content providers really need to care about their audience, taking the time to respond to each inquiry, including emails.  “If anyone follows you or watches you, you should be grateful.  It’s not the size but the emotion” of the following that matters.  Vaynerchuk said the Twitter phenomenon has hurt because, “it’s created a culture about numbers.  How many of those (followers) really care, at least from a business standpoint.  To get them to really care, you must care about them first.”

Vaynerchuk said online entrepreneurs should be focusing on the revenue-generating potential of mobile.  He foresees possibly developing a Wine Library smartphone application that would include a barcode scanner that enables shoppers in the store to see if his show has reviewed a particular wine or to determine whether a store has a recommended wine in stock.  He also envisions each Wine Library TV episode ending with shopping list.

Oh, and he made this one prediction: Facebook Connect is going to win search over Google. He said people would prefer getting a friend’s recommendations than some anonymous opinion positioned through SEO.  “Context of relationship is really powerful,” Vaynerchuk said.

If you’re interested in developing a following for original web content, I highly recommend listening to Vaynerchuk’s entertaining and insightful discussion.

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Desperation is the Mother of Invention: Papers Trying New Revenue Models

Free Content, Internet, Journalism, Media, Newspapers, Paid Content | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Jul 20 2009

You’ve heard the cliché: ‘necessity is the mother of invention.’  When it comes to the newspaper business, one might also substitute ‘desperation’ for necessity.

In Chris Anderson’ new book, Free: A Future of a Radical Price,  the Wired Editor-in-Chief talks about the psychological barrier that free represents for consumers.  Once the ‘free’ line is crossed, at least when it involves digital content, it’s very hard to convert consumers of free into paying customers.  While representing an existential threat to the traditional media model, Anderson also relates how free could drive media companies to innovate. Such innovation might entail the creation of new profit-making models based on free, as well as alternate sources of funding that match supply and demand with long-tail precision.

Needless to say, many publishers are not giving up on paid content, at least not yet.

News Corporation’s The Wall Street Journal (subscription) and the Financial Times (freemium) are two examples of publishers who already charge for online access. Not surprisingly, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch and Financial Times editor Lionel Barber predict that most papers will go from digital free to digital fee in the not-so-distant future.

It’s important to note, however, that The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times both serve a business audience that places a great value on the timely delivery of financial and market data (not to mention it’s covered as a business expense).  What about publications catering to a general interest readership, such as The New York Times?

The New York Times, which has already switched from paid to free, seems less sure about its plans. After having discarded its online pay plan in 2008, The Times recently floated a trial balloon to gauge how readers would feel about paying a $5 monthly online access fee, with a discount for print subscribers. (Considering that an annual subscription is around $600, offering print subscribers an online discount might seem more like an insult than a deal.)

Uncertain about the prospects of a paid model, The Times is also exploring other options.  Craig Whitney, an assistant managing editor at The Times, recently told Poynter’s Bill Mitchell that the paper was weighing the possibility of seeking funding from foundations, a la National Public Radio.

Mitchell’s piece also alluded to a pending collaboration between The Times and freelancer Lindsey Hoshaw, who is using Spot.Us, a crowd-funding start-up, to raise $10,000 in expense money to write about a massive garbage blob –  twice the size of Texas – that’s currently floating in the North Pacific. Given the concept’s newness, the paper finds itself deliberating both the financial and ethical considerations of such an arrangement.

Finally, Journalism Online is presenting itself as a potential savior of paid online content. According to Daily Finance, the Journalism Online’s partners – author and media entrepreneur Steve Brill, former Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz and telecom executive Leo Hindery Jr.  – will soon announce the names of popular newspaper and magazine brands that will be selling their content via Journalism Online using a variety of bundled pay schemes.

A year from now we may have a lot clearer picture as to how all of these initiatives have faired, how inevitable free – at least when it comes to digital media – really is.

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Today’s Media Industry: Death Throes or Birth Pangs?

Free Content, Internet, Journalism, Media, Newspapers, Paid Content | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Jul 10 2009

In March, at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Steven Berlin Johnson presented a framework for understanding how the media landscape has evolved over the past decade – and where it may be heading over the next.  (You can read Johnson’s speech on his blog, stevenberlinjohnson.com.)

Johnson suggested it’s too early to conclude that the disappearance of the traditional newspaper business model will result in dire consequences for investigative journalism, which is typically made possible by deep pockets.

Johnson correctly reminded his audience that blogging, social media and countless other Web 2.0 tools have brought readers more information and analysis about a broader range of topics than could have been imagined a little more than a decade ago.  In retrospect, the traditional newspaper model offered little that was truly local, and only now in hindsight can we appreciate that society was being underserved at the micro-news level.

Perhaps, as Johnson noted, the innovations of Web 2.0 that have enabled specialized coverage of technology, politics, local communities and other areas will free traditional newspapers with shrinking budgetary resource to focus on investigative journalism, which is what they do best. What’s more, traditional media could act as an authoritative filter of the original information already being generated on the web.  It’s a reasonable forecast.

In the meantime, how do newspapers and other traditional media companies and professionals cope with painful downsizing?

As reported by Fishbowl NY, Mayor Mike Bloomberg recently announced MediaNYC 2020, a program of eight initiatives designed to revitalize New York City’s media industry, a sector that accounts for $30 billion in annual revenue.  The program, developed after consultations with area media movers and shakers, includes various initiatives for supporting and attracting both new media start-ups and established companies. Among other things, the program will help fledgling businesses with IT purchases and attracting investment, as well as provide social and digital media skills training for laid-off professionals with traditional media backgrounds.

New York City is both a media center and home to Silicon Alley, a renowned incubator of emerging technology companies.  Hopefully programs like MediaNYC 2020 will facilitate greater cross-pollination of these two industries, helping both to thrive in the not-too-distant future.

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Anderson and Gladwell: A Healthy Debate about the Inevitability of Free

Free Content, Internet, Journalism, Media, Paid Content | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Jul 02 2009

The term “thought leader” is sometimes used rather freely, especially in the world of business.

For an example of genuine thought leaders, one need only follow the recent public controversy stirred by Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.  Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, and Gladwell, a contributor to The New Yorker, are perhaps two of the best-known commentators on societal and business trends.  Both have authored books whose titles (Anderson’s Long Tail; Gladwell’s Tipping Point) have become reference points for a wide range of discussions about the emerging global economy.

Although I have read Gladwell’s critique – and the subsequent critiques of his critique – I have not yet read Free, so I can’t comment on the substance of Anderson’s book.  The resulting debate, however, highlights the tensions between the traditional purveyors of content — the multi-billion dollar publishing, television, motion picture and music industries – and the businesses and customers who have wholeheartedly embraced digital media — that is, just about anyone who regularly goes online.

(To get into the particulars of the Anderson-Gladwell debate, be sure to read this TechDirt piece by Mike Masnick and associated comments.)

Naturally, the creators and distributors of professionally-produced content want to gain some measure of control, recognition and recompense for their efforts.  Is free, as some worry, a destructive force that must be contained lest professional producers lose incentive to stay in the content business and, therefore, we all lose? Or is free already leading to a reinvention of the professional media industry, in which customers become producing partners or where the product, which used to be sold at a price, becomes a valuable loss-leading marketing tool for an entirely new type of profit-making model?

These are both scary and exciting times for the industry.  The debate between these two thought leaders provides a useful framework for trying to understand this most fundamental development in the media world.

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The Media and the Message

Branding, Free Content, Internet, Paid Content, Social Media, Television | Posted by Larry Greenberg
Jun 09 2009


I recently attended a digital media event in which a panelist, a video producer, disagreed with Marshall McLuhan: the media is not the message; the message is the message, the panelist said.

Even if you’ve never heard of McLuhan, chances are you will recognize the reference. The Canadian scholar made up the phrase at a time when the new medium of television had all but secured its dominance as a message delivery platform.  Alternately brilliant and inscrutable, McLuhan’s controversial media theories got industry experts to think in a new way about the impact of technologies on people’s behavior – and on content itself.

McLuhan categorized different media as “hot” and “cool” according to the extent of sensory interpretation required of the consumer. Radio and newspapers were deemed hot because the information is presented fully formed, needing little sensory interpretation by listeners and readers.  Television, on the other hand, which in the 1950s and 60s offered a low-resolution, black-and-white image of inconsistent quality, was cool (and by that McLuhan didn’t mean ‘boss’).  Television required greater involvement of the viewer’s senses to ‘get the full picture.’

Back to the panelist’s point and what it has to do with the name of this blog.   Media has come a long way since McLuhan’s time.  There is an endless array of high and low-resolutions screens – HDTV, IPTV, mobile devices, portable readers, iPods, PCs, IMAX theatres and more. This variety offers new opportunities and challenges for advertisers, content publishers and influencers.  With so much content competing over so many platforms for the attention of a greatly disaggregated audience, quality, as defined by the beholders, will be an essential differentiator.  As the old saw goes, content – that is, good content – is king.

But the nature of the platform – the media – as well as context matter, too. For example, what demographic prefers what type of video and at what length?  How should a message or brand be shaped to leverage the power of a particular medium?

When it comes to video, conventional wisdom on this topic seems fleeting.  Online was thought suited best for user-generated video-snacking, an association that didn’t appeal to advertisers; then came Hulu and viewers started consuming full-length television episodes.  NetFlix’s Watch Instantly function will now be available through the Vista Media Center; and internet-ready televisions were front-and-center at this year’s CES.  Will this cause more filmmakers to consider direct-to-web features? Will advertisers now reassess online video or will the shrinking traditional television audience share still represent the biggest bang-for-the-buck?  Will users who are accustomed to free be willing to pay for premium content?

Hopefully this blog will serve to initiate discussions on these and other questions, as “The Media and the Message” will endeavor to explore a broad range of media-related issues involving monetization, content creation, messaging, branding and more.

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