In 1979, a British Band named The Buggles released a song that almost all reading have heard at some point in their lives. Chances are most people haven’t seen the video, which is slightly ironic considering its status as the first video ever played on MTV, as well as the one-millionth. Although the part catchy, part grating tune never made it big in the US, it did top the UK charts and the Australian charts. The song is none other than Video Killed the Radio Star. It’s an incredibly apropos title for MTV’s first-ever video.
If video killed the radio star, then what has killed video? According to Der Spiegel, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe believe MySpace has. In their interview with the German language magazine, they say “We have replaced MTV” Given the rumor that MTV might even shutter one if its longest standing shows, one that launched Carson Daily, and became so popular viewers called it by three letters – TRL instead of its full name Total Request Live. MTV, the company, the shows, the entity transformed itself from avant garde to the mainstream representation of youth and popular culture.
Today, Viacom’s MTV isn’t exactly struggling, but it’s not exactly thriving either. The company has made multiple internet acquisitions, including its most recent investment in community site TagWorld.com, but more than just office-chair analysts seem to say that Viacom has yet to do for the web with MTV what it did to TV. In other words, MySpace, without necessarily meaning to do so, has kicked MTV’s butt. As DeWolfe says in the Der Spiegel piece, co-founder Tom Anderson, “designed the site originally to cater to creative folks whether it was actors, artists, or musicians…It was set up for everyday people to express themselves creatively.”
Assuming MySpace has “replaced MTV,” it did so by making more efficient and tactile the behavior of users – MySpace took being on a telephone, talking to your friend about a great video, took this social behavior and made it . As Anderson remarks, MTV is a one-way dialogue; regardless of how slick or impressive the content, a one-way dialogue will almost always lose ground to an equally satisfying experience that offers back and forth. That could be why the venerable TRL has lost ground. By TV standards it offered a two-way dialogue, but by internet standards, it did not. Those same people that made TRL such a success are the very same that have profiles on MySpace. As DeWolfe points out, it’s a platform to quickly show the whole world who you are and that you get a “visual and acoustic feeling of what a person is like” just by looking at their profile. MySpace has played a key role in the fundamental shift in communication taking place today.
This leads to one of the more interesting assertions found in the Der Spiegel piece. The article says, “…you have so far failed to become the big cash cow that Google and Yahoo have proven to be.” To which DeWolfe says, “Not yet. But we have only been in business for three years…We are going to earn a couple of hundred million dollars next year.” Think of MTV when it started. What chances did people give it to become not just a run away success but a multi-billion dollar media empire. Sounds familiar doesn’t it? Sounds a lot like another form of video, user-generated videos, embodied by YouTube. It might have sold for more than a billion dollars, but like MySpace at the time of its sale, more than a few think that YouTube does, or will, earn significant revenues and profit.
Citing a Screen Digest report, News.com reports, “User-generated video web sites…face big challenges turning traffic to cash.” Arash Amel, a Screen Digest analyst who wrote the report puts it best, “How do you monetize free content?” The content is about everything and nothing. Different from MySpace, YouTube hasn’t changed the way people communicate. Instead, and perhaps equally disruptive, it changed the way we consume content. With sites like YouTube, the core issue isn’t copyright, but learning what users want. From a marketing perspective, YouTube, and like sites, turn the existing means of buying video upside down. What we see with video and user-generated content parallels the banner ten years ago. All of the sudden, marketers had real metrics they could use to analyze their spends. It took them awhile to get comfortable with that, but now they embrace it. The same thing is taking place with video.
Sites like YouTube add a new layer of interaction and feedback to video ads. They allow for not just precise tracking, but participation. Users have become accustomed to owning media. They now expect the same with their brands. Talking to them doesn’t work. Opening up a dialogue does. Granted, there are a whole slew of issues around advertising on user-generated video sites, but they will learn how to make money, because in the end, marketers don’t have a choice. Consumers will still want well-produced content, and that content will draw in more money per second. It should. The rest of the content, the free content dilemma, it’s nothing new. People have always flocked to free content, and the sites that cater to them will always have lower yields. They now just have more power.
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