home  pluginblog Media Models Part 1 - Show Me the Money
|
|
Media Models Part 1 - Show Me the Money |
|
|
|
|
Written by tom
|
The end of January 2008 saw the expanding of YouTube's partnership scheme to the UK , which was designed to share ad-revenue with producers. The scheme only targets a few of the tens of thousands of filmmakers' who use the site to share content, but YouTube claims that some are now earning several thousand dollars a month from videos on the site. Nice work if you can get it. And that's the key - how do you get it? you have to be picked by YouTube. This scheme has not been without its critics ;
"So basically what YouTube are saying is, go away and work hard to create great content AND build an audience to win the grand prize which is an ad-revenue deal with us....Sounds a lot like a record company to me where bands slog it out for years, usually at a loss, hoping to appear on the industry's radar...So why not open the scheme to everybody..."
The key issue does not seem to be so much 'what can technology do?', but 'how can it pay?' But therein lies the question - pay whom and how much? The music industry still seems to be in free-fall about how to deal with the networked age it finds itself in;
"U2's manager yesterday called on artists to join him in forcing the 'hippy' technology and internet executives he blames for the collapse of the music industry to help save it...He was speaking at the Midem music conference in Cannes, which has been dominated by talk of new revenue models that might save an industry brought to its knees by piracy and falling sales."
The continued focus on copyright law as a way to enforce business models is having a rough time. ThePirateBay is under attack , (again ) yet the use of torrents is growing, new frontiers have opened up, even before the closing of this front; witness QuickSliverScreen , akin to VideoHybrid we reported on before , streaming full length films over the net; (at the time of writing this you could see In The Valley Of Elah, Sweeny Todd and hundreds of others! ) It seems a never-ending battle. (Much of this seems to be powered by the frankly impressive Stage6 by DivX.)
So what are the revenue models that are breaking though? We looked at this a while ago in the plugincinema book, and much of what we said stills holds true, so for the next couple of blog entries, we are going to look at the ideas and practices being talked about and used at the moment... PS: Feel free to contact us with ideas and suggestions for the blog.
|
|
