Miscellaneous

A Quick Theory About Paying For Stuff On The Internet, Part 1

By jeremyblachman

A friend and I were talking the other day about a series of web videos he's thinking about putting together, and whether it seems reasonable that anyone might pay to watch them, and whether a video is even the right format for what he's trying to do. 

My knee-jerk set of opinions in this area:

-- No one, to my (incomplete) knowledge, has cracked the code on a series of web videos that people really care about in the same way that there's a whole set of blogs that have built up from nothing and have either become established things everyone is at least aware of -- Gawker, etc -- or launched careers for people. 

-- The one exception I think of is Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible series last year, which somehow rose above the mass of video out there and was watched by tons and tons of people and got tons and tons of press.  But I feel like this is a legitimate exception because Whedon is reasonably famous with an already-established fan base, and he used famous actors.  In fact, I think the reality that more people haven't been able to replicate Whedon's success supports my point -- it's really, really hard, even with all sorts of fame and celebrity advantages, to put together some sort of web video thing that people will care about.

-- I would rather read something on the Internet than watch something, and it isn't even close.  I think a big part of that is time and efficiency.  If you send me a link to a thing to read, I can click and skim and decide whether it's worth it in a lot less time than it takes to let a video load and watch the first few seconds.  I can also skim text in a way I can't skim a video.  Even when I actively decide to watch something online, I usually end up finding myself clicking on other things when I get bored and suddenly I realize the video has been running for three minutes in the background and I've been vaguely listening, not watching, and I have no idea what's going on.  This holds true for podcasts as well, unless I am listening on my iPod without any distractions.  This may be an idiosyncratic thing about the way I best process information, but I get more out of spending ten seconds scrolling quickly through a New York Times article than five minutes of someone reading it to me out loud in an audio file.

-- I'm failing so far to make a distinction between two kinds of videos on the web: pure entertainment and business-related.  By business-related, I mean information that can potentially make someone money or that they feel compelled to watch in some sort of information-seeking way.  The way that the Wall Street Journal can charge for content but Sports Illustrated can't -- in theory, people make money using the kinds of information the WSJ provides but not SI -- WSJ is necessary but SI is pure entertainment, with a billion alternatives out there.

-- On the pure entertainment side, because watching, say, a series of 10 4-minute episodes of a web series is a much greater investment of time and energy than skimming a piece on McSweeney's, I am much more reluctant to bother checking something out if it's a video.

-- Part of this, in my head, is because of relevance.  Even if I watch something awesome, I still think it's pretty unlikely anyone I know will have seen it, and also unlikely that me sending a link to a video will get anyone to watch it.  There's probably nothing much on the Internet written about it either.  So who can I share this with?  It is not that much fun to watch something cool if you can't really talk to anyone about it.  At least if I watch something on regular TV, I know other people who've seen it, I know people who I can convince to check it out, and there's probably a message board about it somewhere that I can read for validation.  It feels like part of the actual world, something legitimate and decently relevant, not like something 400 people might have stumbled on.  For whatever reason my brain only thinks about stuff like this as related to video, not text.  If I read something awesome, I assume other people have found or will find it, or if I link to it on my blog or in an e-mail, people may check it out.  I assume no one watches videos that people suggest they do, because I don't.

-- I cannot really explain why my brain thinks the previous point makes any sense, especially because I can probably count on two hands the number of times I've ever sent someone the link to something awesome I've read or watched online.  There is perhaps nothing actually more relevant about random text on the Internet than random video on the Internet, it just feels more relevant in my head.

OK.  So these are my built-in biases and assumptions.  I thought writing them down would lead more directly into the actual point of what I wanted to write about, which is why I think people don't pay for videos on the Internet, and how I think they might.  But it seems silly to bury that at the end of a post no one's going to scroll down to read, so I'm going call it Part 2 and make it a separate post.  I should have outlined my thoughts before typing them.  Oops.

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on January 11, 2009 (boomark / email).