How the long tail cripples bonus content/multimedia http://t.co/PoDriUI7
I have a friend who used to do a large amount of bonus material for one of the major studios as they progressed through releasing their back catalog. He has already noted that, as of about two years ago, that work dried up completely and now is no longer part of his business, which fortunately is still fairly healthy for him.
This is a depressing reality check, and is probably the counter argument to “the year of Transmedia“. Transmedia is seriously expensive to produce!
The same thing that happened to music is going to be true of books. The typical ebook costs about $10 in out of pocket expenses to write (more if you count coffee and not just pencils). But if we add in $50,000 for app coding, $10,000 for a director and another $500,000 for the sort of bespoke work that was featured in Al Gore’s recent ‘book’, you can see the problem. The publisher will never have a chance to make this money back.
Sure, there will be experiments at the cutting edge, but no, they’re not going to pay off regularly enough for it to become an industry. The quality is going to remain in the writing and in the bravery of ideas, not in teams of people making expensive digital books.
The market didn’t really make a conscious choice here, but the choice has been made: it’s not a few publishers putting out a few books for the masses. No, the market for the foreseeable future is a million publishers publishing to 100 million readers. Do the math. Lots of choice, not a lot of whistles. And no bells.
2 replies on “How the long tail cripples bonus content/multimedia.”
I don’t get the following quote from the article:
“The only reason that movies still cost so much to make is the finite number of movie screens available to the studios (this choke point enforces the scarcity of the short head). Once the world is 100% Netflix, don’t expect to see many more $200 million movies.”
For years now theatrical runs have been mainly loss leaders and DVD was the cash cow. Where does the scarcity he talks about come into play especially with many content creators pushing for the theatrical exclusivity window to shorten (if not disappear altogether)?
I think the point is that, when there are limited players and limited distribution channels – like theatrical and DVD release with the push and publicity of a major studio – can sustain $200 million movies, but if we’re all distributing independently, fragmenting the market, then the chance of a return on a $200 million movie is dramatically reduced.
We’ve already seen this happen in Television, with the proliferation of cable channels and the fragmenting of the market, a hit today would have been an abject failure 20 years ago. Smaller audiences, less advertising revenue and smaller production budgets. And that’s been a reality for year.