Steven Rosenbaum on 'Why Curation Is Just as Important as Creation' [OPINION]

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Excerpt from Steven Rosenbaum's article on mashable.com

"...We don’t have an information shortage; we have an attention shortage,” Seth Godin said. “There’s always someone who’s going to supply you with information that you’re going to curate. The Guggenheim doesn’t have a shortage of art. They don’t pay you to hang paintings for a show — in fact you have to pay for the insurance. Why? Because the Guggenheim is doing a service to the person who’s in the museum and the artist who’s being displayed.”

As Godin sees it, power is shifting from content makers to content curators: “If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power....”

A timely piece as this is exactly! what I'm writing about today in the context of interactive documentaries. I'll be posting that later...

Read Rosenbaum's full article:

http://mashable.com/2011/03/17/curation-importance/

ComScore Releases February 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings #infdist

Microsoft Sites Jumps to Second Place in Video Content Ranking

RESTON, Va., March 17, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — comScore, Inc. (SCOR: 27.01 +0.62 +2.35%), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 170 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in February for an average of 13.6 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5.0 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20080115/COMSCORELOGO)

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in February with 141.1 million unique viewers. Microsoft Sites captured the #2 ranking (up from #7) with 48.8 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 46.7 million viewers. Facebook.com came in fourth with nearly 46.7 million viewers, while VEVO ranked fifth with 45.9 million viewers. Google Sites had the highest number of viewing sessions with 1.8 billion, and average time spent per viewer at 262 minutes, or 4.4 hours.


Top U.S. Online Video Properties by Video Content Views

Ranked by Unique Video Viewers

February 2011

Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations

Source: comScore Video Metrix

Property

Total Unique Viewers (000)

Viewing Sessions (000)

Minutes per Viewer

Total Internet : Total Audience

169,646

5,038,485

816.4

Google Sites

141,065

1,829,662

261.6

Microsoft Sites

48,812

297,731

46.5

Yahoo! Sites

46,714

200,088

36.3

Facebook.com*

46,661

170,319

18.5

VEVO

45,917

222,110

86.7

Viacom Digital

45,214

229,856

74.2

AOL, Inc.

38,773

137,362

23.1

Turner Digital

27,447

87,652

25.3

Hulu

27,257

143,461

224.3

NBC Universal

24,185

53,136

20.4

*Facebook.com experienced a positive step-change in its data this month due to the inclusion of an additional video serving location that was not previously credited to Facebook.

Top 10 Video Ad Properties by Video Ads Viewed

Americans viewed 3.8 billion video ads in February, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at more than 1.1 billion. Tremor Media Video Network ranked second overall (and highest among video ad networks) with 548.3 million ad views, followed by ADAP.TV (396 million) and SpotXchange Video Ad Network (343 million). Time spent watching videos ads totaled 1.7 billion minutes during the month, with Hulu delivering the highest duration of video ads at 454 million minutes. Video ads reached 42 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 30 times during the month. Hulu also delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 48 over the course of the month.


Top U.S. Online Video Properties by Video Ads* Viewed

Ranked by Video Ads Viewed

February 2011

Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations

Source: comScore Video Metrix

Property

Video Ads (000)

Total Ad Minutes (MM)

Frequency (Ads per Viewer)

% Reach Total U.S. Population

Total Internet : Total Audience

3,829,869

1,661

30.2

42.0%

Hulu

1,131,047

454

48.1

7.8%

Tremor Media Video Network**

548,323

336

9.0

20.1%

ADAP.TV**

395,864

236

8.2

16.1%

SpotXchange Video Ad Network**

342,878

217

9.7

11.7%

Viacom Digital

284,767

131

11.7

8.0%

BrightRoll Video Network** +

273,190

157

5.1

17.8%

CBS Interactive

227,808

74

10.1

7.4%

Microsoft Sites

208,799

92

9.2

7.5%

ABC Television

171,359

71

20.9

2.7%

Undertone**

154,191

88

8.1

6.3%

*Video ads include streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, homepage ads, etc.


**Indicates video ad network


+BrightRoll Video Network reported an internal tagging error that led to a potential undercounting of their videos.

Other notable findings from February 2011 include:

  • The top video ad networks in terms of their potential reach of the total U.S. population were: Tremor Media at 46.3 percent, BrightRoll Video Network at 37.3 percent and Break Media at 36.8 percent.
  • 82.5 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
  • The duration of the average online content video was 5.1 minutes, while the average online video ad was 0.4 minutes.
  • Video ads accounted for 12.4 percent of all videos viewed and 1.2 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.


About comScore

comScore, Inc. (SCOR: 27.01 +0.62 +2.35%) is a global leader in measuring the digital world and preferred source of digital business analytics. For more information, please visit www.comscore.com/companyinfo.

SOURCE comScore, Inc.

How Kickstarter Became a Lab for Daring Prototypes and Ingenious Products | Magazine

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Excerpt from original article by Carlye Adler:

"Ivan Wong struggled with his camera strap. It would whip through the air when he turned his lens, occasionally flapping into the frame and destroying the composition. It’s a common issue, but for Wong it was more than an annoyance—as a professional sports photographer, he depended on his ability to capture the perfect moment. A wayward strap could kill an entire assignment. Wong talked to some fellow photographers—his brother, Ben, and his friend Anne Bui, a product developer at Fox Racing. They agreed it was a problem. So they did what any modern maker would: They designed their own solution. The idea was to connect the strap to one point on the bottom of the camera—the threaded tripod mount—instead of two points on the top. That should keep the strap out of the shot and reduce tangling. They grabbed some nuts and bolts from a local workshop and hit Ivan and Ben’s parents’ garage. Their prototype wasn’t pretty, but it worked. They called it the C-Loop and began to think it might have commercial potential.

The team had some manufacturing experience, but they had no idea how to bring a product to market. And money? They didn’t have that either, and it would cost $15,000 to produce a minimum run of 500 C-Loops. They considered pooling their savings (including Ben’s college money) and taking out a loan, but nobody relished that idea.

Then they found Kickstarter, a website where people post descriptions of their projects and anyone can chip in to help fund them. Ben had discovered the site after hearing about a couple of guys who wanted to manufacture a tripod mount for the iPhone 4. Ivan pledged $20—in effect preordering one of the gizmos. “I thought, that could be us,” Ivan says. Using Kickstarter was an appealingly offbeat approach, and there was no risk. Even if they couldn’t raise the full amount, they’d build a following and win some free publicity...."

Read the excellent long article on Wired.com

Art of the Title - Amazing Archive!

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Description:

"THE SITE

A compendium and leading web resource of film and television title design from around the world. We honor the artists who design excellent title sequences. We discuss and display their work with a desire to foster more of it, via stills and video links, interviews, creator notes, and user comments.

Featuring opening title design for film and television from Croatia, New Zealand, Serbia, Russia, the United States, Brazil, England, France, India, Japan, Italy, Chile, Mexico, Yugoslavia and Egypt.

THE STAFF

Ian Albinson Editor-in-chief | Founder
Alexander Ulloa Head Writer

Angel Tagudin Contributing Author

Netflix Original Content Is Much More Than A Strategy Shift — It Could Shift An Industry

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I'm agreeing with MG Siegler here:

"...Netflix has confirmed that they intend to pay for House of Cards a new show being produced by David Fincher (yes, he of Fight Club, The Social Network, etc) and starring Kevin Spacey (yes, he of The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, etc). Netflix is not paying for the full production of it, but instead they’re paying for the first-rights access to air it. In other words, they get the first “window” to show it to viewers.

And while the company is saying that this isn’t a shift in strategy, it could end up being potentially much more than that.

Up until now, Netflix has not had content in this first window. Instead, they’ve focused on the second or third or even fourth window. That is, they’ve shown content after it’s in theaters or on television for its initial run. And sometimes they don’t get content until after it’s been in theaters and then on television for quite some time. This catalog of content has been the service’s bread and butter.

But with House of Cards, the game changes. For the first time, they’re going to get people signing up to Netflix to get first access to content...."

Read Siegler's full post on TechCrunch.com

A Modest Proposal: Make an awesome web series. Then get people to pay for it. Hugh Hancock weighs in

This is an excerpt from a long smart post - read the full post on Hugh Hancock's site:

"...I haven’t really checked up on the Rooster Teeth model, but to expand on what I was thinking of-

Let’s say you have show that puts out a 30 minute episode every other Monday- an episode every two weeks. You make it available for free- but you only get it in 5-minute chunks on a couple of days a week. Monday and Thursday, say.

Over the two week period between the release of one 30 minute show and the release of the next 30 minutes, you give away 20 free minutes- giving you a backlog of 10 minutes for freeviewers.
In the next two-week cycle, you produce another 30 minutes and you screen another 20 minutes for free.
You’re up to a 20 minute backlog.

Over two months you end up with (4x30min episodes=120mins of content) and (8x5mins freeview=40mins of freeview), leaving an 80 minute backlog of content to lure new paying customers.

Potential customers get to see your show in a cut-down trickle, while actual customers get it in it’s full glory- and all your site content is trumpeting what’s in the new show, and how big the archives are, and which are the most popular episodes (which may or may not be available to freeviewers, as they might be in the backlog limbo).

For sure, people might rip the content and torrent it, or dump it onto YouTube, or otherwise try to work around your distribution- that’s almost a given in the internet environment, though. The thing is, customers won’t have to torrent the files, or suffer the YouTube cuts- they can watch the show in bite-size chunks on your site for free, or subscribe and get it in more meaty portions.

Wait, that didn’t come out right. Anyway.

It’s a model that makes it convenient for content grazers, who just drop in twice a week to watch 5 minutes of programming. It’s convenient for new subscribers, who get access to that backlog and can binge. If it’s backed up by a solid community and extras (podcasts can be quick and easy to produce, commentary and behind-the-scenes content can be similar, shooting scripts and animatics can be shown, outtakes and cut scenes and whatnot), it’s a good investment for ongoing subscribers.

As an aside, kill advertising for paying customers, or make it an option (an upgraded account of some kind). They’ve paid you already- give them the content, not banners and those stupid video inserts that try and sell a car before watching a man get kicked in the dick on YouTube...."