Distribution Is Part of the Show

Your plan for getting your work out there has to be as original as the actual work, perhaps even more so. The work has to create a totally new market. There's no point trying to do the same thing as 250,000 other young hopefuls, waiting for a miracle. All existing business models are wrong. Find a new one

(from gapingvoid). The old school way to put it is: The Medium is the Message. Perhaps I can help you figure out how to get your work out there /plug.

Viewership Growing On YouTube

Basically, we took the top 100 all-time most-viewed "mid-tail" or "new media studio" content creators (i.e. Next New Networks, Howcast Studios, The Wall Street Journal's videos etc.) and looked at their viewership growth. The results? Over the past six months, publishers saw their daily average views grow by an average of 4.98% per month. Although there have been several recent failures in the space (60Frames, ManiaTV), overall the sector is growing in terms of viewership

(emphasis added, from TubeMogul's blog).

Social Media Salaries

There are no surprises, but I can tell you that consulting fees range from $20 an hour to $400 an hour, salaries range from $24,000 a year to $170,000, and the difference is based almost entirely on your non-social media employment background

(from Social Media Headhunter).

Social Network Dominance by County

While now some months old, there is a map of the world with the dominant social network for each country shown. Might be useful as a starting point if trying to reach a given country's audience.

Page Rank Is Not What It Once Was

Google's pagerank is shown most commonly by the green bar in the Google toolbar in your browser (if you have it installed). While Wikipedia says this ...numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet... denotes a site's importance in the eyes of Google, this is no longer true. Pagerank is now a deceptive, essentially useless number leading many to make bad decisions (e.g., buying ads on sites based on pagerank, when foreseeable results will actually disappoint).

There was a time, a few years ago, that Google's pagerank was a great indicator of how much traffic Google would send to a site. After that traffic got to the site, the site would have a chance to connect with, or sell things to those visitors. That is no longer the case, pagerank is no longer very important and like so many things online and in life, numbers aren't everything.

In all things, the shorthand of a number seems convenient, but is likely useless for revealing the most important truths (e.g., "I love my parents 72" is fairly meaningless).

Printed Newspapers Are Yesterday's News

The Daily Show pointed out online news is faster than print. This is part of what makes people prefer online news, and by extension, makes advertisers shift their focus and spend from print to online.

Get Twitter Direct Messages as txts

You can have twitter send DMs to your cell phone as text messages (SMS). Go to http://twitter.com/devices and set-up your phone. Remember to set up the times you do not want texts (or else it may wake you, interrupt work, etc.).

You can also have people's tweets come to your phone as texts (their public tweets, in addition to DMs). After your phone is set up, go to their twitter page (http://twitter.com/[their twitter name]) when logged in, and below their name on the left, change the "Device updates" next to where it says "following".

Cat Video - Schrodinger's (flash)

My friend Schrodinger's cute cat (rated PG).

Market Value of Content Hard to Assess

There are new untried ways to make money with moving pictures with synchronized sound, and lots of other ways it's currently being done, but I think who pays for the means of distribution and how is interesting and worth noticing. Substitute "moving pictures with synchronized sound" for "journalism" in this quote and interesting ideas form.

So long as our information economy treats journalism as overhead, valuable only as advertising-bait, then our economy will be glutted with free, low-value journalism. We won't be able to study specific indications of value - in terms of price or quality - so long as it's produced as a subsidized commodity. The Web merely revealed that truth

(from The fire that frees the seed).

Various forms of infrastructure are needed for video/film/TV distribution, for example:

• physical DVDs and shipping
• movie theatres and their films which can cost >$30,000.00 per print
• cables/wires/wireless systems that carry the internet to you
• etc.

The costs of the moving picture distribution infrastructure are covered directly and indirectly in different ways.

• Movies in theatres can have the physical reels of film paid for by the distribution company which often affords to pay for the prints by getting a part of the box office receipts (charging the viewer directly). The final stages of distribution, like the projector and screen/speakers, are paid for by the exhibitors that get part of the box office but make most of their money through concessions (candy, popcorn, drinks).
• Broadcast television through the air has its first stages of distribution paid for in the early stages by the station (transmitter and licensing fees) which it sells ads to pay for. The final stage, as with online video, is a viewing device usually owned by the viewer.
• Video uploaded online, say to YouTube, has its hosting and first stages of distribution paid for by a web site (an internet company) like Google, which often sells ads to make the money to afford do so. The final stages are covered by the telecommunication companies (which charge the viewer) and finally the display device which is usually owned by the viewer.
• On-Demand, be it iTunes-like or through a cable or satellite company, is paid for by charging the viewer directly.

This is not a complete list. All of these models can change, with the last two changing most quickly today (internet ad supported and on-demand).

Paid-Content for Newspapers Not a Solution

Quality journalism is expensive, and to the extent that it provides a public good, we will find ways to fund it. But top-heavy, poorly run, arrogant-to-the-bitter-end media companies? This is their crisis, not our crisis, and it certainly isn't about journalism.

Newspapers that are turning to paywall plans today are gambling on a risky revenue stream that even the experts aren't predicting will provide a replacement to their lost advertising revenues (their biggest financial problem is the rapid decline in advertising rates, not the slow decline in print circulation). It's a "well, we've got to do SOMETHING" solution, not a logical, do-the-math solution.

They don't get it. They don't want to get it. And in many cases, they're literally paid not to get it

(from The newspaper suicide pact).