Nintendo's YouTuber Affiliate Plan Is A Bureaucratic Mess Of Delays And Control

from the who'd-have-thought? dept

You may remember that several months ago, Nintendo announced plans to create a YouTuber-affiliate program that would finally allow YouTube personalities to, according to Nintendo, share in the ad revenue generated by YouTube videos featuring Nintendo content. Leaving aside the notion that such videos are essentially a version of free advertising for the company, there was also a great deal of concern over how much control Nintendo wanted to leverage over the content within the videos. The wording in the agreement made it clear that access was being traded for positive coverage, essentially destroying the trust relationship between YouTube producers and their hard-won audiences.

Well, as if those concerns weren't enough, it turns out that Nintendo can't even administer to their own program appropriately, the result of which is them attempting to exert even more control. The problem? Well, it turns out too many people wanted to sign up.

Many people are still waiting for Nintendo to approve their first set of submitted YouTube creations despite the company’s promise to process videos in “two to three days.” The game publisher has acknowledged the problem, and it says that it’s still working on getting caught up. Game videos on YouTube is a big business, as that category regularly has the biggest audience of viewers and subscribers.

“Due to your enthusiasm for the program, we’re receiving a higher volume of applications to register channels and videos than expected,” reads an update on the Creator’s Program website. “It is taking longer than we anticipated to confirm the applications. We appreciate your patience as we work through them as quickly as possible.”

Given the kind of money involved in game videos on YouTube, you have to believe the request for patience is being met with glares and stares. Especially, as I mentioned above, since Nintendo appears to be a subscriber to the theory that every crises is an opportunity. In this case, an opportunity to tighten their grip on video content even more, to a degree that's actually quite stunning.

Nintendo posted an extensive whitelist of games that it has said are OK to monetize on YouTube. You can read the list for yourself, since it’s far too long to include here. For people who did want to submit their entire YouTube channels to Nintendo, the company is now saying that it will have to turn down your application if you have any uploads featuring games not on the whitelist. That includes non-Nintendo games.

“If a video within your channel contains game titles outside of the list of supported games, please remove it from the channel before registering,” reads the website. “If you are unable to remove the video from your channel, please register each video that contains game titles on the list of supported games individually.”

Except, as Nintendo also noted, the company is first completing registrations or entire channels, while the wait time for registering individual videos has ballooned. What does this mean? Well, if you actually want to get this stuff rolling, you register your entire channel. And if you do that, you have to delete any videos that aren't on Nintendo's happy-happy approved list. That's about as clear-cut an example of using a bureaucracy to shape a message through complicit media as it gets, and it should be a warning to anyone who was thinking about getting into bed with Nintendo on this YouTuber thing but hasn't yet.

Because, and this is important, this is the beginning. If Nintendo is attempting to control video producers' content this way at the beginning, imagine what they have planned once they've convinced enough producers to sign up.

Filed Under: ad revenue, affiliate, bureaucratic mess, let's play
Companies: nintendo, youtube

Newspaper Ad Revenue Fell Off Quite A Cliff: Now On Par With 1950 Revenue

from the adjust-for-inflation... dept

It's no secret that the newspaper industry has been in quite a decline lately. But a graphic put together by econ professor Mark Perry really highlights the massive size of that decline. It shows newspaper advertising revenue adjusted for inflation from 1950 to 2012 (with 2012 being estimated), and also includes a second line adding in online newspaper ad revenue. The situation is pretty clear: As Perry puts it:

It's another one of those huge Schumpeterian gales of creative destruction.

Jay Rosen helpfully points out that the peak was the same year that blogging software came on the scene. Though, I'm doubtful that's the "cause" here. You could probably make a stronger argument that the introduction of Craigslist, which really came on the scene in San Francisco in the late 90s before spreading elsewhere in 2000, contributed to this, as did tons of other online services.

But, here's the thing: for years we keep hearing about how the "decline" of the newspaper industry is supposedly happening because they put their papers online for free. But this chart certainly suggests a very different story. As we've said for a while, the real problem wasn't "free" but the newspapers failure to innovate. Going free online, if anything, should have increased ad revenue, not decreased it, since it would have increased inventory (though potentially decreased the prices).

We've pointed out for many years that the "real" business of newspapers was never "news," but collecting together a community and then selling their attention. The problem that newspapers came up against wasn't that they were suddenly giving out content online for free, but that there were very, very quickly millions of other "communities" that people could join online, such that the community of folks reading the newspaper started to go down, and with it, the attention went away. Thus, advertising in a newspaper became a lot less valuable. In fact, it became even more pronounced because, at best, newspaper advertising was targeted around (a) the general location where the newspaper was published and (b) perhaps the section of the newspaper in which the ad was placed. But, again, the internet changed the equation there, where you could start to target the attention of various communities based on a variety of other factors, some of which were seen to be much more lucrative than a crapshoot towards "all people in this city."

Making matters even worse, as various online communities focused on providing more "community" oriented features and content, newspapers seemed to go in the other direction. In part, this was because they kept insisting they were in the business of providing news, not in the business of aggregating a community's attention. So they took the somewhat elitist view that the community didn't matter much -- often to the point of acting in almost insulting ways towards the community. Things like paywalls, overly intrusive advertising, limited community functionality and the like just made newspapers less and less relevant. And when you're less and less relevant to a community, their attention goes elsewhere... and with it, advertising revenue.

And, in fact, it does not appear that the money that used to be spent on newspaper ads went away. While there are a number of different sources that seek to calculate total ad revenue over time, here's a chart showing overall US ad revenue from 1919 up to 2007, in which you see that it has a pretty consistent upward trend (admittedly, this is not corrected for inflation). That same chart also shows advertising as a percentage of GDP... and that has been pretty consistently stuck between 2.0% and 2.5% since the early 1980s. Various other metrics seem to show something similar. US advertising, as a whole, continued to generally expand over the past decade and a half while newspaper advertising collapsed. Looking over some more data, it looks like the big winners since 1998 were, of course, the internet, direct mail, cable TV and "out of home" advertising. Also "miscellaneous."

In other words, the newspapers suddenly faced a lot more competition for ad dollars, and they did nothing to convince the market to stick with them. So, the market went elsewhere.

Filed Under: ad revenue, business models, creative destruction, journalism

Don't Buy Into Any Reports On Q4 Online Ad Revenue Just Yet

from the flushed-out dept

In the last month or so, we heard a few different reports making the rounds claiming that "online advertising is back!" after lots of companies had great fourth quarters when it came to online ad revenues. The latest to report such a thing is the NY Times, who saw a big boost in online ad revenues in the fourth quarter, leading a bunch of people to wonder if maybe online ad revenue is taking off in a big way. While advertising has always been a cyclical market, and will certainly continue to grow, I think people are overreacting to Q4 of 2009.

Frankly, we saw the same thing here. While we don't rely on ad revenue as the core of our business model, we do make money on advertising, and we had a great fourth quarter on that front, as advertisers were pumping tons of money into ads. But I don't think it's a sign of anything to get too excited about -- and that's because a lot of companies were really skittish earlier in the year, so I think a large chunk of Q4 online ad spending was a mirage. Here's why:

The economy took a nosedive in the fourth quarter of 2008. By that point, lots of companies had already set their 2009 ad budgets, and had committed to at least a decent portion of what they planned to spend in Q1 of 2009. However, once the credit crunch went into overdrive, and there was all sorts of talk about how the world economy might collapse and we'd all be living in a post-apocalyptic Mad Maxian world, lots of companies hit the brakes, and didn't want to commit to spending. A bunch of companies simply stopped spending on online advertising until they knew what was going on. Then, along came Q3, and suddenly the marketing VPs and directors realized they were approaching the end of the year, and still had huge chunks of money that had been budgeted in 2008 for 2009, but hadn't been spent. And the way lots of companies do budgeting is that, if you haven't spent it, you get less the next year. So, these marketing folks had to quickly spend the budgets they had meant to spread out over the entire year, and they dumped a bunch of it into online advertising, because it was quick and easy.

So, I don't think that any of the Q4 reports you hear about concerning online advertising should be considered as an indicator of very much in terms of the future.

Filed Under: ad revenue
Companies: ny times