This makes sense coming from a comic book writer, considering there's a hugely growing subset of comics gaining ground, which exist entirely on the web. Webcomics are, for the most part, all almost entirely free. That's the point: if the reader can't see the content then he doesn't know anything, and if he can't see the archive (since most of them are continuous stories) then he has no reason to be interested. So paywalls are terribly counterproductive (indeed, there were plenty of attempts to use them anyway in the early 'oughts, but to no avail)
And yet, amazingly, there are a great number of webcomic creators out there who not only make money, but make a *living* off it! Wouldn't ya know! Not just the big hitters either, like Sluggy Freelance or Penny Arcade. Webcomics you've never heard of, and never WILL hear of, are making money for their creators. The reason comes from the principle of "1000 dedicated fans", where the size of your audience is far less important than their loyalty (this idea, at least as it relates to webcomics, was put forward by a collective that included the creators of PvP and Girl Genius among others).
This principle is the same reason why more musicians are starting find that they're better off working independently rather than through a label. Carpet-bombing someone into popularity is only of life-or-death importance to giant companies. To the individual creators, 1000 dedicated fans is the only necessity. Everything else is icing.
God, yeah. How many times have record labels sent cease and desists to their own bands, not realizing it was they who were uploading their own music? You could probably make an image-dump site devoted to just that subject.
Re: This *is* the kind of reporting that needs to be protected.
Just trying to keep up here...you're talking about "the royal family", yeah? The group with zero political power or influence whatsoever, who serve no purpose in England except to keep tabloids running?
Why the hell should they be treated with anything other than complete and utter indifference?
Quicktime is a good example of a "freemium" model that works (who came up with that word? I want to choke them). The Pro version of Quicktime is definably for people who need to do more things with the program than the average joe. Most people just don't need to export movie files into new formats, or cut-and-paste specific sections/frames of their video into new files. But when you *do*...Pro suddenly looks like a great idea.
You're right though, it's not a thing you can just apply to anything with multiple features. Basically, you need a clearly split demographic of people interested in your product, with one group being laypersons and the other being experts/hobbyists. At least that's what it seems like to me.
Eerily reminds me of Jasper Fforde's concept of the UltraWord upgrade, from his Thursday Next series. It's a pseudo-magical/high tech upgrade that's going to be automatically applied to regular books for a higher quality reading experience; featuring night-glow print, real-time post-publication corrections, a massively overhauled story engine and...oh yeah...horrible, crippling DRM that makes it impossible to read a single book more than three times, among other things.
Comic book shops are also really good about trading in defective copies. Granted, that's an especially big deal for them, since printing is such a vital aspect of the business. Especially now that graphic novels are taking off, and a lot of indie creators are using smaller upstart publishers to get their books printed. Printing defects, though still uncommon, are practically an inevitability anymore.
In Dale Carnegie's old "Winning Friends and Influencing People", there's an anecdote about a factory supervisor that almost exactly mirrors your example. Seeing productivity drop to an all-time-low, he decided on the novel idea of just setting up a chalk board with everyone's name, and turning production into a contest. Boom. Problem solved.
See it turns out people do better work when they actually interested in the outcome. Who'da thunk?
Even if they sole mantra is "bring down big cable", they can't *say* that.
It would be nice if that was true. It could be, I suppose, but the intent is worthless if the execution can't be carried out. At the moment, there's not indication to me that they have the means and the will necessary to do so, either now or in the future.
Meanwhile, the thing about Hulu's "relationships" is that they're all with companies that are MUCH MORE POWERFUL THAN THEY ARE. That's not a level relationship. Or even a climbable relationship. The networks have a little to gain by pulling Hulu's strings and a little to lose if it fails; Hulu has *everything* to gain by allowing their strings to be pulled and *everything* to lose by going against those partners. No matter how much money they make, Hulu will never even that playing field.
So the idea that Hulu is safe just because they've partnered with all these guys is pure illusion. If Hulu, at any point, starts to look uninteresting to the networks (or something prettier comes along), boom. They're out on the street. No question.
I mean, consumers get the shaft either way, but Hulu's is full of just as many holes.
Just to help clarify, can someone who knows about the details of this stuff explain *why* you're able to sue someone for infringing on a copyright you don't have until after the infringment happens? Because to me that sounds like one of those can o' worms things, where tons on unintentional infringement could happen prior to a copyright creation, and then everybody gets sued for being incapable of predicting the future...
The catch is that about a million people have tried just that. Almost all of them have failed because monetizing content on the internet through advertising puts you at such a deeper disadvantage than doing it through TV. Since advertisers *know* that websites get exact information about who watches, when, for how long, and from where, they're able to put a lot of pressure on them to meet specific demands. That's a ton of power in the wrong hands.
The sites who are still in the game (the "funny or die"s of the web), have survived not from any user support but through the same deals that have kept Hulu afloat. In other words, in order to succeed here, you have to work with the people you're trying to displace. Which means - much like what Hulu is learning - you'll never displace them.
That is...until someone who's able to wrap his or her head around this ridiculousness comes along and sets up a new paradigm. Could happen. I think it would need to start with a reliable way to necessarily obfuscate website viewer numbers, not just from the public, but from the site holders themselves. Then you can start over from the top down, the way TV does it with Nielsen boxes, which only represent about 1% of the TV watching public. Compare to something like Quantcast or Google Analytics, where installing the code onto your site gives you a representation of 100% of the people viewing the site.
What I learned from the Hulu Plus list of available shows was less that the list was lacking, and more than I don't actually like most TV programs so what the hell should I care whether it's good or not in the first place.
It would be one thing if the people Hulu was trying to make happy was film studios with decades-long back catalogs of impressive footage. But they're not. All they're dealing with are a bunch of idiots who've way overvalued their own crappy products.
You see this all the time with plenty of "news" magazines (and probably TV news, but I never watch..) I personally find myself avoiding science magazines for exactly that reason. When you constantly see bombastic, declarative headlines that are completely debunked within the body of the article, the childish manipulation gets tiresome.
Yeah, the difference here is that "Is Silverlight Dead?" is an honest question you could ask after looking at the evidence. Ultimately, the answer is probably "no", but that doesn't invalidate the question.
On the post: If There Were No IP Restrictions, What Kind Of Mobile Devices Could You Build?
Re: No IP restrictions for personal use.
On the post: Forget Product Placement; Get Ready For Product Anti-Placement
Imagine: angry moviegoers leaving a terrible movie, images of a crappy actor drinking Pepsi in their head,looking for a Coke machine...
On the post: Mark Waid Explains: Culture Is More Important Than Copyright & It's Time To Look For Opportunities In Sharing
And yet, amazingly, there are a great number of webcomic creators out there who not only make money, but make a *living* off it! Wouldn't ya know! Not just the big hitters either, like Sluggy Freelance or Penny Arcade. Webcomics you've never heard of, and never WILL hear of, are making money for their creators. The reason comes from the principle of "1000 dedicated fans", where the size of your audience is far less important than their loyalty (this idea, at least as it relates to webcomics, was put forward by a collective that included the creators of PvP and Girl Genius among others).
This principle is the same reason why more musicians are starting find that they're better off working independently rather than through a label. Carpet-bombing someone into popularity is only of life-or-death importance to giant companies. To the individual creators, 1000 dedicated fans is the only necessity. Everything else is icing.
On the post: German Court Says YouTube Has To Pay Because A User Uploaded A Musician's Video
Re:
On the post: Murdoch's Reporters Allegedly Listened To The Voicemails Of Hundreds
Re: This *is* the kind of reporting that needs to be protected.
Why the hell should they be treated with anything other than complete and utter indifference?
On the post: Software Startups Realizing That Cookie-Cutter Freemium Doesn't Always Work Well
You're right though, it's not a thing you can just apply to anything with multiple features. Basically, you need a clearly split demographic of people interested in your product, with one group being laypersons and the other being experts/hobbyists. At least that's what it seems like to me.
On the post: Reminder: You Don't Own Your Ebooks; Amazon Locks Customer Out And Doesn't Respond To Help Requests
On the post: Reminder: You Don't Own Your Ebooks; Amazon Locks Customer Out And Doesn't Respond To Help Requests
Re: Re: Re: Not for the iPad
On the post: Reminder: You Don't Own Your Ebooks; Amazon Locks Customer Out And Doesn't Respond To Help Requests
Re: Re: Yeah, I recognize the problem...
On the post: Why Big Companies Almost Never Notice Disruptive Innovation
Re: Prime innovation example HP vs HP
See it turns out people do better work when they actually interested in the outcome. Who'da thunk?
On the post: Hulu CEO So Careful Not To Upset Cable Companies, He Might Just Destroy His Own Business
Re: Party Lines
It would be nice if that was true. It could be, I suppose, but the intent is worthless if the execution can't be carried out. At the moment, there's not indication to me that they have the means and the will necessary to do so, either now or in the future.
Meanwhile, the thing about Hulu's "relationships" is that they're all with companies that are MUCH MORE POWERFUL THAN THEY ARE. That's not a level relationship. Or even a climbable relationship. The networks have a little to gain by pulling Hulu's strings and a little to lose if it fails; Hulu has *everything* to gain by allowing their strings to be pulled and *everything* to lose by going against those partners. No matter how much money they make, Hulu will never even that playing field.
So the idea that Hulu is safe just because they've partnered with all these guys is pure illusion. If Hulu, at any point, starts to look uninteresting to the networks (or something prettier comes along), boom. They're out on the street. No question.
I mean, consumers get the shaft either way, but Hulu's is full of just as many holes.
On the post: Court Refuses To Dismiss Righthaven Lawsuit Just Because Righthaven Bought The Copyright After Infringement Happened
On the post: Tesla Motors Pays Fine For Lacking Emissions Certificate Of Conformity... Even Though It Lacks Emissions
On the post: Hulu CEO So Careful Not To Upset Cable Companies, He Might Just Destroy His Own Business
Re: Hm...
The sites who are still in the game (the "funny or die"s of the web), have survived not from any user support but through the same deals that have kept Hulu afloat. In other words, in order to succeed here, you have to work with the people you're trying to displace. Which means - much like what Hulu is learning - you'll never displace them.
That is...until someone who's able to wrap his or her head around this ridiculousness comes along and sets up a new paradigm. Could happen. I think it would need to start with a reliable way to necessarily obfuscate website viewer numbers, not just from the public, but from the site holders themselves. Then you can start over from the top down, the way TV does it with Nielsen boxes, which only represent about 1% of the TV watching public. Compare to something like Quantcast or Google Analytics, where installing the code onto your site gives you a representation of 100% of the people viewing the site.
On the post: Hulu: We Know That Hulu Plus Sucks, But It's Not Our Fault
It would be one thing if the people Hulu was trying to make happy was film studios with decades-long back catalogs of impressive footage. But they're not. All they're dealing with are a bunch of idiots who've way overvalued their own crappy products.
On the post: Blockbuster Bankruptcy, Yet Again, Highlights How It's Not Easy To Just Copy The Disruptive Innovation
Re: Re: RE: a few things on netflix
"Well *I* heard Netflix had to fight four dragons and a lemur in order to get the exclusivity contract"
On the post: Why Does The NY Times Rely So Often On Single Anecdote Trend Pieces Not Supported By The Data?
On the post: Why Does The NY Times Rely So Often On Single Anecdote Trend Pieces Not Supported By The Data?
Re:
On the post: How Should Facebook Respond To The Social Network Movie?
Re: "The Net"... or maybe you meant
On the post: Ticketmaster Says People Don't Like Service Fees Because We Don't Understand Them
Re: Trolls are hungry today!
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