Docking The Long Tail

In my opinion, Chris Anderson's The Long Tail was dealt the best body-blow I have yet to see in Lee Gomes's Wall Street Journal column. Running a close second was the success of Pirates of The Carribean II's opening weekend.

The debate over The Long Tail is heating up but it looks to me that Chris is going to have to publish some kind of errata saying that it was perhaps an overstated theory.

Note that the notion that almost all kinds of content will find an appropriate audience works in theory but in my opinion I don't think this sounds the death knell for top 20 singles or blockbuster movies. I think -and labour the point endlessly- that the function of the long tail is a sorting mechanism: niche content that is actually good will move beyond a niche audience. Hence: Golden Age of Content.

My sincere hope is that the long tail will sound the death nell for crap blockbusters -not all blockbusters. See below for evidence of this.

Wondering what the hell The Long Tail is? Check out this short film for an intro. very clever.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem: The Golden Age is Coming

Being right is great. One of the earlier signs of my Golden Age of Content is repurposing tv content for the web. In essence, this is what networks have been doing with Desperate Housewives and other shows available via iTunes -making us pay for reruns. But we read today that Fox has sold syndication rights for Arrested Development to MSN. There are two reasons I am incredibly happy about this.

Reason the first: it's good content -in fact it's my favourite show by a mile. Reasons the second: It will be ad-supported/free. Here's hoping the show gets a second chance at popularity (a la Family Guy on DVD) because this will greatly increase the chances that it can come back.

Microsoft declared a few months ago that it was getting back into the content creation game. Maybe we could see Arrested Development as a web series? I'd settle for that.

Now if somebody would just buy Firefly and get that running again...

Click Fraud Update

Wow. This could be interesting if it turns out to be the case. A startling 16% of marketers are completely stopping paid search spends because of click fraud. One wonders where this sizeable chunk of online revenue is going.

Heading back to traditional media? Unlikely. TV Upfront was down and the general consensus is that that extra money is moving to other forms of media.

Gosh, I wish people would ask those marketers that are cutting their paid search where the money is going.

In This Year's Stocking: Microsoft's wireless media player

It appears Microsoft's long-rumoured media player will be available before Christmas. This could be a welcome addition to my Golden Age of Content -assuming it is done right. According to paidcontent.org, This player will allow users to download content over the air.

While this in itself is a cause for excitement, think of where this can lead. Imagine automatically receiving audio histories as you walk into a city's old quarter, or regularly updated traffic tips, or user-specific music as you go shopping (no more Bing at Christmas time!).

Time to start drafting that letter to Santa.

Click Frauds Costs USD$800 million. That's an expensive transit lounge.

The San Francisco Chronicle published an article claiming that Click Fraud cost advertisers $800 million last year. Advertisers are claiming that 14.6 per cent of clicks are fraudulent and yet only 7 per cent requested a refund.

It's an interesting situation because pay-per-click looks like a great advertising model at first glance. Only it's half way there yet. The solution is not going to come from chasing fraudsters because there is no feasible way to do this effectively. The solution is going to come from monetizing the click further along the line -such as when someone actually purchases or downloads something from a client's site. This is known as CPA or Cost Per Action.

Of course, CPA is still in its infancy as far as a universal business model is concerned -in fact, odds are there won't be a universal business model for CPA. It will be up to the advertiser and the provider to work something out that is mutually beneficial and will vary from campaign to campaign.

What do we do in the meantime? Do we abandon Pay Per Click? Well, no. But we can move our money around online. According to the above article, 37% of advertisers are planning to reduce their click spend in the near future. Here's hoping they put that into some adventurous online branding: podcasts, viral video, etc. We are right up on the edge of a complete shift in how we market in an online space. All it takes is a few brave brands to beat the path.

MySpace Goes Mobile

Ooooh. This is clever and a little surprising. MySpace is rolling out a mobile service. I honestly didn't expect them to take this step before trying to properly monetize the site via advertising, etc.

But hey, shows what I know. I'm impressed. There's nothing like teenage use of cellphones to quickly fill your coffers.

We all spend so much time complaining about Newscorp fixing elections and denying human rights abuses in China and Tibet that we can sometimes forget that occasionally they do things very right.

The Napster Effect: YouTube's Last Days

Yes, YouTube has taken far too long to establish a viable business model, which is strange because the only model that they could ever make money with is a display ad-supported one. And yet people are already declaring the website terminal.

Admittedly, YouTube is facing a similar challenge that Napster faced in the late nineties, but it has a whole lot more going for it. Healther user interaction, more people, viral popularity and the potential to sell highly targeted demographics to advertisers. To say nothing of the exponential increase in broadband take up and the rampant popularity of user generated video.

The reason so few people believe advertising will work for the site is the unfiltered nature of the content. There is violent video, copyrighted content, nudity... the list goes on. However, this 'wild west' content is exactly what saw YouTube snatch around forty per cent of all video traffic. If you try to filter it in some way, the users will head straight for whatever video start-up site emerges to fill its place.

The same thing will happen if YouTube attempts to pre-roll its video. Users will leave and advertisers will start making more and more filtering demands. However, I don't see how having a small banner advertisement running underneath an emailed video posing the same problem -in fact, this is probably where YouTube's advertising power will come from. Only the funniest and most engaging advertisements are emailed and if you think logically about it: Emailed videos filter themselves. I tend to only email videos to and from my work address -to my friends work addresses. It is highly unlikely I am going to send them criminal video.

Having done a lot of research on In-Game advertising, it appears that users do not actually negatively associate a branded message with whatever violent or otherwise unseemly content they are interacting with. This makes sense when you think about it: It's not Nike's fault that I decided to shoot up a strip mall in GTA. I am willing to bet that these findings will easily transfer to YouTube. It isn't Dell's fault that I am trawling YouTube looking for video of car crashes.

I have said this before but all we need are some brave brands and some clever marketers willing to reach out to this truly huge and potentially lucrative demographic.

Make no mistake, YouTube's imminent move to monetize its success will be controversial and certainly won't please everybody. They may take a hit in their visitor numbers in the short term, but if it is managed properly this will be temporary.

Don't write them off yet. Unlike Napster, they have been compliant in handling copyright infringement and they haven't sold out at the first sniff of success. The cynic in me says this is all a moot point because someone in Big Media will ultimately by them for an absurd sum.