Every time we say that a piece of video content will become viral, I believe it de-values the video.  The creator of the content cannot decide what will become viral, only consumers can.  Typically what becomes viral are stunts and humorous 2 minute clips and this hurts the adoption rate of longer serious form video into the minds of marketers.

I was scheduled to attend the JackMeyers Future of Media breakfast yesterday but could not attend due to a few work conflicts.  My friend Dina Kaplan (and one of the most front facing COO’s I know) was part of a power-panel that spoke about the Realities of Dealing with a Changing Marketplace.  She mentioned a few things that were written up that I’m going to reblog here:

Kaplan, sees a significant change in the business as “the lines are blurring between professional and independent content producers. Networks used to control what would get on the air; now you might find a Revision 3, Next New Networks or Worldwide Biggies show you like as much as a network show.” She also points to series launched at blip.tv such as zefrank and Amanda Congdon.

The challenge, Kaplan admits, is monetizing this content and “convincing people at the brands and agencies there is more to viral videos than cats flushing toilets. They can reach people in ways not possible before. Consumers are engaged with other consumers in online conversations and web video is an important new trend.” Kaplan believes it will take at least until 2010 before video content developers will have a clear picture of the economic potential, but several of blip.tv’s content producers, she says, are generating revenues and are profitable.

Kaplan believes consumers will increasingly be viewing content across TV, the computer, mobile devices and personal video displays and that content will be available across an array of platforms. “The era of destination sites is over,” she says. “The belief you need to build a site that is all things to all people is over and it will sound silly in a few years.” Even Hulu, the joint venture of News Corp and NBC, she points out, is doing extensive distribution deals to make their content available wherever consumers want it.

Dina and I share the notion of her last paragraph especially:  Kaplan believes consumers will increasingly be viewing content across TV, the computer, mobile devices and personal video displays and that content will be available across an array of platforms.

I’ve been harping this for a long time - content is portable.  Our world is on demand and soon, it’s going to be pretty much custom (more on that in subsequent postings).  If I want to watch Fast Lane Daily on my computer, my television, or my iPhone, let me do so.  Oh wait, Next New Networks is already making that happen.

Going back to a changing marketplace thought, one of the ways to innovate AND survive is to not be too far a head of the curve, but far enough to be a thought leader.  The reason why you don’t want to be too far ahead is because you need to generate revenue to sustain yourself (after all, you’re probably not a charity) and folks who are too far ahead have a hard time generating repeat and sustaining revenue.

If interested in this topic, re-read my hyperdistribution post here.

Sony has launched Sony Home, their virtual world enabling their community of users to interact with each other in a “game like” setting.  Apple is now toying with opening a store in Second Life (speculation).  Will this mean that ultimately, they will acquire Second Life and roll it out as their communications platform for their computers?  Will it be the next iteration of iChat?

One thing that we have learned is that people do not have have time to manage identities in multiple virtual worlds at the same time. If you are engaged in Habbo Hotel, then chances are, you don’t have time for Second Life.  If you’re playing World of Warcraft, then you may not have time to utilize IMVU.  Also, many of the previous brands who have released their wares into Second Life have all abandoned them after it being all the hype (front page of NY Times, etc).

I’m curious to see how this plays out.   What are your thoughts?

Pick up the newstand copy of Advertising Age today if you can.  Today’s copy includes a circular entitled “Ad Network & Exchange Guide” and so far, it’s excellent if you are involved in digital media or the advertising business.  I haven’t finished reading it as I’m trying to balance phone calls, emails, and the magazine, but it’s sure to be on my list to finish by tomorrow.

I cannot stress this enough:  If you are a startup who is selling advertising space on your website/product/service, please read Advertising Age or MediaWeek to keep current with the industry you are generating revenue from.

You might have read that I was selected as an AdAge DigitalNext blogger along with my friends and peers David Armano, Craig Daitch, Colleen Decourcy, Ian Schafer, Reuben Steiger, Troy Young, and Mat Zucker.  I’m excited to be part of this group and some of the content on this blog will find it’s way over to the DigitalNext blog as well, as, the print magazine.

Ian Schafer penned a piece in the AdAge Magazine today about how social-network sites should get a relationship point person.  His thesis for the article is that since social networks are all about conversations and relationships, just buying an ad on the sideline may not bode well for the advertiser and the sites are going to have a hard time of selling the majority of their inventory.  Certainly check out the article to read more or click over to his blog to see some commentary.

I spent the last 3 days down in Augusta, Georgia @ the Masters with some friends and colleagues.  I had absolutely no idea what I was in for as I had not been to a golf event of that magnitude.  Here are a few things I had observed and learned this weekend:

•  The Masters is offline:  Do you think the airport has tight electronics security?  Head over to the Masters… they do not allow any electrical device including ANY cellphone, Blackberry, camera, etc. The only people with cameras are the press photographers and even most of them do not have cellphones.  It’s extremely nice to shut-off for 6+ hours per day.
• Respect:  Sometimes we forget this living in Manhattan.  At the Masters, you can put a chair down by the fairway and return to it 4 hours later… and still use your seat and not worry that someone else has moved it.  If you aren’t in your seat within the first inning of a Yankee game, chances are, someone will move down to it and remain there until you kick them out.
• Tiger Woods is the PGA Tour:  Unless you see him in person at a golf event (that he’s playing), you cannot understand the magnitude of his fanbase.  Even if you aren’t following him around the course, you always know where he is by the cheers and screams of his thousands of fans across the fairways.  When Tiger moves onto the hole you’re standing on, his thousands of fans follow and you’re instantly surrounded on all sides and generally, it’s 5-10 people deep.  No other player had his following but the closest was Phil Mickelson.
• Food is cheap; merchandise is not:  The Masters is old school and the prices have stayed the same since the late 50s (I believe). Sandwiches are $1.00-2.50 and beers are $2.  You can have an entire meal for under $4.  Where else can you do that?  The famous sandwich is a cheese and pimento sandwich on white bread… and it’s pretty good!  The merchandise is not cheap but I didn’t see anyone NOT buy something.  The lines into the merchandise store were incredible and the amount of inventory moving off the shelves was more than Walmart on Black Friday.
• People Love to be Social and Share:  As we walked the course and ate on picnic benches, we met people from all walks of life and the one thing we all had in common were stories of golf.  We heard from people who had been coming to the Masters for 30+ years and others who were here for their first time.  People love to share their stories and if given the chance, more often than not, will do so.  This makes me think harder about all of the startups in the digital media world who help people communicate.
• The Best/Most Popular Doesn’t Always Win:  This tournament wasn’t Tiger’s best, but congratulations to Trevor Immelman.  Show’s that ANYONE can win at anytime - Google/MSFT/Yahoo doesn’t always dominate and there is room in the market for everyone.
• Brands Don’t Have to Be Everywhere, Just Strategically Placed:  There are NO brands on the inside of the Augusta National Grounds… the only brands were on the clothing of the players.  Even the food was branded, Masters.  There were hundreds of opportunities to have areas of the course co-branded but they were not…

Lots of observations and looking forward to more golf events this year…

When I want to download music, I really don’t care what label the band is on.  Honestly, most of the time, I don’t really know if it’s Universal or Sony BMG or Saddle Creek, etc.  iTunes is great because the majority (note, not all) of what I listen to is listed and available.  Sony BMG is now developing their own music service…. I’m calling it’s demise now.  Why?  Because it’s going to fragment the market and listeners have to worry about which labels their artists are signed to.  Yikes.

In the past, I’ve written about talent agents in many different capacities including music and video games.  Some music industry pundits would say that the most promising position to have in the upcoming years is on the “agent” side, and for the competitive video game space, major talent houses such as CAA & UTA are creating divisions to rep extremely talented gamers.

Steve Rubel blogs about three Internet Careers that Won’t Soon Exist and one of his three are digital talent agents.  Excerpted below:

Digital Talent Agents

During the AdAge Digital Conference last week, a Digital Agent with a major talent agency talked about how they have a group of people who crawl the web in search of undiscovered musicians, artists, etc. These agents then pair promising amateurs with Hollywood or branded entertainment projects. I last wrote about this three years ago. Then it was emerging business. Now, however, it is becoming the norm.

Rubel further makes the point that the digital talent agent will not exist in the future because there really is no difference between a digital agent and traditional (offline) agent.   Digital/traditional lines are blurring and there should be no seperation.  He raises an extremely good point here.

For the foreseeable future, digital talent agents aren’t going anywhere, IMHO.  There are too many people at the top of the pyramid that still do not understand the digital space and will want dedicated teams to oversee it.  Not everyone loves integration…. just look at the advertising world.

I sat through presentation recently by John Battelle as he spoke on behalf of Federated Media (his company).  After listening to him speak about the position of his company, I can see them as the next UTA or CAA… he’s got many of the top celebs of the digital world under representation agreements.  I’m not sure what his contracts state, but he’s able to help generate revenue on their behalf through integrated marketing opportunities.  I’d like to see him go beyond (or maybe it’s already done) the traditional marketing arrangements and do a “management” division and really step on the toes of the big guys.

The talent agency world is fascinating…

I received an email from my brother who knows I’m a huge Muppets fan.  Couldn’t be any more timely since yesterday was St. Patrick’s day and I’m a bit under the weather today. A great laugh.

I’ve spent the past 24 hours out here in Palm Springs at the iMedia Breakthrough Summit, as guests of our trafficking partner, Operative. Lorne and Dan have been extremely hospitable and it was great to finally meet Lorne in person.

Last night was the opening reception and saw some old friends such as David Berkowitz, Mike Rosner, Andy Monfried, Tim Kelly (thanks for the t-shirt!), and put some faces to names I’ve known such as Adam Broitman and Jameson Hsu (amongst many others).

I had the opportunity to give the opening speech this morning for the industry participants and the “sell side” and it went well. The topic of my speech was, “How to get on an agency’s radar.” For the dozens of vendors in the room, it should have been extremely helpful as I always enjoy learning from the people I’m selling to.

I’ve had a few requests for the presentation and I believe that iMedia will be putting it online somewhere. If that’s not the case, please feel free to contact me and I’ll gladly send it over.

The music that filled the room right before I got on stage was all DMB - who leaked it to the sound guys? I was excited!

Time to leave the beautiful desert and head back to New York so I can be in the office tomorrow…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately, you’re well aware of the Lacy/Zuckerberg interview that took place in Austin. If we can look past this historical interview, you would notice that FriendFeed emerged and as some would quote, became the Twitter of SXSW.  Recently, there has even been a lifestreaming backlash posting that made the front page of Techmeme.

When Twitter first emerged, I was skeptical. I didn’t think I needed to broadcast to the world that I was eating or that I was sitting in traffic on the West Side Highway. I saw some applications for it in terms of groups getting together, but all-in-all, it’s been an application that was always secondary or tertiary to me. But, for a select few lifecasters (350k Feb ‘08, ComScore), this service has been serving them well.

Twitter contributes to a growing technological/MEdia segment called lifecasting (lifestreaming too). The notion of lifecasting/lifestreaming is that people are interested in your behavior both offline and online. This is not new at all, as even in the earliest days, voyeurism has been extremely popular with certain audiences. Facebook’s News Feed, is taking lifecasting to new levels and introducing it to audiences that never would have adopted it.

Lifecasting/streaming certainly brings a level of transparency to this world. In advertising, transparency is all the rage now with all of the major ad networks divulging their properties. In the latest Wendy’s advertisements, it talks about how their food is always fresh… and even the fish are from the north pacific. Transparency.

So I’ve been recently turned onto FriendFeed… how could you not with all of the recent hooplah around it. FriendFeed is certainly not the first in it’s market but apparently has a stellar team that’s building it out (ex-Googlers) and their credibility is gaining the startup some attention. In a market that’s all about transparency, someone has to aggregate all of the different lifecasting services together and create one platform or ‘feed’ (maybe the wrong term). FriendFeed aggregates all of my blog posts, Twitter “tweets”, NetFlix movies, Flickr photos, (and a lot more), all together and then mixes them with my friends (people I subscribe to). By doing this, you’re essentially creating a single place to get all the information you need about your friends. Certainly interesting. From an aggregation layer, I do like the opportunity that this affords.

In terms of FriendFeed overall - are we there yet? Here’s my FriendFeed. Is society ready to be fully transparent? Apparently Spitzer didn’t think so and he’s paying the price for it now. Honestly, I’m not ready….there are many things that I’m doing both personally and professionally that I’d rather not share. Not saying any of these things are illegal, but there are certainly times that I want my alone time. Anyone who knows me extremely well understands that I can easily survive alone. Justin.tv is the opposite and over 300k people are going to Justin.TV according to ComScrore in Feb 08… so there is an audience.

These lifecasting/lifestreaming services are not for everyone but it seems that many web applications are being built today with a massive target audience. Many of the major bloggers and journalists almost expect FriendFeed to be for everyone. I can almost garauntee that my mother would not use it.

There is one thing that we cannot change in this world and that’s time. We have 24 hours a day in order to live. Some of our lives are shorter than others, but if one thing remains constant, we’ve all been given the same amount of time per day to live. How much content can we consume in one day? How many different applications can we use in one day? How many different devices can we utilize each day? How many different feeds/websites can we use in one day? I personally don’t see where people have the time to update their lifecasting/lifestreaming feeds on a continuous basis. Life is all about priorities and for certain audiences, lifecasting/lifestreaming maybe just that… but for me, I think I may have to take a back seat position for now.

From an investment standpoint, we need to explore how this impacts the future of services.

At some point in our life, we’ve probably all seen a video/story/picture or two that originated from CollegeHumor (acquired by IAC in 2006) or maybe you’ve worn a t-shirt from BustedTees. For this interview, I sat down with one of the two brain children (a friend) behind the sites and chatted about entrepreneurship and strategy in general.

Please join me in welcoming Ricky Van Veen…

1. Please state your name, title, and years at current company/position:
Ricky Van Veen, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief at CollegeHumor.com, which is eight years old.

2. What are you currently up to? If entrepreunering (my word), tell me about your startup.
Entrepenuering is a word that makes me think of flashlights and caves. Maybe because it reminds me of the word “spelunking?” Anyway, I’m still doing what I’ve been doing since I was a freshman in college – making young guys and immature older men laugh through the internet. Though now I’m less involved in the actual day-to-day content and more focused on growing the site long term. Also, I’m working with my business partner Josh on coming up with ideas for new web properties.

3. Why are you doing this? You could be doing so many other things in the world, what about this particular idea strikes you?
Well, technically I’m under contract to be doing this (when IAC bought our company in 2006, part of the deal was that the partners would stay and help grow the business for a few years.) But I’d be here regardless. Watching a business you started grow is always interesting, but the stuff we’ve started to do in the past year with original video in particular has been really exciting for me. We’re basically trying to take a brand that has built up a big following for one type of product (user-gen stuff and articles) and transition into the future with another (high quality short form original video). From an editorial perspective, it’s almost as if we’re starting a new company. That’s a bonus for me since new ventures are my favorite drug (besides heroin).

4. All startups should be addressing a problem in the market. What is that exact problem and how are you solving it?
I think there are two problems we’re addressing. The first is that there is a massive amount of new content being created on a daily basis online (especially in the humor space) and trying to find content that appeals to your particular mindset can be difficult. CollegeHumor offers this proposition: if you’re a young male who’s into offbeat comedy, visit our site on a regular basis and we’ll create stuff that you’ll like. And if somebody else creates something you’d enjoy on another site, we’ll make you aware of it.

The second problem concerns the quality of most content online - there simply isn’t that much being produced specifically for consumption over the web. There’s obviously lots of amateur stuff that’s fun to watch and some high quality 30min and 60min repurposed TV stuff, but little made for the web that’s shot/edited/acted well. So we’re trying to make content to bridge that gap.

5. Have you thought about your business model yet? I’m assuming so, so tell us a bit about it.
Our fundamental business model is not unlike any other media business. We present content to a specific demographic, and then sell advertising around that content. Where we do differ is in our ability to offer easy integration with our content since we have our sales, edit, and production teams under the same roof. As the online world shifts away from banner ads, this becomes more critical.

6a. If you’re looking at an ad-supported model, how are you going about it? Do you have in-house ad sales? Using a rep firm? What are the challenges that you’re facing with getting ad dollars?
We do have an in-house ad sales team based in New York, with outposts in Chicago and LA. I’d say that scale is probably our biggest challenge – trying to compete with those who might not have a better product, but more monthly visitors. We’re working to grow our numbers by upping our original content output (that’s really been a driver of traffic for us lately), increasing our marketing budget, and starting new sites.

6b. If you’re selling a product/service/subscription, how is that coming along? What are the challenges? Are you using the freemium model?
We’re not using a subscription model for CH. Though we do sell t-shirts through our apparel division, BustedTees. That’s coming along swimmingly. Originally we started selling t-shirts on the site because we weren’t big enough to sell ads. Now that we are, we still use BT ads for remnant inventory on CH, but that business has taken on a life of its own independently.

7. As an entrepreneur or investor, what are your thoughts on competition? How do you view competition?
Competition can definitely be a help. Indirectly, it forces you to innovate – stagnation equals death. Competition can help directly as well — every once in a while we’ll sit around as a group, and surf our competitor’s sites on a projector to see what they’re doing right, what they’re doing wrong, and see what we can learn from them.

At CollegeHumor, we view our competition in two different categories, those who compete for the attention of our audience, and those who compete for ad dollars. Surprisingly, there’s little overlap between the two groups.

8. If your competitor called you up to have coffee and discuss shop, what would you do? Would you go? What would you divulge?
I’d definitely go. We’re friends with most all of our competitors. In fact, I share a Hamptons house with a friend who runs what many would consider to be our biggest competitor. We learned early that the web content business isn’t a zero sum game. Just because somebody goes to site A doesn’t mean they won’t visit site B as well. I think most people would be surprised at how much information is divulged among Internet entrepreneurs, even competitors. That probably has to do with the fact that the Internet industry is so young and everybody feels like we’re all on the same team figuring it out together.

9. Is the current state of the economy playing to your favor? If so, why? If not, why?
No, it is hurting us. On-line advertising, despite its obvious advantages, is still slowly catching on with most traditional advertisers. Since on-line is still considered somewhat experimental, many of our larger clients have had their on-line ad budgets cut down to achieve cost savings in anticipation of this years recession.

10. How much of your time is spent working? How much is spent with family? Have you found the entrepreneurial quality of life yet?
Though I’m not sure if I fit in age-wise, I do think I fit into the “Always On” generation psychographically. That mindset – constantly checking e-mail on my phone, etc — has defined my work/life ratio since I started the business. I’m finally getting over that and starting to do things like not bring my laptop if I go away for the weekend, to the delight of my girlfriend.

It’s tough to shut off the work part of your brain, however. I find that to be true of many fellow entrepreneurs and I think the reason for that is simple: there’s no clear work/play distinction if you’re engaged and loving what you do in life. As long as you remember to take a break every once in a while, that’s a pretty great way to live.

I want to thank Ricky for taking the time to sit thru the Interview and if there are any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments area and we’ll do our best to answer them. Thank you!