10 observations for the future of media

The Publishing 2.0 blog pointed to a recent article from an analyst at Screen Digest, which compares YouTube and Hulu. They also offer up, in no particular order, ten observations about the future of media:

1. Professional content still has A LOT more value than “user-generated content.”
2. Legal content still has A LOT more value than illegal content.
3. Professional content produced for analogue media is worth pennies on the dollar when distributed in the web’s commoditizing content marketplace.
4. It probably costs a lot more than $180 million to produce the content on Hulu, which means that it’s not a standalone business.
5. Ads inserted into online video are about 1,000 times more annoying than TV ads (I say this having watched many shows on Hulu) — losing control of your content is not a web-native experience. This suppresses advertising value.
6. TV/Video will likely follow the path of music and newspapers in suffering a dramatic decline in content value on the web.
7. Video is probably not a panacea for newspapers trying to reinvent their businesses on the web.
8. Most analogue media businesses, when fully transitioned to the web, will likely bear little resemblance to the original businesses.
9. Google isn’t doing any better than anyone else at solving the content commoditization problem on the web.
10. Six years after Google perfected search advertising, there has been no innovation in online advertising that even comes close to the same scale.

Facebook in Real Life

OMG, is this just too classic or what? Austin is "Yeah baby party naked!" Just imagine going through one day emulating these actions. People would think you were totally insane.

FaceBook In Reality

For those of you out there who haven't yet "fallen for" the whole social media bug, this hilarious video from Idiotsofants.com should give you a really good idea of what it's like. Well that is, if you were like surrounded by savants and very special friends.

Anyway, for those of you who have Facebook, you should get a really good kick out of this video and the next one I found. Enjoy!

Word of Mouth Marketing Roadmap

For many in the marketing community, the new road that is being blazed by the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, and most importantly the social networks (MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc) ventures into foreign territory. This new road doesn't follow the familiar routes that traditional marketing has taken for the last 50 years. No sir-ree, this new road has most "traditional" marketers feeling very uncomfortable and out of place; which is not a place that no anyone that is supposed to understand how to reach consumers should be.

Word of Mouth Marketing Roadmap

Well I ran across an article that I think lays out a new road map. A road map to understand how to successfully pierce the fog of confusion surrounding this new road, but without getting lost. As most people, traditional marketers, are hesitant to stop and ask for directions (help) from explorers (entrepreneurs) who are unafraid of driving around on this new road until they find their way, no, old-school marketers would rather just wish that the new road didn't exist in the first place. Unfortunately for them, this road continues under construction as daily tens of millions convert it from a two lane country road into a 8 lane super highway.

Entitled the "The Microfame Game," this article from Rex Sorgatz of the New York Magazine describes an eight step road map to micro-fame. And while micro-fame is certanaly not the goal of most marketers, the same essential steps are involved in getting your brand, product, service noticed. And while I'm just a starving high-tech entrepreneur and not really understand or believe in traditional marketing, in these days of mass-marketing over-saturation, I do know that getting noticed is the goal of marketing in this new territory.

The article is extremely well researched and gives you plenty of examples to study and imitate. As I've said earlier in this blog, YouTube plays a signficant role in this new road-map and any marketerer who chooses to ignore this new channel will do so at their own peril.

Well I'll leave you to start your analysis of these new steps, and a little word to the wise, don't be like the proverbial alpha-male who refuses to ask for direction when lost in the country, find an intrepid explorer (entrepreneur) of this new road as a guide. You'll get where you want to be a lot faster and you'll please your clients in the process.

8 STEPS TO MICROFAME

1. Self-publish
2. Stylize
3. Overshare
4. Respond
5. Ally
6. Diversify
7. Create Controversy
8. Persist

Flickr Creative Commons Contributor: twenty_questions

Univision Doesn't Get YouTube

Recently the keynote speaker for the 2008 SME Internet Forum, Alfonso Luna, Director of Marketing for Latin American Division of Google, went to great efforts to illustrate how powerful YouTube was as a marketing tool, literally unmatched by any other tool on the Internet. How right he is. Check out this review I wrote about the event.

Number of Online Videos Viewed in the U.S. Jumps 13% Percent in March to 11.5 Billion

According to the most recent report by comScore Video Metrix, the number of videos watched on YouTube is nearly the triple the rest of the top ten sites combined. 38% of all videos watched during March 2008 are hosted on YouTube, that brings the total videos watched in one month to 4,358,306.

Univision announces video on demand offering

So while Univision does recognize that video over the Internet is a big deal, they are both late to the party, and second misguided. They are hoping that by launching, as they claim, "the most extensive library of Spanish-language content in the U.S.", they are hoping to siphon off some of the YouTube traffic to Univision.com.

I see this time and time again. Instead of going were the momentum is, they want to swim against the current and try to get the Internet community to stop using YouTube. Unless, that is, they basically duplicate their efforts and create a Univsion channel on YouTube and publish all of their content their as well, which is what I would do. In addition, they need to come out with a very sophisticated solution. One which integrates effortlessly with MySpace and FaceBook, because if they don't, it's not going to be very pretty when the project manager tries to explain why the number of video views for the new service isn't rising as they expected.