As Google tries to trumpet its new YouTube system for identifying copyrighted video materials you'd think that they would be getting some slaps on the back from commercial video producers. Instead Google's YouTube initiative, which was eagerly awaited only a few months ago, constitutes in the minds of many media companies only a partial and proprietary solution to the question of how to manage copyrighted materials in social media outlets. Google itself recognizes this when it notes in its description of its new service:
No matter how accurate the tools get, it is important to remember that no technology can tell legal from infringing material without the cooperation of the content owners themselves. This means that copyright holders who want to use and help us refine our Video ID system will be providing the necessary information to help us recognize their work. We aim to make that process as convenient as possible.
So how best to handle managing copyrighted materials across social media environments? Several media and technology companies have joined together to define "User-Generated Content Principles," an online document that provides a general framework of requirements for managing copyrighted materials in social media services. Although not a binding legal document the language of UGCP is clearly legally oriented, with the typical onerous one-sided expectations that any corporate legal team is likely to insert in terms of unconditional legal surrender. Moreover, if one tries to abide by this framework a social media service provider must consider the following claim in the UGCP:
Copyright Owners should not assert that adherence to these Principles, including efforts by UGC Services to locate or remove infringing content as provided by these Principles, or to replace content following receipt of an effective counter notification as provided in the Copyright Act, support disqualification from any limitation on direct or indirect liability relating to material online under the Copyright Act or substantively similar statutes of any applicable jurisdiction outside the United States.
In other words, even if you do everything that we ask you to, don't expect that copyright holders still won't give you a hard time. There's comfort for you.
The main rub in the UGCP document is that while it is broad enough to provide a general requirements framework to develop more universal copyright management services it does nothing to ensure that copyright holders will provide any significant standardization of copyright identification technology, filtering processes and reference materials referenced in the document. In essence it suggests to social media sites that they must be ready to institute whatever technologies that any number of publishers find to be acceptable to their needs. Given that Microsoft is one of the technology companies that has signed on to the UGCP one can imagine that there may be some proprietary interests in play on this front.
The UCGP document does cite some good best practices for managing copyrighted content in a social media environment, but it's far from clear that it brings the content industry any closer to a significant agreement on how copyright should be managed in online materials. Even as Google gets slammed by some for rushing to get some sort of filtering and identification system in place on a rapid basis we are no closer to copyright holders agreeing to a common framework for them taking on some reasonable portion of the burden of implementing tools that will make the universal identification, filtering and referencing of copyrighted materials simple and reasonable to manage.
To some degree the rise of digital watermarking and identification schemes that eliminate onerous DRM packaging are pointing towards a more workable solution. Being able to allow publishers to identify their content using reports from social media sites and their own scanning tools can help them to determine when the reuse of copyrighted materials is worth pursuing as a legal matter or as a business development opportunity. But until these technologies are implemented more broadly it's unrealistic to expect social media outlets to respond aggressively with their own solutions if the see Google getting slammed by UGCP members for its efforts. We seem to be creeping towards open solutions that will enable publishers to get around the copyright conundrum without huge proprietary investments but don't expect the pace to pick up until some publishers have proven how to do it cheap, simply and in a way that won't be irksome to the creative talents that are driving online content value.
In browsing through YouTube today I was thinking about the importance of the musicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax in bringing obscure American folk music to mainstream media outlets. Through Lomax's recordings in the mid-20th century we gained access to pivotal and influential artists such as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie and other performers who have become icons of American culture. Their songs have been "mashed" (covered) countless times by popular artists, creating a legacy of profitable operations for music publishers everywhere. Lomax' subjects were far from slick: some were in or just out of prisons, sitting on tin shack porches in the backwaters of the deep South, up in the mountains of Appalachia - it would be fair to call most of them "nobodies" by the standards of any day.
Today I can turn to YouTube and get a catalog of folk performances with breadth that far outstrips anything that Lomax was able to acquire through his years of sojourns. The average teen humming a song on the edge of her bed in front of a webcam is not likely to become a new Jelly Roll Morton, much less a Sade, but voices such as this have restored the concept of folk art being something that anyone can create for anybody. Which of these performances is worth watching? The new Lomaxes of the world are us, the audience, providing accolades through our use and ranking of their content. Mainstream content being transformed in this environment through mashing is the equivalent of a seamstress cutting up scraps from a designer dress to make a beautiful quilt - it returns the content to its roots as a resource for new folk communication.
When one goes into a major city you're surrounded oftentimes by street performers of various kinds, usually average at best but often enough inspiring in both their content and in the context in which they've chosen to perform. YouTube makes everyone's home a street corner, re-integrating our modern American culture that has been decimated by the automobile cult with its look-alike shopping strips that discourage folk activities in favor of consuming finished goods. Finished and packaged content still matters in a very important way, but I think that we're only at the very leading edge of understanding how profoundly human communications have been affected by services such as YouTube. The emerging dominant culture of the 21st century will be unplugged and unmediated folk culture, free to be free or commercial or whatever it desires to be in the moment. What Lomax exposed through 20th century technology YouTube will unite through the 21st century's direct communications between folk artists and their audiences.
Download Squad highlights a new experiment on YouTube to embed advertising in its online video footage, using a small text box appearing under the live video box with a link to the advertising video. According to Download Squad a limited number of video clips are being exposed via this method in the YouTube site, with ads not appearing when clips are embedded into other sites. Download Squad sees this as a plus, as the embedder of a clip does not benefit from the ad revenues.
But on the other side of the coin, what if the site DID want to benefit from the ad revenue stream? Sites such as TheNewsRoom allow a viral distributor of their videos to take a piece of the revenues from their pre-roll ads, which they hope would entice users to choose their footage from major video outlets for embedding. But there seems to be some push-back from webloggers and other social media outlets on pre-rolls in embedded content. Embedding is a form of personal endorsement for the core content being inserted: the person choosing the content being embedded doesn't necessarily want to endorse a brand advertiser as well. Enabling the embedder to participate in the revenues seems to mitigate this somewhat, but the magic formula for embedding viral video for profit seems to be elusive.
The YouTube experiment seems to point in one key direction in finding a good balance in embedded video ads: sponsored links. As with Google search results in which AdWords sponsored links exist alongside non-sponsored search results the text bar appearing under the video clip enables a viewer to be exposed to the concept of looking at and ad while looking at the clip in question. The key concept of the ad gets exposed to the viewer without creating an interruption. Presumably Google's AdSense infrastructure could enter this picture and allow sites embedding YouTube content to turn on these sponsored links and to participate in their revenue stream.
This Google/YouTube experiment holds promise, but traditional video advertisers are going to want more out of the equation. And perhaps they can get that - for a price and in specific contexts. But in trying to define a new common-denominator formula for online video ads Google's enormously successful experiment with AdSense and AdWords may point to approaches that will be drawing video advertisers away from interruption-driven advertising and towards a level of engagement that may put their content in front of more highly engaged eyeballs.
CNET News and many majors go all apey over an announced distribution alliance between NBC Universal and News Corp. to provide full-length ad-supported and premium video content to media-friendly portals AOL, MSN and Yahoo. CNET and others hint at talks with Google about bringing this presumably rights-protected content into their YouTube video portal, but it sounds like speakerphone-ware at most for now. In general the whole effort sounds a little panicky and ill-formed, with partners confused about what's going to be free or not and no real details as to how this will all hang together. There are promises of user-generated content being in the mix but no sense as to how it would fit in with centrally produced video content.
At the end of the day it's probably going to be a step in the right direction for media companies to get more aggressive about building broader distribution of content with their own monetization built in to the packaging. But for all the talk about "ubiquitous" distribution it's a very limited initiative with scads of professionally-produced content well outside of the packaging schemes - including some of News Corp's and NBCU's flagship shows. It also increases the sites at which one can get content from these partners from two to a whopping...five. Wow. Bump it up to thirteen and we could fill up an old-timey television dial.
It's all a sadly inadequate response to user-generated distribution that doesn't begin to provide video the flexibility that will be required to respond to the user-generated media phenomenon. At most it's an acknowledgment that a significant portion of their audiences would be just as glad to receive programming over an Internet connection instead of a digital cable or broadcast service. This will be a plus as PCs become more integrated into home entertainment centers: why muck around with distribution deals with other partners when you can stream the programming that audiences want right to their PC/HDTV server. But a response to YouTube and other user-dominated distribution channels? Hardly.
Instead of circling the wagons of "friendlies" video producers need to face head-on the challenges of making user distribution of their content a plus rather than a frightening minus. The longer that they wait on this inevitable requirement the tighter their circle of wagons will be as the user "savages" develop increasingly flexible - and entertaining - alternatives to traditional video media. We'll see how this goes, but my bet is that in the short term it will be a fairly large ho-hum as users wait for the dust to settle around a less-than-spectacular service debut.
The 2008 U.S. Presidential election is expected to attract more than a billion dollars in spending by some estimates, with the lion's share of that funding being funneled into media buys. But as noted by the New York Times the 2008 election is also likely to be the first election in which freely available content from candidates in social media portals will play a key factor in their media strategies. In addition to MySpace pages for candidates the presence of candid clips of candidates on YouTube turned out to play a pivotal role in key 2006 U.S. elections, providing an outlet for content that major news outlets had to cover and by doing so shape the dialogue. The New York Times today whines that all of this openness makes it difficult for candidates to shape their messages.
Yet what could be a better channel for getting your message out to the masses? Already one of the more interesting clips of the still-young 2008 campaign was concocted by an amateur, playing on a 1984 ad for Apple's Macintosh computer to the detriment of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton:
While the eventual impact of this clip is still hard to determine, it has already been viewed more than 900,000 times, not too far from the number who viewed the original Lyndon Johnson "daisy" anti-war ad in 1964's presidential campaign. If this is what one person with only the most nominal technology at their disposal can create, what could a campaign with sophisticated production equipment and messaging goals do on YouTube? Unfortunately for the campaign consultants whose fees rely in large part on placing ad buys in traditional media outlets the best buys in the 2008 may turn out to be free placements on outlets such as YouTube where the message is the star of an ad-supported show. The "daisy" ad, after all, gained most of its impact not from its original airing but from the coverage that it received as content in other ad-supported shows.
In the YouTube era it can be as important to get your message into the flow of conversation as much as to push it down people's throats with endless repetition. Services like YouTube that monetize the conversation as much as the content itself allow the "push" to come from the audience instead of the media outlet, providing a peer-level endorsement through voting and distribution that's difficult if not impossible to replicate via traditional media channels. It means, of course, a whole new spin on marketing in general: instead of creating messages that can't be questioned or voted upon YouTube and other social media outlets require marketers to create value in the midst of conversations that supply an implied endorsement far more powerfully than interrupt-driven advertising has done to date. Content finds its own level in these conversations, favoring multiple small engagements rather than high-risk big engagements.
I think that we'll see the "daisy" effect in 2008 via YouTube and other social media outlets far more than we have in past elections. Smart candidates will use their own producers to create a forest of interesting "quick-hit" messages for audiences to wade through online, and will aim their loyal followers through weblogs and email campaigns to the most popular of these messages as well as to amateur messages that seem to be resonating with voters. The most popular of these messages may wind up being promoted to broadcast media usage, reversing the flow of clips in a Current-style editorial process that allows tried and tested content to work its way towards broader audiences. The implied endorsement of these born-online broadcast ads is likely to be far more potent, as their airings will capture the attention of people who have already seen them and discussed them online and who are ready to tell their family members or friends, "Watch this, this is cool."
Ultimately this may mean lower budgets for traditional media spends, but I don't think that we're going to see a great lessening of spending in 2008 - only a more well-targeted spending that focuses more on creating online endorsements through social media more aggressively. In the long run, though, established media outlets will have to come up with new ways to make money off of political campaigns than can compete more effectively with outlets that use political ad content as free programming that can attract other ads. Politics in an era of user-driven distribution is certainly going to be a different animal.
UPDATE: The creator of the "Hillary 1984" video has been identified as Phil de Vellis, a Web developer associated with Democratic campaigns, including the Barack Obama campaign. He has resigned his position, but in an interesting post on The Huffington Post de Vellis notes "This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last. The game has changed."
