Category: Distribution

Digital Distribution issues

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Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

Piracy Can Boost Book Sales Tremendously

Piracy Can Boost Book Sales Tremendously http://tinyurl.com/34586kb

It seems the problem of “book piracy” is more of an issue for scaremongers and “the sky is falling” types. In practice book sales stay constant or grow with the wider exposure unauthorized distribution can bring.

Lieber shared his findings in a blog entry, complete with fancy graphics which show that the 4Chan piracy resulted in a flood of new customers.

The picture [on the article site] shows how Lieber’s site traffic surged after the pirated scans were posted, and how 4Chan brings in more traffic than BoingBoing. But Lieber also said that the spike in sales was even more impressive.

This isn’t an isolated instance. I’ve blogged before the Corey Doctorow, who believes that widespread distribution helps more than it hurts, has always made all his books available for free for download, and yet has had many best sellers than have been translated to six languages. While every book was available for free.

David Pogue’s publishers experimented with making one of his books DRM free, which inevitable led to unauthorized distribution, but sales increased slightly.

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Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Models are ‘Exceptions’

Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Model Examples The ‘Exception’ http://tinyurl.com/35znl9a

So often I’ve heard that new business models for music, game creation and other creative endeavors are all exceptions because the majority of money is still being made by the record labels and the successes of the new business models are not typical of the “average musician”.

Except, when you consider it carefully, so few artists ever made money from their Record Contract, that the few successes were indeed the exceptions.

Less than 10% of signed artists recoup. Take Maximo Park for example. They have by their own admission never made a penny from record sales and make their money from DJ sets in the main. An example I have first hand knowledge of, Embrace, have sold millions of albums, they were a genuinely massive band; they performed from Glastonbury main-stage to Top Of The Pops and everywhere in-between. When they split from Virgin, they owed their label three quarters of a million pounds. I guess my point is that if we promote the Trad Music Biz’s model as “The model” then the message we’d be sending is:

  • less than one percent of musical artists are part of the music business
  • only a tenth of those will recoup and make money from their record sales, and that’s good
  • an artist should be saddled with debt, the rate at which they pay that back is equivalent to a credit card with a 900% interest rate

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Distribution Item of Interest

Former Music Industry Exec Says Album Prices should be lower

Former Music Industry Exec Says Album Prices Should Be Drastically Lower http://tinyurl.com/278eh6j Nice to see a “former” exec realize fact but it’s really too little too late. Why did he not push prices in that direction when Rob Dickins was still in charge of Warner Music UK?

Of course albums should be lower prices in order to sell better. Economics 101 seems to be sadly lacking in the music and film/TV industries – among the established players that is.

 

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Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

iPhone apps now more popular than major TV shows

iPhone apps now more popular than major TV shows and sports broadcasts http://tinyurl.com/352at7h

In-App Purchases Yield More Revenue Than Mobile Ads http://tinyurl.com/24k6d75 Apps have bigger audiences and more revenue than ads. Mmmm

These two stories have been hanging around for a while for me to comment on.

The daily audience for apps that run on Apple’s iOS operating system (for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) has now surpassed 19 million users, who spend an average of 22 minutes per day using these apps, according to one measure. That means the audience for the iOS devices is now bigger than NBC’s Sunday Night Football and is just shy of the audience for ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Only 4 million daily viewers separate the iOS audience from that of the No. 1-ranked TV show, Fox’s American Idol, according to data collected by analytics firm Flurry.

<snip> Based on its own estimates, Flurry believes that the iOS is already bigger than all the TV shows if you consider the entire iOS audience.

The article goes on to talk about the influence on advertising revenue before pointing out that this is in aggregate: there is not yet a single app whose audience is so big that it can match the audience of a single most-popular TV show. And that’s a lot of the problem. If in the 1940’s each network had required a different receiver or box (or app) Broadcast TV would never have caught on. This is the biggest problem with Internet delivered media now.

But the advertising issue should worry TV networks (broadcast and cable) as they see their dominance being challenged. In-App revenue is exceeding mobile advertising revenue. In-App revenue can include pay-for-view; virtual goods, upgrades and a range of other options. Advertising is just annoying.

A look at the chart below shows that for the month of September, the average monthly advertising revenue is roughly $1 per app user. For virtual good sales, however, the revenue per user is closer to $8.

Flurry data also highlights that, as of February, mobile advertising revenue per user has remained flat, while in-app purchases are trending upward. “During 2010 … revenue increasingly shifts from advertising to virtual goods sales until reaching a proportion of more than 80% from virtual goods,” according to the report.

 

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Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest

Selling Special Interest Video…

Selling Special Interest Videos: Sell The Sizzle, Not The Steak http://tinyurl.com/26gsbgq

It’s a good general principle in marketing: people are not interested in your product or service (The Steak), merely what it can do for them (The Sizzle). In this article, that principle is applied to selling special interest videos.

Marketing to a potential customer is not that different from marketing to a video service client. You can use all avenues, such as advertising, networking, PR, etc., but to make it the most effective you have to keep this key marketing concept in mind – you need to step into the customer’s shoes and ask, “why would I buy it?” You need to sell the benefit of watching the DVD and answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” That’s what gets people excited about buying your video.

Then goes on to give some great advice on writing copy that sells!

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Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

Indie Success through Branded Entertainment

Indie Success through Branded Entertainment, Syndication http://tinyurl.com/2ehkerb

Report from a panel at the New York Television Festival Digital Day panel.

Almost all of the panels emphasized that branded entertainment is the best way to go to monetize independent online video. Nonetheless, many producers and executives seemed to view brand integration as a necessary evil, yearning for when it is no longer needed. Even Ben Silverman, whose company Electus exclusively does branded entertainment, mentioned that brand integrations helped keep television afloat in its early days before the platform matured.

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Distribution Item of Interest

P2P Backed Film Platform to Reward Influencers

P2P Backed Film Platform to Reward Influencers http://tinyurl.com/23mxzry

Instead of being the “freetards” they are painted with, the P2P community seems to be setting some precedents in alternative business models for distributing, growing an audience and monetizing them.

VODO, short for voluntary donation, has been a great success thus far. With support from several torrent sites including EZTV, The Pirate Bay and isoHunt, all of VODO’s major releases have been downloaded several hundred thousand times. In addition, downloaders have donated tens of thousands of dollars to the filmmakers.

Categories
Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest The Business of Production

‘Ride the Divide’ a case in DYI Distribution

‘Ride the Divide’ a case in DIY http://tinyurl.com/2d3edl7

I love an article about a filmmaker that starts with:

Hunter Weeks went into his work on the feature documentary  “Ride The Divide” with a solid sense of how to get the film out once it was done.

This is so important and yet so overlooked by most filmmakers. It’s a business and you have to think about the Return on Investment right from the start, because you’ll have to be creative about it.

They took on a corporate sponsor and encouraged participants to wear the corporate beanie (but not compulsory). They targeted a limited number of film festivals and when they missed the larger, more public ones, they went straight to distribution.

The film has screened at about 100 times in theaters, in about 70 cities in all, in shows we’ve produced ourselves – sometimes one night, or sometimes three nights in a row in the same place. We also had a licensing fee to screen the film for $295, and we tapped into these hotbed cycling communities – mountain-bike extreme groups all over the country, especially in the mountain region. We had these tremendously successful shows. And that helped sell the DVDs in a pre-release version over the last six months.

One other approach has been to  offer 500 “Living Room Screening Packages” for $99, for which 50 percent of the proceeds go to cyclist Lance Armstrong’s Live Strong Foundation. The kit includes a  DVD or Bluray in  wood laser-engraved box by karvt.com, a limited edition t-shirt byMighty Karma, a SmartWool Beanie, Tony Hsieh’s Best Selling book – Deli

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest The Business of Production

TV is Dead. Long Live Web Video

TV is Dead. Long Live Web Video. http://tinyurl.com/2cb9xuu But Web video isn’t television. It’s something else. Web Video abandoned TV.

So much has changed – Cameras, Bandwidth, YouTube – provide a trifecta of change plus the cognitive surplus we have as a result of being less “couch potato” and more “active creator” leads to a whole new thing: not TV, not web video as it’s been.

But Web video isn’t television. It’s something else entirely. And in the past 5 years, from 2005 to 2010, as Web video has moved to become the fastest growing and most prevalent form of traffic emerging on the Web, something else happened.

Web video abandoned TV. It moved on.

There are plenty of examples of this — but the perhaps most dramatic one is the growth of TED Talks. TED Curator, Chris Anderson, calls this emergence Crowd Accelerated Innovation. His thesis is that Web video accelerates the cycle of humans creating, sharing, and iterating.

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Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

Distribution U., coming to NY and LA

Distribution U., coming to NY and LA http://bit.ly/cVEsfV

Very few events get my unqualified endorsement but I attended Distribution U last year and learnt a lot and thoroughly recommend it to anyone that is even considering doing independent distribution.

In fact, go to any Conference or Seminar where either Scott Kirsner or Peter Broderick are speaking: they’re always interesting.

The event has a couple objectives:

    – Let filmmakers connect, find new ways to collaborate, and help one another succeed.

    – Talk about what’s changing in terms of funding, distribution, and audience-building, with actual examples and case studies, rather than theoretical predictions.

    – Hear directly from filmmakers about what they’ve done successfully with their most recent films to get them seen by a large audience, and earn a solid return. (We also talk about what didn’t work, and wasn’t worth the time or investment.) 

    – Enable participants to sit down with industry experts for small group lunch conversations on very specific topics, like working with the media and bloggers… understanding the way VOD deals work… organizing theatrical screenings that make money… and more.

    – Provide ideas and strategies to several filmmakers in the audience, as part of an on-stage brainstorming session.

    – Get participants charged up and excited about new possibilities, as opposed to depressed about how things are changing.