From Mark Hall, one of the makers of the delightful Showyou app.
I don’t know her, but I am happy to see Caterina Fake is blogging again. She writes intelligent, interesting posts, particularly if you are a practitioner of the web arts.
I stumbled upon her blog in late 2004, when I developed a mild obsession with flickr (and last.fm), and I promptly added her blog to my feed reader. Seems like she stopped posting a while back, maybe shortly after Flickr was bought by Yahoo! Start by reading her post today (and the related post from 2003).
In my last job, I lived and worked from London for three years running the international consumer business for a mid-sized, publicly-traded Internet company that did a lot of work in the mobile space.
So I went to lots of meetings in Finland with Nokia, and outside London and in Germany with Vodafone, and there was always a good bit of fun had at my expense teasing me about the pathetic state of the US mobile phone business. Lot’s of smack talk about how the US was third rate in the mobile space and would never catch up.
Our carriers still lag in many ways, though Vodafone and most European carriers are not all they’re cracked up to be.
But it’s a completely different story as far as the phones go. At the time I was in Europe, no one could touch Nokia. How they’ve lost their way.
With the public unveiling of the Palm Pre yesterday, the three best phones in the world now come from Silicon Valley:
– the iPhone
– the G1/Android
– the Palm Pre
With all the doom and gloom about American mediocrity it’s nice to be reminded people here still know how to build great products.
Now if only we could get the car makers sorted out…
There has been a bit a chatter on NewTeeVee (here), AllthingsD (here and then here), and Venture Beat (here) about online video viewing statistics in October and November 2008 (relevant Comscore releases here and here). A lot of attention paid to Hulu in particular (and whether it was growing or shrinking in the wake of the election).
Turns out people were right to focus on Hulu, but they paid attention to the wrong thing.
I spent a bit of time the past week looking at and parsing the data, and these numbers jumped off the screen and grabbed me by the throat:
Simple, very important, lesson here: videos embeds = distribution. Both YouTube and Hulu expand their reach by using embed codes. Their users are their distribution channels.
Hulu has effectively quadrupled its reach — it gets only 5 million people to Hulu.com, but more than 20 million watch Hulu videos around the web. Put another way: it gets only 1/10th the traffic of the Turner properties (mainly CNN.com), but gets more more overall reach (traffic) to its videos. Astounding. And very much under-reported. But perhaps not surprising if you were reading Umair Haque in 2005 and 2006.
The data above gets even more interesting when I cross-reference it with the most recent version of our Vodpod Sitegeist that we posted just last week. This lists the top 100 sites from which our users — tens of thousands of bloggers, Facebook members, Myspace users, Twitterers, and so on — collect video. Not one major media brand website is represented in the Top 10. No MTV, no CNN, no MSNBC, no ESPN. The closest is Hulu, which has risen to #13 (and which I firmly expect will crack the top 10 later this year).
Instead, in addition to YouTube, Google Video, Myspace, you see scrappy folks like Daily Motion, blip.tv, and Vimeo in the Top 10. They have figured out the 21st centure equivalent of cable carriage.
This is all very ironic given media giants like Viacom and Turner were distribution, not programming, empires first and foremost. They hustled for space and got carriage for MTV and CNN on the nascent cable nets, then worried about filling in their channels with programming and advertising.
As I wrote on the Vodpod blog last week, some media companies are getting in the game. Viacom has at least begun making strides to understand this.
Turner Networks and Disney, though, seem stuck in the stone age. Particularly sad is CNN; they appear to understand the idea of allowing their users to redistribute their videos, they offer something that looks like an embed code — but it’s a crippled version of an embed code, it doesn’t really work, and so they get very little re-distribution. With the exception of ESPN, most Disney sites (for example, ABC News) don’t even bother to offer embed codes.
Maybe it’s just not a priority for them. I’m sure there are strong voices inside both organizations who view things like redistribution through viewers and users as just one more instance of Web 2.0 fluffery. But the world of video is going to evolve and change far more rapidly and dramatically in the next 10 years than it has in the past 10. The cable and satellite television business is going to look like the newspaper business by 2018, and maybe even by 2012.
Media companies like Turner and Disney need to figure this out now; or other folks are going to have taken their place.
*The Comscore “MediaMetrix” service measures US visitors to a specific domain; its “VideoMetrix” services measures reach to all videos from a specific source, including reach to videos both the source domain (Hulu.com) plus embeds.
My friend Om has a good provocative post up today: With 2008, Let’s Say Good-bye to Mediocrity. Go read it.
Om writes: “In 2008, U.S. society — from the very top (our political leaders) to the very bottom (our bankers) — came to embrace mediocrity.”
I have a slightly different take. The examples Om cites of our supposed embrace of mediocrity are are trailing indicators, not leading indicators. They tell us more about where we’ve been and what we’ve done wrong, not where we’re going.
2008 wasn’t the year we accepted or embraced mediocrity; it was the year the chickens came home to roost. It was the year where the bill came due for two, maybe three, decades of steady cultural and political rot. Decades in which our individual and collective desire for more money and more stuff drove our policies and our behaviors.
An era where your worth was measured not by your character or good works, but by the size of your yacht or your private jet. Where we were endlessly fascinated by folks like Mark Cuban (a funny and interesting guy, to be sure, but famous because principally because he got Yahoo! to buy his company for way more money than it was worth) and Paris Hilton. Where an MBA degree was revered, not mocked. ( Trillion Dollar Meltown, Richistan, and Liar’s Poker — the latter two the perfect bookends for our sad story — are excellent chronicles of the past thirty or so years.)
When I try to divine and look at the leading indicators (oddly and ironically in light of the heavy toll of the past year and likely heavier toll to be paid this coming year and my own ingrained and deeply-rooted cynicism) I find myself more optimistic this new year than any other in recent memory about the state of the country and where things might go the next twenty to thirty years.
I don’t see people embracing mediocrity — I saw that in spades in the late 1980s, the very, very overhyped 1990s, and the first part of this decade. Rather, I see more evidence of more people doing good work in more places than I can recall in my adult lifetime.
Some examples:
1. Start with politics. Coming up on the one year anniversary of Barack Obama’s win in Iowa, and nineteen days from his inaugural, I find myself more optimistic about the state of our politics than ever before.
It’s not only — or principally — because of Obama. Rather, it’s the serious, sober-minded, and eminently practical bunch of kids in their 20s who spent the last year and a half working for him. I got to see them up close, as a volunteer for Obama in California, Indiana and finally Ohio. Many in the press, trained to be cynical and wry, tried to portray this as some sort of cultish movement (volunteers and workers were “Obamabots”). But really, it was a group of kids (and they were mostly kids) who were sick of how the country was being run, and who decided to do something about it rather than complain or sit on their hands. They didn’t protest, they didn’t march on Washington — they just got stuff done, did the hard, demanding, and unglamorous work of grassroots politicking, and changed our country.
2. The hard-headed, largely unheralded work by folks to fix our public school system. People like Michelle Rhee, or Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, who founded KIPP.
3. Our media. Don’t laugh. Between the renaissance of great writing and performance on television (The Wire, Sopranos, Mad Men, Elvis Costello’s new show, and many, many more) and the development of sustainable, strong new voices on the Internet (folks like Om but also Josh Marshall at TPM, music sites like Pitchfork and Stereogum) there are more signs of life than ever before. It’s invigorating and inspiring.
4. And, closer to my daily life, an impressive wave of startups and entrepreneurs launching companies the last three to four years. The work done by this second wave of startups has been far better, and resulted in many more useful and more durable services, than the efforts of their predecessors in mid- to late-1990s (I’m in a position to judge, I’ve been involved in both eras!). More of these companies act like Craiglist (the most important web company after google); few act like Pets.com.
It’s not incidental that this second wave of entrepreneurs came of age after (and in reaction to) a previous — if smaller scale and more localized — calamity; the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Folks who worked in and around the Internet business realized they’d been on a bender, went to work putting their value systems back in order, and renewed their focus on doing good work, not just doing well.
As a society and country, we’re paying the price for our decades of binging this year. It will be painful. But people seem serious about confronting the problems, about doing real work again, putting our values back in order, and that gives me hope on this first day of this very new year.
