Almost two years ago I read this profile of game inventor Will Wright in The New Yorker. He was working on a new game for Electronic Arts called Spore, which was going to essentially be "Sim Everything"--you would have the chance to create unicellular creatures all the way up to whole civilizations and see how they did against other people's creations in a virtual world. After watching this 35-minute demo back then I thought this is going to turn kids into mini-Darwins or mini-creationists but either way, they are going to have fun.
If the enormous YouTube ad pictured above didn't tip you off (Has YouTube ever allowed such a huge ad that pushes the content down like that before? How much did that cost?), Spore is finally in stores today. If there were any video game I would play it would be this one, but I already have enough addictions, so I will avoid it. However, this video of Robin Williams playing it sure makes it look like fun.
For decades, comedians with dreams of fame and money labored for years in improv troupes across the country, hoping to get picked up by Saturday Night Live. Today however, more comedians are turning directly to the web to make a name for themselves.
Case in point: "Tom Cruise is a C**kblock" (as the title implies, this is not safe for work, but overall, it is PG-13).
So are actors Evan Ferrante, Ross Kohn and Ed Stein, and director Richie Keen headed for online immortality and profit? If they did want to turn their online videos into a business, they’ve got some work ahead of them. In the article "Online Fame Easy, Ads Harder to Get" at TV Week, Dina Kaplan of video sharing site Blip.tv says that to attract quality advertisers, a site has to get between 50,000 to 100,000 views per month and creators shouldn't even think about quitting their day job until they hit 500,000 a month.
There are only a few sites that have done this. Ask a Ninja, featuring Douglas Sarine as an assassin answer-man, started as a single video in November 2005. It could have remained a quirky show followed by a few friends, but the podcast was featured on iTunes, and gained 12,000 subscribers in one week, tuning in to see Ninja’s manic and random answers to viewer-submitted questions--for instance, the answer to "What is a Podcast?" is "apple pie for whales."
About a year later, Sarine and Nichols decided to make money off their hungry viewership, not from paid subscriptions but from ads. They started posting their videos on Revver, which splits ad revenues with creators 50-50, and earned over $40,000 in eight months. This in turn attracted Federated Media, which signed them to a seven-figure ad deal in January 2007.
Now they have their own Ask a Ninja site.In an interview last June with NPR, they stated they have more viewers than Adult Swim, the nighttime persona of the Cartoon Network, for the same young male demographic. By December, they had amassed 70 million views, and now average 2.7 million views a month and $100,000 a month from ads and merchandise sales.
Since established stars have more lucrative projects, very few name-brand talents have an entire site dedicated to themselves, nor would they prolific enough to create a steady stream of videos in their free time. In this case, banding together on an internet channel that they can use to promote their latest project or make a few bucks makes sense. My Damn Channel features Andy Milonakis, David Wain of the afore mentioned show The State, and Harry Shearer of The Simpsons in their own weekly shows. Funny or Die features comedic shorts by both name and unnamed talent and got a huge boost when SNL alumnus Will Ferrell and director Judd Apatow signed up, followed by videos from their celebrity friends.
So in general, only celebrities are paid upfront to create content or generate ad revenue. Unless they want to work behind the scenes as writers first (As Tina Fey and Conan O'Brian did for many years), upstarts will need to establish their audience first before they can get noticed by either Hollywood or advertising networks. They'll also need to keep the content flowing--one hit isn't enough.
That's exactly the approach these comedians are taking--here are some names to watch (though not at work, as many of their sketches are off color)
Jon LaJoie, with his Everyday Normal Guy rap keeps coming back with more topical skits.
Evan Mann and Gareth Reynolds: They seem to have been trying for a while to break into comedy writing and acting, even doing internet shorts for Axe Bodyspray, and each getting acting gigs on nationally aired commercials. They're on a show called The Writer's Room on Hulu. But their best work came after they paired with director Todd Strauss-Schulson and Ulterior Productions on three videos, including Evan Meets a Leprechaun.
So how will Ross Kohn and Ed Stein do? Too soon to say. After all, how many Tom Cruise parodies can you make? The answer, for now, is at least two. Here is their sequel, "Tom Cruise is a C**kblock 2."
If you are like me, you might have assumed that San Francisco's Monster Park (formerly Candlestick Park) was named for the job hunting site Monster.com. But you'd be wrong!
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the naming contract is coming to a close this year after four years, just in time for me to learn that it's Monster Cable that's been sponsoring it the whole time.
Given that that is the case, shouldn't they have insisted on calling it Monster Cable Stadium? Even my husband thought it was Monster.com who was sponsoring the stadium. With the prominent advertising of Monster.com at past Superbowls, this is the first company any football fan is going to think of when they see that name. Just Google "candlestick monster.com" and after you get past a dozen links that talk about people erroneously assume that Monster.com was the sponsor, you get to the hundreds of links from everyday people that say Monster.com is the actual sponsor.
I am reminded of the cowbird that lays its eggs in other birds' nests to be raised and fed by an unwitting mother. The cowbird chick gets all the benefit and will either outcompete it's foster siblings for food or even push them out of the nest. The cowbird's birth mother, meanwhile, makes absolutely no investment, while reaping all the benefit.
Only we are talking about humans here. Obviously Monster Cable knew about the naming confusion even in 2004, or they wouldn't have launched all those lawsuits, but they paid for the naming rights anyway. So not only were they paying their lawyers, they were paying to advertise for another company. Monster Cable, Monster.com has been drinking your $6 million milkshake and you have no one to blame but yourselves.
I was shopping for yogurt the other day when overheard two young boys, who I can only presume were brothers, in rapture over the latest product from Yoplait.
"Ooh, that's the yogurt with the bubbles that fizzes!" "Yeah, Fizzix, it's the best!"
I learned later that Fizzix comes in a tube and is therefore a species of Yoplait's Go-Gurt line. It comes in crazy colors and flavors and is carbonated. I am 99% certain neither of them had tasted it before. I am 99% certain they saw a commercial on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel. Oh, the power of TV ads. Or they could have seen it on the internet, since Yoplait created this game site around the product--diabolical! At least it's yogurt. They are clearly targeting this at kids and going for the whine factor (though this blog review says they were also going after undergraduate males on a tight food budget).
As I listened, I was thinking that when I had kids, they would either never get to watch TV or I would never bring them shopping with me. But then, their Starbucks-swilling dad, who was lingering nearby on his cell phone, got off his call.
"What part of 'You can have a Go-gurt smoothie' did you not understand?"
"But Dad..."
"Look, you can have a strawberry or a wild berry. Which do you want?"
"I don't know..."
"I'm going to choose for you then."
"Okay, Strawberry," says one brother. "Strawberry," say the other brother.
Wow, go Dad, I thought, way to handle your sons. I love it: decisive, taking control, giving them a choice. Done and done.
I was with him right until the point he said to his kids, "Aww, you made me spill my coffee. Get down on your knees and lick it up."
I've watched old episodes of Heroes on the NBC own website but I assumed that with the debut of Hulu (the topic of my last three posts), that all NBC's content would move there. I was surprised to find out that both websites were being maintained and that both feature streaming shows with commercials. Frankly, the browsing experience on Hulu seems relatively clunky compared to NBC's own site.
So why did News Corp. and NBC bother to build Hulu? It's not for better ads or better browsing for users--based on what I've seen, they want you to embed their content. They don't necessarily want you to just go to Hulu-- they want you to take their content and spread it virally, just like what I've done below. Instead of making everyone come to their site, Fox and NBC let fans take their ad-laced shows and embed them into their own websites and blogs--so long as the commercials stay with the content and the impressions are reported back to Hulu, who cares where it lives? Fans were already posting clips or full episodes of Family Guy to YouTube and embedding it in their own sites--now they can do that legally and the networks can finally make money off of the viral spread of their videos. Hulu is acting like an ad broker, but unlike most ad brokers, Hulu doesn't have to pay users money to embed their ads because those users are getting valuable content for free.
They should probably try to make the user experience on their site better, but speaking as a recovering TV addict, if they were trying to make Hulu into a TV-like site where they wanted users to stay, they would have a related video start playing as soon as you had finished watching one, much like episodes flow into one another on TV. Instead, it pauses on a screen that allows you to email or embed the video. It seems they would prefer to get new eyeballs, not hit the same pair over and over.
It's too bad for Google that they were not able to negotiate any deals with the networks for YouTube. With their (perhaps scary) understanding of each user and their likes and dislikes based on previous searches and Gmail, they could probably do a much better job of targeting ads than Hulu, which can only go by the main demographic of the show. If Google were running Hulu, I, as a woman, might actually see an ad for Tampax or Yoplait during Family Guy, even though I was watching a show that seems to be targeted at men 18-30 years old.
It's no wonder the Writer's Guild of America is striking now. It's probably true that networks weren't able to make as much money off of webisodes and shows distributed online compared to TV broadcasts, but with Hulu and Joost (where you'll find CBS and Viacom programming) coming out last year, the potential is growing.
On a summer day in the mid-nineties, my graduating class clustered around a hole in the ground, tossing in items that were personal but of little value. The hole was a time capsule, to be sealed up at the end of the day and to be opened in a hundred years. While everyone else threw in their student ID, my mother saw the future. "Throw in your Blockbuster card. In a hundred years, people will wonder what that company was."
I got a new card the next day and, over a decade later, and as of just yesterday, I am still using it. We've had TiVo, and Netflix, but the promise of online, instant content has not quite been met. If you are uncomfortable using Bit Torrent to download pirated films, there is no way to get films online for free. iTunes and Amazon Unbox are options if you are willing to pay, but Amazon Unbox also requires a TiVo.
However, now there might be Hulu. While Hulu is dominated by TV content, a couple of studies seem to be experimenting with a handful of full-length feature movies. For instance, Twentieth Century Fox has contributed five movies. At one end of the spectrum, they have Weekend at Bernies, at the other, the Oscar-winning Sideways, which you can watch below for free.
The catch? Advertising of course. As with every example I've posted, you must watch commercials, in this case, a trailer for the movie Vantage Point. After that point, there are no commercials and you can fast forward to any point in the movie, but "swipes" will pop up from the bottom of the screen while you are watching.
Perhaps Hulu will move to a dual model, where you can get ad-free content if you pay a subscription. After all, it's one thing for a swipe to pop up during a comedy, quite another during Gandhi. But I think most people will tolerate intrusive ads for the chance to watch most movies straight through for free, especially if the ad is for another movie I might be interested in watching. Would you?
Almost two years ago I read this profile of game inventor Will Wright in The New Yorker. He was working on a new game for Electronic Arts called Spore, which was going to essentially be "Sim Everything"--you would have the chance to create unicellular creatures all the way up to whole civilizations and see how they did against other people's creations in a virtual world. After watching this 35-minute demo back then I thought this is going to turn kids into mini-Darwins or mini-creationists but either way, they are going to have fun. 
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