Publishing
The YouTube Effect: Copyright Law Will Eat Itself
Jeff Atwood’s “YouTube: The Big Copyright Lie” may be the most telling — and concise — article ever written about today’s online copyright law fiasco. According to Atwood, the company’s whole existence teeters a fundamental lie: that so-called “fair use” is in the eye of the beholder, and the only beholders who matter are the copyright’s owner and their attorneys (read: copyrighted material is kept live on YouTube indefinitely until either the copyright holder or their lawyers complain).
Atwood shows that YouTube’s copyright tips page, although refreshingly plain-spoken, is a bit self-righteous, considering that, as he puts it, 90% of the content on YouTube is ripped-off copyrighted material…
It’s completely glossed over on the YouTube copyright page in favor of 100% original content, but the loophole in copyright is fair use. Under the banner of fair use, you could legally upload a video without the copyright holder’s permission. Anyone who contributes anything to the web should have the four factors of fair use commited [sic] to memory by now:
- the purpose of the use
- the nature of the copyrighted work
- the relative amount of the portion used
- the market effect of the use on the copyrighted work
Atwood goes on to explain why “The typical YouTube clip does well on the last two factors of the fair use test, but utterly fails the first two.” It’s an eye-opener for anyone who creates original content.
Meanwhile, our attitudes toward the media landscape continues to shift according to generational fault lines. In AdvertisingAge, Mike Vorhaus shares some telling figures:
Americans also believe their use of online video has cannibalized TV. Overall, more than 15% of respondents say they watch TV less as a result of watching online videos. And 25% of 18- to 24-year-olds believe that online video is cannibalizing their TV viewing. In comparison, fewer than 11% of 45- to 54-year-olds report such cannibalization.
Hmm… Does it count as watching TV if you’re watching TV on YouTube?
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Written by:Robert Gorell
What Keywords Say About Your Visitors
I was reading an article in AdAge about Ian Ayres. He and his publisher were battling over the title of his new book. He wanted to call it The End of Intuition. His publishers wanted to call it Super Crunchers.
[His publishers said] “The End of Intuition” is a terrible name. So boring. But Ian Ayres didn’t believe it. That’s what he wanted to call his new book about how much better it is to test ideas through random trials rather than just trusting some marketing guru or focus group — or intuition. His editor thought he was nuts and insisted that “Super Crunchers” was a much zippier name.
So the two of them decided to do some random testing of his book on random testing. They took out a Google ad and half the time someone was doing a search on “data mining” or “number crunching,” a little ad on the right would appear for a new book called “The End of Intuition.” Half the time the same ad appeared for a new book called “Super Crunchers.”
Based only on this information, which title do you think won? Make your best guess, then keep reading.
To me, it’s pretty darn obvious; “Super Crunchers” had to perform much better if they keywords they targeted were “data mining” and “number crunching.”
Sure enough…
“Super Crunchers” got way more traffic — 63% — and thus became the title of his book.
I was actually a little surprised it wasn’t higher than 63%, but I don’t have access to the actual ad.
There are two types of people in customer research. There are Humanistics, who have a great ability to empathize with other people. They truly want to understand why people behave the way they do, what their deeper motivations are, and how to better relate to people. Then there are Methodicals. They’re superior number crunchers. They like statistics and spreadsheets. They base their decisions on facts (even if they’re merely justifying to themselves a decision that’s already been made based on emotion).
I’d be curious to see this test repeated with different keywords like “customer insight” or “customer research”or “understanding your customers.” These are keywords more likely to be used by Humanistics, who would be more attracted to the title “The End of Insight.”
If the subject matter of the book is truly aimed at more Methodical researchers, “Super Crunchers” is definitely the way to go. I’m not suggesting Ian change the title of the book. But never underestimate the power of words. The keywords you choose will affect your results.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
Want to Be a Bestselling Author?
Here’s what you do:
1.) Build a marketing platform.
2.) Write a book people want to read.
3.) Contact Michael Drew.
We’re often asked how Waiting for Your Cat to Bark hit #1 on the Wall Street Journal list, while reaching bestseller status on the New York Times, USA Today, Amazon, and BusinessWeek lists. (AdvertisingAge even called it one of the “10 books you should have read” for 2006.) How is it, they wonder, that Call to Action became a bestseller, despite being sold exclusively online. Well, we had a secret weapon: A marketer who knows book publishing and promotion better than anyone else in the business, and has the track record to prove it. His name, one more, is Mike Drew — and he’s struck again.
On the American Small Business blog, Michele Miller points out that Drew turned three separate books into bestsellers in just this past weekend alone.
A lot of authors make the mistake of thinking that signing with the right publisher will all but guarantee a book’s success. Think again. Unless you’re uncannily blessed by the word-of-mouth gods, even a well-reviewed book can have a hard time making the bestseller lists. Authors need their books to be properly marketed and promoted. That’s where Michael Drew comes in.
If you or someone you know is an author with bestseller ambitions, take a moment to watch this video or subscribe to Drew’s blog, Beneath the Cover.
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Written by:The Grok
Amazon is Ready to Take a Bite Out of Apple
Amazon (AMZN) pulled the cover off its long-awaited music store, Amazon MP3. Amazon is targeting the long tail that Apple (AAPL) hasn’t captured. Their selection is DRM-free MP3s with over 2 million songs from more than 180,000 artists represented by over 20,000 major and independent labels. Most songs are priced between 89 cents and 99 cents.
Will they outsell Apple’s iTunes?
Check it out and compare it to iTunes. Do you think one is better than the other? Will you shop at both or keep your loyalty to one?
(UPDATE: It seems that Virgin Digital, the online Virgin Megastore has closed.)
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Don’t Turn Over Reader List To IRS Rules Judge Hall
Can the IRS obtain information about what you read on a website even if you have done nothing wrong?
I didn’t think it was possible until I read “Order on Tax Evasion Site Blocked” in the NY Times:
On Friday, Judge Peter W. Hall temporarily blocked the portion of the order requiring Mr. Schulz to turn over to the government the names and identifying details of people who had obtained information at the Web site on how to stop federal tax from being withheld from their paychecks.
My position is clear, I’m a card carrying member of the ACLU. Do you think the IRS should be able to get that list?
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
SEO Ethics: New York Times is Challenged
Clark Hoyt, the New York Times public editor, serves as the readers’ representative. In his Op Ed column, he writes:
A BUSINESS strategy of The New York Times to get its articles to pop up first in Internet searches is creating a perplexing problem: long-buried information about people that is wrong, outdated or incomplete is getting unwelcome new life.
People are coming forward at the rate of roughly one a day to complain that they are being embarrassed, are worried about losing or not getting jobs, or may be losing customers because of the sudden prominence of old news articles that contain errors or were never followed up.
Archived material is being pushed to the top of the search engine result pages by the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts of the New York Times. That is considered good business, especially for a website that makes money from displaying ads and the reader gets what might be relevant information. However, the practice raises a new crop of questions about journalistic ethics:
- What is their responsibility to archive all of their published works?
- Do they have a responsibility as a news organization to follow up on all published material to verify outcomes and then link it back to the older articles?
- Should they allow people the ability to comment on this dated material?
- Should they allow for the editing of the archives at a later date to change what was originally published as news?
- Should some material just be deleted and forgotten in this digital age?
- Whose responsibility is it to monitor and influence (if possible) what the search engines say about people?
Please let me know what you think about these new ethical challenges for journalists. What are our responsibilities as bloggers? Do the readers even care when things have finally been resolved?
P.S. If you’re in the mood for contemplating ethical challenges, Marshall Sponder raises another large one: What’s an honest SEO person to do when Universal Search clogs up SERPS with results they can’t manipulate?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Would You Play with Helium?
My friend Anne Kennedy sat with me yesterday in the speakers’ room at Search Engine Strategies and told me about a company she’s involved with called Helium; a directory of about a half-million user-generated articles (so far).
But it’s much more than a directory. Helium allows articles its community considers more valuable to get better visibility — and a bigger chunk of its ad revenue. They also have an area for debate and have included a marketplace for publishers and authors to connect. Today, they have publishers willing to pay from $16 to $100 per article to some 69,000 writers, who’ve already generated 400,000 articles on 60,000 topics.
As a Publisher, you can list a bounty for any articles you want written. Authors then submit stories following your guidelines and compete for the bounty. Publishers can select any article as the winner, while Helium’s peer review ratings help rank submissions.
Would you use articles written by anonymous freelancers? Have you already? Could you see yourself using Helium to bolster your content offerings and, possibly, your search engine rankings?
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
I’ll Pay for Lunch
I recently shared lunch with my good friend and business associate, Ray Bard. Ray is the monumentally successful mastermind behind the Bard Press publishing house where I worked from 1999-2002. We established a great dialog during my stint there and try to get together as often as possible to trade war stories about current projects and the state of affairs in the Big Bad Book Industry.
We spent most of this particular lunch discussing the challenges faced by today’s publishers. (This Brand Autopsy post should shed some light.) Ray used industry averages to illustrate just how it’s become critical for publishers to be extremely selective with the authors they choose to bring on board.
Here’s how those averages break down on a per-book basis, for those with the gag tolerance to stomach the facts:
Retail price = $20
- Trade discount to bookstores: $ 10
- Co-op displays at bookstores: $ 2
- Distributor cut (15%): $ 3
- Author royalties (15%): $ 3
- Printing costs: $ 2
Left for publisher = $0
Nice margin, isn’t it? I’m not positive, but I think convicts make more in prison.
So how do publishing houses like Bard Press survive? By holding out for authors who have either the money or the over-the-top marketing platform to make a serious run at the bestseller lists.
I can always tell when Ray finds an author with bestselling potential. At the end of those lunches, he’s a lot quicker to reach for the tab.
[Author’s Note: Read more about selecting the right authors in my article, “A Few Good Books: Just Say ‘No!’ to Authors without Healthy Marketing Platforms.”]
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Written by:Mike Drew
The Death of Paid Newspaper Content
Two great posts articles today with postmortem analysis on the death of paid newspaper content…
First, Publishing 2.0’s Scott Karp opines the New York Times‘ decision to drop TimesSelect and return to publishing the entirety of its content online — for free. Says Karp:
The ability to charge for content in non-digital media like newspapers, magazines, and cable TV was based on a limited supply of content and monopoly control of distribution. The web and digital media have generated an overabundance of content — not just a spike in high-quality content but, more disruptively, and even larger spike in “pretty good” or “good enough” content. The web has of course utterly destroyed destroyed distribution monopolies. Anyone can create and distribute content on a meaningful scale.
[…] The WSJ.com remains the last great bastion of paid content on the web, and with the News Corp acquisition, the pressure to tear down the walls will likely be too great to resits [sic]. Even if it’s true that the WSJ has the highest quality business content bar none, the web is so awash in good, great, and utterly crappy business content, all free, that WSJ is holding onto its paid subscribers through sheer brand strength alone.
Indeed. Of course, there’s already been plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking about what Murdoch should/can/will do with the Wall Street Journal now that he’s majority shareholder of Dow Jones (DJ), but this Silicon Ally Insider has the best one we’ve seen thus far; a 10-point plan on how to fix Dow Jones from mogul Ted Leonsis, whose very first suggestion is to drop WSJ’s subscription model in order to scale.
Karp believes mobile is the next frontier for free content, and that long-form video content (e.g., movies) remains safe for now. Regardless, all of this raises the stickiest point of the old media probate battle: Should content be free?
UPDATE: Over at paidContent.org, another great post about the numbers at stake if WSJ were set free.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
What “an idiot with a modem” Can Teach You About Blogging
The L.A. Times (reg. required) has a fascinating piece on the influence of the Drudge Report. When Matt Drudge first started his humble website out of $600 per month Hollywood apartment, many of the journalists who work extremely hard at getting his attention today saw him as a black hat villain. The New York Times dismissed Drudge as “the country’s reigning mischief-maker,” and Newsweek investigative reporter Michael Isikoff even called him “a menace to honest, responsible journalism.”
That was then. Today, it’s a different story:
Every day, journalists and media executives in newsrooms across the land hope they’ll have something that catches Drudge’s fancy — or, as he has put it, “raises my whiskers.” Most keep their fingers crossed that he’ll discover their articles on his own and link to them. Others are more proactive, sending anonymous e-mails or placing calls to him or his behind-the-scenes assistant.
Drudge’s following is so large and loyal that he routinely can drive hundreds of thousands of readers to a single story, photo or video through a link on his lively compendium of the news. With media organizations competing fiercely for online audiences, the whims of Matt Drudge can make a measurable difference.
Here’s what Matt Drudge can teach us about blogging:
1. Content reigns over design — Focus on giving readers relevant content above all else. Offer a diversity of topics to appeal to different tastes. (I think we can all agree that Drudge has a pretty ugly website, but those links rule.)
2. Have an opinion — If you aim to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one. Have a clear and unique voice. Dare to be different.
3. Be consistent — You can generally find something fresh whenever you go to DrudgeReport.com. How often are you updating your blog?
4. Be persistent -- This level of success didn’t happen overnight. You have to continue publishing and sharing your opinions every day. Listen to the critics, but if you know you’re right, keep your self on track.
5. Tools du jour not required - People will spread word of mouth whether or not you providing them with any Web 2.0 tools to share your stories. If your content is worth sharing, people will find a way.
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
