Tuesday, 30 January 2001
Breakout: Business:
Making an Online Content Deal: Can It Work?
Timothy Childs, moderator
Rory O'Connor, MediaChannel
I used to get up at these conferences and identify myself as a journalist, but that was back in the days when there was such a thing as journalism, before journalism morphed first into information and then into content. People would like to describe me now as a content provider, which I don't know about you, but that's a term that I detest. So I now describe myself not as a journalist, but as a discontent provider, and I'm going to do my best to provide a little discontent in the next ten minutes or so if I can.
| "I now describe myself not as a journalist, but as a discontent provider. " RORY O'CONNOR |
We did a weekly series for four years about human rights, called "Rights and Wrongs." At its peak, it was distributed to sixty-two countries, but after four years the money dried up. I don't want to be in that position again, where we put five years into a project and it stops right when it starts to have real impact. "Rights and Wrongs" was on 150 American public television stations, in eighteen of the top twenty markets, with most of them in prime time. But after four years of hard work and not just making it but promoting it, funding it and distributing it, the funders pulled the plug. The new model, at least for us, is to go out into the capital market and try to compete and we can use a mixture, dual revenue streams. There can be some private money and there can be some public money. I can tell you we're going to have to monetize them down the line, not to produce profit, but to produce revenue so that we can have sustainable media.
Then there are the times when you sign a contract with an entity, write an original piece of content for them, and they resell it and tell you that they'll give you some money back. Salon, for example, has such an arrangement and much of the email that I've been getting and much of the chat on the Internet seems to indicate that they're simply not paying those resale rights to the content providers. So what does this mean? It means that the contracts that are offered are probably not worth the electron that they're written on. They're very onerous and often there's very little to no enforcement. As I mentioned before, in terms of licensing, if it's not clear who owns the film rights, then whatever contract you may sign and try to enforce is probably going to be tied up in legal limbo for quite some time.
To get to the actual topic of this session, making a content deal that actually pays, I have to tell you that it is a real mess, and I'm not sure that anyone is really in a position to make a lot of money on a content deal these days. Then there's a final fact related to the copyright versus copy left conversation earlier today. You probably heard the claim that information wants to be free. Well, if information wants to be free, what does that mean for the people who are creating and providing this information for us? It's certainly not free to provide it.
There's a tremendous amount of content around, whence the problem recognized by earlier speakers - we have too much content and too much information. In the firs
t wave of the Internet, I remember everybody saying this is fantastic. Look at all the information that's available. I don't know about you, but often my reaction these days to all that information that's available is "Oh my God!" How do we deal with this? The filtering mechanism is going to be key. Somebody is going to have to start filtering this information for us because there's too much for us to deal with on our own. Obviously, that raises a lot of issues. Who filters? What's being filtered? How is it being filtered? I think what we need in the first place as independent media makers is an authentic filter, one we can trust, one we know is for real.
We're up against global brands. We're up against people with billions and billions and billions of dollars, and I think that we need to aggregate content from all over the world. In my context, which is largely news with documentary filmmakers and television news providers, we like to think that there is news that is not in the news. The newest project on the Internet, which Globalvision is going to be going into beyond the Mediachannel, is to create a global news and information syndicator that will aggregate what we're calling the "news not in the news."
Brad deGraf, Protozoa
I think the web's ad rates right now are extremely low. They've actually gone way down, even in the last year, way lower than they really deserve to be as compared with other media that are nowhere near as good.
| "The great hope for a web commons is a direct connection with an audience." BRAD DEGRAF |
Getting an audience established on the web is a really good way to get a much better deal if you're going to do television. I do think that it's about aggregating content, but I also think it's about aggregating audience. There is an audience for this stuff. I think the reason we feel like there isn't an audience is because the existing media doesn't want anybody to know that it's out there.
I also think that there's a notion of the commons that we need to keep in mind. So much of our whole society is based on competition and an "I win, you lose" construct. The great hope for a web commons is a direct connection with an audience. Ace Hardware is a good example. Everybody thinks that that it's a conglomerate, but it's not, it's a cooperative. All those hardware stores are locally owned and they created Ace as a franchise so that they could buy collectively, brand collectively and market themselves. There's a lot of value created there, so I think that the notion of a universally accessible commons, without the usual catch of people getting rich off of us, is really powerful.
OneWorld, which is one of Rory's partners on MediaChannel, is a really good example of a commons set-up. They've basically created a central funnel through which to collect information from non-governmental organizations all over the world.
Reichart von Wolfshield, Prolific
First off I want to say, because the topic is how to make money off of all this, I think I'm a little more cynical than even yourselves. We should all get together and go buy a parking lot somewhere around this building, because that's where the money is. I've seen it. You just sit there and take the money.
I've made video games for the Play Station, Color Gameboy, Nintendo, Amiga, PC, MacIntosh, etc. We've designed games for every single platform, but more specifically entertainment, and we create the content and we build product, do the art and programming, and it's all done internally. However, the majority of my interest in creating technology has always been in creating tools.
Just so you know, Napster is not technology. In fact it's the opposite. For most people it's technology because it's a whizzy thing you've got in your computer. But it's not technology, because for me at least technology means something that you had to think about because it was outside the box. Napster is actually about two days' worth of work. We have versions of Napster that we've written for ourselves. It's just a simple file-sharing program, and the point I want to make is that you're never going to see from this day forward any technology that stops any propagation of your material. Period. If someone wants it, we'll get it.
But you need to find a trusting attorney, somebody who wants to invest in you, and you need to understand that, if you've got something great, the only way you're going to make money is to have someone who's smarter than yourself to help you. You've got to look at that teamwork. That teamwork goes to everything. That's the creation of it, share. Ah, the word, share. I just can't imagine how I can say that any more, but sharing and having somebody to represent you. A friend of mine was head of Washington Post Digital, and I'd watch how they ("they" meaning every big entity, Disney, etc.) would do the deals; and the reality is they can afford seventy times as many attorneys as you ever could. They're there to make money off you. Their attorneys are being paid by the very same they are not going to give you.