Goodreads, After the Buyout

For those not already familiar with them, Goodreads is an online community for readers to keep track of books they want to read, are reading, or have read. It also allows them to interact with other readers and authors. Authors can also use Goodreads to promote their own personal brand and books while interacting with readers.

To the best of my knowledge, Goodreads was built as an independent entity using venture capital funds (and not a subsidiary or affiliate of Barnes & Noble NYSE:BKS). The entire business may originally have been “built to flip” given its rather thin monetization on a sketchy business model up to its acquisition in March this year by Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN).

I have three Goodreads accounts serving different purposes, including an author's account. It’s handy for keeping track of my books, but its user interface could use a lot of improvement; I hope Amazon will spend the money to do so. I don’t use it for community interaction about books. but a number of acquaintances use it extensively for tracking their reading, interacting with other readers interested in the same books, and for promoting their own works.

[Hereafter follows lengthy business discussion, skip as desired.]

Video On Demand: Film and Television's Blind Spot

[Theater in which you are playing]

Missing the VOD Forest for Movie Trees

Scott Myers at Go Into The Story asked this past week why film studios are not making more movies for the largest demographic groups.

What struck me as odd when looking at the Nielsen data provided in Scott’s post: the remarkable stasis in movie audience over the three-year period, when we know that the video-on-demand (VOD) market has changed dramatically during the same period. Consumption of VOD movie content nearly doubled between 2009-2012. (It had already doubled in the preceding three-year time, according to a Pew Internet and American Life study.)

We’re looking at this form of entertainment called film or movies, based on content delivered initially at an external location in approximately two-hour long chunks. But this product and industry appears to be benchmarking against itself when it has other more challenging competition or an entire market in the form of VOD.

This may be one of the answers in itself as to why the industry pitches to the same market; they either cannot get a bead on VOD due to its newness and volatility, or they are blind to it.

Take a look at this presentation [PDF] by the American Advertising Federation (AAF). The numbers are quite different and are extremely fluid, changing substantially over the last three years. Think Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu, and YouTube as primary examples; how much have their audiences&rsquo consumption patterns changed?

The movie industry’s favorite demographic is the one most likely to watch VOD. At some point, traditional movies as currently formatted will not sync with their lifestyle.

Why is it that the film industry does not appear to be targeting the audience least likely to shift?

Why is it that the film industry is not encouraging development of products that are inherently more flexible in response to their current target demographic before they screen in a traditional theater?

Or is the film industry relying on its traditional products aimed at young adults to continue to appeal through traditional outlets, in spite of the dramatic shift in digital delivery? This approach leaves a more mature market under-served at both the box office and at home.

In theory, advertisers should be pressing the film industry to do better by women with hybridized VOD-movie products as they are the largest group of VOD consumers in terms of consumption of both entertainment and attached advertising. We can see AAF has the numbers, but we can’t yet see any shift in how financing of films may be changing in response to advertisers’ understanding of the marketplace.

There’s a disparity and tension here not fully articulated. Entertainment industry creatives, whether attached to film or VOD, would do well to position themselves for an earthquake when the tension releases.

The Case of the Missing Web TV Critics: There's No There There

Aymar Jean Christian at Televisual asked, Where Are The Web TV Critics?, noting traditional outlets for media criticism including New York Times, The AV Club, New York, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, and Variety have yet to establish a regular column evaluating web TV content.

There are several problems with Christian’s criticism:

What is this thing you speak of? —  

A single nomenclature as well as definition for the visual entertainment content streamed over the internet has yet to be developed. What exactly is “web TV”? Is it the same as “video on demand”? “streaming video”? Is it “social TV” or “second screen content” as covered by TVNewser’s sister site, LostRemote.com (which doesn’t provide criticism but news of the same)?

The lack of a cohesive, uniform identity encourages marginalization of the content and delivery format. It's easy to discount it because there's no aggregate accruing critical mass for lack of identity and definition.

What the existing outlets for criticism do know is that whatever it is, it’s not Film or Television, both of which they continue to critique.

Why ask the past about the future of entertainment? —  

If this unnamed and undefined entertainment content has not yet found a home after all this time in traditional outlets, perhaps it’s because these platforms are still tied to a dead-tree, brick-and-mortar analog concept of entertainment.

Why not approach newer, internet-only venues like HuffingtonPost, Flavorwire, Gawker, or other outlets which are not tied to print media formats while focusing on internet content?

Further, why approach traditional, mainstream outlets with requests by email, rather than contacting their critics who use social media through the same? The critics who are most wired and current are those who will best understand how the lack of criticism, published on the internet, affects entertainment content released only through the internet.

Print News Continues Flaming Death Spiral; Will The Guardian Bail Out in Time?

[photo: Stuart Chalmers via Flickr]

We’ve seen stories this week about two print news outlets trending away from print--phasing out a print edition in the case of Newsweek, and potential phase out of print operations in the case of The Guardian.

Newsweek’s print edition will be a thing of the past as of the end of the year. The Guardian is considering a similar move, if off-the-record sources in a Telegraph article are credible.

Ironically, The Guardian’s staff contributor Michael Wolff is doing an annoyingly smug I-told-you-so dance, bashing Newsweek’s editor Tina Brown for bothering to take on Newsweek. At the time the news magazine was sold in 2008, Wolff told one of their staff reporters, “...Newsweek wouldn't be around in five years.”

Let’s hope for Wolff’s sake that The Guardian’s owners are as brave as Tina and as monied as Newsweek’s benefactors in helping the newspaper limp along for another handful of years. The Guardian has been hemorrhaging money to the tune of £44M a year; the parent firm’s owners appear to have discussed soto voce their concerns about the losses with Telegraph’s reporter.

As the New Yorker noted this past spring, “... [The Guardian]  lost roughly $50 million last year, and though it’s subsidized by a nonprofit trust, at that rate it can survive for at most another five years.” Guardian Media Group CEO Alan Miller appeared less optimistic in June 2011, when he indicated “parent company Guardian Media Group could run out of cash in three to five years if the business operations did not change” in a report featured in The Guardian on its “digital-first” strategy.

Fine reading The Telegraph’s article by journalist Katherine Rushton, the sources cited are referred to as “Senior figures at Guardian News & Media“ and “trustees of the Scott Trust, GNM’s ultimate owner.” One might assume on the face of it that these are separate sources--senior figures and trustees being different persons--and that the Telegraph is stringing together lightly sourced gossip about a competitor.

However Rushton may have relied entirely on the reporting of Stephen Foster at More About Advertising, an independent news service focused on business reporting. Rushton links to Foster’s report in her article, in which Foster refers to his sources as “Sources at the Guardian newspaper,” “top levels of Guardian News & Media,” and “trustees of the Scott Trust.” Given Foster’s background in marketing, advertising, and business communications, it’s likely there are both sources within the newspaper as well as at trustee level who are concerned about financial losses and looking at major cost cutting.

The Guardian’s own management decisions have offered enough validation to undermine Alan Rusbridger’s denials about any discussions to leave print. The “digital-first” strategy announced in 2011 along with the move toward open journalism, described by Rusbridger in May this year in an interview with Nieman Labs, positions The Guardian to rely more heavily on breaking news in digital space and publishing there first, before moving the final story to print.

Roy Greenslade, The Guardian’s press blogger, actively countered Rushton’s Telegraph article, implying it was a “flyer”--in colloquial American English, a “trial balloon” or a “stalking horse,” an idea floated to test for or elicit reaction, possibly from competitors or from the newspapers’ constituency. Greenslade says the Telegraph story is false.

But Greenslade doesn’t respond to the original source story at More About Advertising; MAA’s Foster pushes back at Greenslade’s protests, saying, “Our story was well-sourced. It’s certainly what staff on the Guardian newspaper fear is happening...”

Finding the "missing" talent in a technology-rich present

Filmmaker David Schmüdde wrote at Beyond The Frame about director Peter Webber’s latest post for Directors.UK.com. Webber discussed film and technology in his entry, The Newest New Wave; he lamented that in spite of the quantity and quality of technology available today, new filmmaking genius has not emerged:

“…there is a limit to what can be expected from this democratisation of the means of film production. The most important commodity in all of this is not in fact the technology but the talent.”

Director Aaron Stewart-Ahn’s recent comments informed Webber’s post:

"...we don’t see films as brave, funny, entertaining, ambitious or unashamedly intellectual as the ones they [Godard, Coutard] made together....Nowadays there seems to be an overall diminution of ambition, an unfortunate limiting of horizons."

Is this true? It may be more accurate to say we’re prevented from seeing clearly the heirs of Godard/Coutard:
1) The US is now a culture of amateurs. Anybody with a digital camera/videocam, camera phone, tablet with camera--but without any additional training--is a potential creator of video for publication/distribution. Much of what appears in public online video repositories is produced by the untrained but highly motivated user. It may not look like the product of seasoned creators.
2) Education in the US places a premium on analysis (and not storytelling) in preparation for the workplace, not on analysis for the creation of better art. However, analysis is taught, and it may yield content that looks very different from Godard/Coutard's generation. What narrative emerges will also look very different.
3) Venues for sharing/publication/distribution like YouTube and Vimeo receive and warehouse so much content that it's unfathomable how even the existing film industry could drink from this firehouse and find satiation. There's just so much content that it swamps whatever is really good; how do we find the needle in the haystack?
4) Success breeds contempt; The Blair Witch Project neutralized the indie creator space for quite some time. Commercially-funded cinema has mimicked independent film to the point of discouragement (see Cloverfield [2008] for the use of cinéma vérité complete with jump cuts as an example, applied in a sci-fi/fantasy production). The product of blowback against earlier real and faux indie efforts may look quite different as it rebels against past success.

Entertainment Industry and the Truth About Information: It's the Experience, Stupid

I’ve been stewing over a post by Steve Blank retweeted earlier today by director Peter Webber. Blank discusses the reason why the movie industry can’t innovate, pointing to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) as one of the firewalls the movie industry bought to prevent incursion on the industry’s intellectual property.
SOPA is a cheap method for the industry to avoid more expensive innovation and take a less risky action: sue the fuck out of anybody who might find a way to tweak their output and make yet another product, especially products from which they can’t reliably draw income. Bottom line, it’s not about creativity or protecting it; SOPA is about protecting monetary turf on the cheap while avoiding any expense-incurring risk.
But the movie industry will have to deal with reality sooner or later--better now, while the current business model still brings in tons of money as Steve Blank pointed out. They can afford the luxury of experimentation to the benefit of their shareholders, versus later when the truth becomes crystal clear to the public.
The truth, which all industries built on replicable human knowledge must face, is that information is a commodity in the age of the internet. It wants to move freely, and it will. For most of human history, information was corralled and controlled; money could be extracted by gatekeepers who controlled the medium. In the age of the internet, gatekeepers no longer have control. Networks attached to the internet are leaky--and information will take advantage of these leaks to move as it’s like air, hard to maintain in a vacuum of any scale. [cont'd.]