FRESH CLIPPINGS
Craving Simplicity
We’re all familiar with just how fragmented audiences have become in the creator economy. Niche corners of the internet have won over mass media (generally).
How this translates to TV is a nightmare we all as customers grapple with to some degree. As industry vet Caroline Giegerich describes it, “Nobody wakes up wanting to manage ten thousand apps, ten thousand logins, ten thousand bills.”
And even within social apps, think about how difficult it is to consistently track those creators you love and follow. Since our algorithms are designed to keep us engaged, they’re constantly feeding us new stuff, making it hard for communities to stay engaged.
All of which has lead to what seems to be the next wave of disruption (yes, at this point, many of the disruptors have become traditionalists) that affects both legacy and creators.
It was described in this recent NY Times piece, the gist being that platforms are now competing for people to use their app and only their app.
Because as it turns out, Amazon has been playing a different game all along. Lucas Shaw reported that the retailer’s best video business is not Prime Video, but its channels program, i.e. they sell other streaming services (mainstream and niche) and take a cut of the subscription revenue / get advertising inventory in exchange.
And although Amazon is leading the charge with 67% of sign-ups for specialty services in the second quarter of the year (more than Apple, Google, Roku and everyone else combined), the NY Times coverage tells us that Netflix and YouTube are in the same race. They, too, are betting to make things simple for consumers and become the everything app.
How does this all relate to creators / legacy, though?
Perhaps this is crazy speculation, but bear with me.
Using Amazon as an example, it’s playing a game in which it’s really the best. If it’s the central home of retail, then it can also presumably become the central home of media. Sure, they’ll have Prime Video, but the true win is the interface where you can get every other channel and service. And for the other big platforms, it will be a big hit to have to shave off revenue off the top to be a part of that singular ecosystem.
For creators, we’ve seen big ones like Mark Rober, etc. put up content on Netflix, but in this new landscape, why not have the Mark Rober Channel on the Amazon interface and keep 100% ownership? (More on ownership in the next story).
If you have a strong audience, then you can build your own infrastructure around it. Just look at what Angel Studios has built.
Oh, and in case it hadn’t clocked until now, this crazy new system that’s starting to dominate the conversation is… pretty much an iteration of basic cable.
The more things change…
The Ownership Debate
Matt Belloni travelled to the Edinburgh TV Festival, where he held a panel with several top TV producers in the UK. The conversation proved to be a microcosm of what’s happening in the broader market.
The speakers were Matt; Patrick Holland, executive chair and C.E.O. of Banijay UK, (MasterChef, Big Brother); Jane Root, founder and C.E.O. of Nutopia (Limitless With Chris Hemsworth, WWII With Tom Hanks), and Dimitri Doganis, the founder and chief creative officer of Raw (The Tinder Swindler, Trainwreck).
And the crux of the discussion was IP ownership.
For all the gripes producers face about Youtube funding original productions (that has started to change recently given Netflix’s competition), one of the great things that they do have to offer is ownership. If you post something on YouTube, you as the creator own it.
Streamers like Amazon and Netflix, on the other hand, do the opposite. They buy out your show upfront and you don’t any of it for future exploitation.
This is especially important in the UK because, by law, BBC funded shows have to let the producers keep the IP (which one can argue has led to the plethora of brilliant British productions over the years). As Doganis said: “You show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.”
However, the BBC money has dried up as of late, and streaming platforms have happily come in to fill the funding gap.
Producers are tired of not owning anything anymore in legacy media. For that, they must turn to YouTube or the broader creator economy. But, as everybody knows, Youtube economics are really hard. Also, the scale of shows is inherently smaller and they are brand funded.
For a TV producer, this is truly a Catch 22. Own it and sacrifice scale, or sell it and lose all future rights.
The way people are working around this is: launch on YouTube small scale, own it with the stars / creators, and then find secondary places for it where you can increase the scale.
Somehow, I think that as the convergence continues, we can come up with a better solution.
Speaking of Launching on YouTube and Scaling
Disney has struck a deal with Dhar Mann Studios where the creator will produce 20 episodes of original content for them.
The specifics of the format are TBD, but the deal fits into Disney’s stated goal of turning Disney+ into a comprehensive ecosystem that includes both creator content and traditional programming.
We’ve covered Fox’s moves in the recent past. Dhar Mann Studios itself signed a deal with Fox Entertainment earlier this year for 40 narrative-driven vertical videos.
But it now seems that Disney is taking big swings in the creator space as well.
The numbers behind Dhar Mann Studios are pretty insane: 170 million followers globally; nearly 300 million views per week across platforms. Which kind of proves the point of convergence since Dhar is one of the creators who can geniinely say, “I don’t need legacy media.”
It’ll be really interesting to see how different Dhar’s Disney content is vs. what they normally publish on YouTube.
GARDEN VIEW
HARVEST QUOTE
"I fear that, as can often happen in Hollywood, the lessons from the year might be the wrong ones – all that talk and hype and bluster about the YouTube effect and YouTube creators because of Backrooms and Obsession. It’s a gold rush mentality of anything that works on YouTube can do that. I don’t believe that’s the case. If you look at those movies, they are different. Neither of those is tied to the specificity of YouTube audiences crossing over to theaters."
— Focus Features Chairman Peter Kujawski
Have a great weekend…