Bill Cammack

Reader Adam H. had a couple of questions about what I thought about the Fast Company / Robert Scoble / Shel Israel thing that’s been going on now for about a month. The first GlobalNeighbourhoods.TV video was dropped on March 19th… Actually, the first FOUR episodes were released on that date and since then, post-production of that show has essentially been non-existent during a virtual metalstorm of criticism of nearly every single aspect of that show.

I commented five days ago on Shel’s site here and here. I thought I’d say something today about budgeting for internet video, with the focus being essentially that you get what you pay for, and if you don’t pay for anything it’s not only the content creator that’s going to be ridiculed, it’s YOUR brand.

Here’s the problem with internet video. I’ve been saying this for probably over a year now, and nothing’s different today. The way television works (which I know, because I’m a broadcast editor) is that the money comes from advertisers. The reason the money comes from advertisers is because they want to take advantage of *you*… the viewer. They know that 2 million people are going to sit in front of the television and watch this show, so they’re willing to pay the network to get their product in front of that many potential customers. Television is ALLLLLLL about sales. That’s why they call them “soap operas”. The point was to sell soap. ACTUAL soap.

This model doesn’t exist with internet video. Not only do you generally have a smaller audience, but you can’t prove demographics. This means you can’t convince an advertiser to give you big money to do an internet show. Since there’s no real revenue stream, it’s spawned a mentality of individuals and companies trying to do or get something for nothing. The less they can spend and still have a video to put on youtube or wherever and try to get hits, page views and revenue shares, the more they like it.

That’s the internet video formula. Spend little, get a garbage product, have people click on it anyway, split the revenue with the host. As we’ve seen with people that have gotten millions of hits on a video and pulled in maybe a couple of thousand dollars worth of revenue, it’s just not worth it. The odds are low that you’re going to get that many hits, and the fact of the matter is that time is money. Unless you have a sponsor, making video on the internet is a money-LOSING situation.

For example… If you work in NYC, and you’re the slowest, least-knowledgeable nonlinear video editor with his/her own system, you can still get $30/hour. Using that insanely-low number as a base, let’s look at the time that it would take to do the Shel Israel show. Actually… Let’s kick it down to McDonald’s wages… What do they get? $10/hour? Is that minimum wage at this point? Let’s say you could get someone to work for $10/hour to make Global Neighbourhoods Television.

The first thing you have to do is shoot the show. Assuming the company you’re going to talk to is local to you, you have to get paid for the time you spend at that company plus the time it took you to travel there. Let’s say you spent 5 hours at a company, traveled another two hours to get there and back and shot 2 hours of footage while you were there (I have no idea how long they actually take or how much they shoot to do their show).

Off the bat, your show has now cost you $70 in time and $15 in tape if you didn’t buy bulk. That’s assuming you already own a camera. That’s assuming you already own a microphone. That’s assuming you already own lights. That’s assuming you’re going to run the camera yourself WHILE you do the interview. If you want to have a cameraman follow you around, let’s say you were able to find someone else that was willing to work for my version of minimum wage, $10/hour. That means that your show is infinitely better, but that it now costs you $140 to shoot. It also means that most likely, the person that you hired… SUCKS, so there’s a good chance that you won’t get anything good for your no-budget production.

Now you have a show “in the can”, meaning you have the elements, but you don’t have a finished show. This means that you have to find someone that’s willing to edit your show for $10/hour. Off the bat, there’s going to be a two-hour loading fee because if you used tape, it has to be ingested into the system in real-time = $20. If you didn’t hire a producer for $10/hour to make sense out of the footage that you shot, that means that the editor has to play through ALL of your footage to extract the best parts = another two hours = $20. Now, the editor is either charged with making your show him/herself, or it’s a supervised edit, meaning someone is telling the editor what they’d like to see happen. Let’s assume it’s going to take four hours to edit the show. That’s another either $40 or $80 depending on the number of people involved. That also doesn’t take into account Suite Fees and Equipment Fees.

So… Adding up this bunch of $10s, we end up with a base price of something like $165/episode for a show that’s shot in one day, by one person and edited during a four hour time span. No revisions. No changes. No more work done on that show past one day. Now… How does that money come back? Revenue-sharing? Let’s say you can get a $7 CPM (cost per mille) for your videos. That means that for every ONE THOUSAND TIMES that someone clicks on your video, you receive a whopping $7. And that’s AFTER you accumulate enough of those thousands to make it over the low limit which the host has agreed in their ToS that they’ll write you a check. That might be $25 and it might be $100, so you don’t get paid JACK unless you get 25/7×1000 views. Let’s call it 4,000 views gets you $28 and THEN you get paid.

$165/$28 = 5.892. Multiply that by 4,000 views, and you’d have to get over 23,000 views to break even if you’re working for $10/hour. Sure, you can do other stuff like have banner ads on your page and google ads, but basically, you can see that without sponsorship, Shel’s not only doing a show for free, he’s actually LOSING MONEY doing the show. SOMEONE’S got to come up with that $165/episode. If it’s a weekly show, that’s $660/month.

PLUS… Unless you’ve got it like that, and you have a business that makes money without you being involved, you have to factor in the opportunity cost of not being able to make money during those hours that you’re shooting and editing your show. You also have to factor in downtime on your computer while videos are being rendered, compressed or uploaded to the internet.

So, even with this hypothetical minimum wage example, we’re looking at $800/month to produce Global Neighbourhoods Television…. in its CURRENT state.

So now, you’d have to wonder WHO you could get to pay you $800/month as a sponsor of a no-budget show. You’re not going to be able to sell “numbers” unless you’re popular for some reason. You’re not going to be able to sell page views either.

Apparently, what happened in this particular case is that Shel Israel’s show has been submitted for editing. Today is April 10th. The show, which was originally announced as a daily… was kicked back to being a weekly… and now hasn’t been updated since March 28th, which will be two weeks ago, tomorrow. If it actually becomes a weekly show, tack on that four hours of minimum wage editing for another $40/week = $160/month and now, the budget is approaching $1,000/month, including shipping tapes to the editor.

So now, I can get to Adam H’s questions:

Adam H: What is Bill’s opinion on this? What are his thoughts on why the videos are lag coming out, why they are long and boring, about FastCompanyTV in general?

My guess is that the videos aren’t coming out on schedule because Fast Company’s in between a rock and a hard place. They only have two choices… Release videos of the same ‘quality’ or get the videos worked on. It seems like they’ve chosen to get them worked on. Neither solution “works” for them.

If they release videos similar to what they’ve already produced, they’re going to be the subject of even more ridicule than they already have been. “They”, being the entire crew involved in this: FastCompany, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel… in that order.

If they get Shel’s videos worked on, the minimum wage editing money is going to have to appear out of thin air. As far as I know, there’s still no sponsor, even though that Seagate advertisement is STILL on fastcompany.tv/global-neighbourhoods-tv. Actually, they could virtually “pay” for Shel’s show to get edited if they have a staff editor and just tack it onto his/her list of duties for fastcompany.tv. That still incurs the opportunity cost of that editor taking time away from doing edits that were originally in their job description.

The other problem with getting the shows edited is that they’re already shot incorrectly. This means that the 4 hours (plus 2 hours for loading, plus an hour for encoding, uploading, tagging, etc) that I estimated for the edit will probably be more like 8 hours and probably spread out over several days, including running the show by an EP (more minimum wage $$/episode) and making several revisions until it’s deemed worthy to be released.

Why are they long and boring? Their focus is on “content” and not entertainment. Basically, what they do is bring you along as a fly on the wall while they hang out with business people and ask questions. Their goal is to archive these Q&A sessions. Basically, as an editor, I can tell you that watching their shows is like watching raw footage. It’s what you would see if you opened up the viewfinder on the camera they used to shoot it and pressed play. The credit that I can give them is that the only show of theirs that I’ve listened to end-to-end was the Jason Calacanis interview, which was broken up into a 20 MINUTE SEGMENT and a *24* MINUTE SEGMENT with a third segement still to be released. I probably watched the first 5 minutes’ worth, then let it play in a background window like a radio program while I did other things. So I can guess that if the niche that they report on consistently has topics/guests that someone’s actually interested in, then their long, boring videos are consistently useful to someone. I’d love to see stats on how many people are return viewers and what percentage (time-wise) of these 44-minute and counting videos are actually being watched.

What about FastCompany.TV in general? hahahaha Interestingly enough, I said what I had to say about FastCompany.TV when I heard about it through the grapevine. I left my comment on Robert Scoble’s announcement post, three months ago, on January 16th, 2008. Video quality isn’t based on a website… It’s based on a team. Bring the same team and you get the same videos.

Meet the new boss….

Same as the old boss………

Kristen “Kroosh” Crusius wrote a post the other day about what’s going on in her “Friendiverse”… her universe of friends. Her post reminded me that I had intended to comment about Robert Scoble‘s videos about how social networks’ “friends lists” really work.

Part I of Social Graph Based Search. 14:41 minutes.

Part II of Social Graph Based Search. 15 minutes.

And a bonus round III. 6 minutes.

I didn’t get around to writing that post because I’ve been incredibly busy for the last two months.

I think the term “Friends”, as automatically used by several social sites is an unfortunate and misleading label. This is especially true when there are no other choices. You’re forced into a binary system…. Accept or Decline… Yes or No… 1 or 0… My-Friend or Not-My-Friend. Unfortunately, as Scoble pointed out in his videos, reality doesn’t work like that. There are different levels and flavors of relationships between people. Business relationships, Family relationships, Intimate relationships, Adversarial relationships… I think linkedin has it right with the generic term “contact”. How many ‘contacts’ do you have? They’re not (your friends) by default, nor are they (not your friends) by default. Still, in linkedin, there are several types of business relationships, including people that you have worked with personally… people you have not worked with personally, but you trust whomever recommended them to you… people you have not worked with and you have no professional recommendations for, but you vouch for them as a person, so you are happy to recommend them to someone who’s looking to fill a position…. people you have no intention of recommending to anyone, but you will still accept them as a contact… people that you are in contact with specifically so you can set them up with other people….. ALL of these are thrown in together under the title ‘contact’.

Because of the misnomer “friends”, some people have selected this to mean their ACTUAL friends and will only add people that they actually know. Here, I agree with Scoble’s assertion that this is an incorrect usage of social networks. How are you supposed to expand your circle of CONTACTS or “sphere of influence” if you limit yourself on the internet to only the people you know IRL? How are you supposed to learn about new people that might have similar interests or ideals if you deny them connection to you? What’s the point of being on a social site if you’re only going to get in touch with the same people you’re already in contact with? I think that if they had levels of acquaintance on these sites, a lot more people would be connected to each other, because the categories would make sense to them. You would be able to see at-a-glance what level each person had placed their contacts on, and make a better assessment of their actual interaction with each other.

Looking at it from the other direction… It’s not fair that someone that sends you a friends request out of the blue has the exact same status as someone you collaborate with or work with or highly respect or go out for drinks with or climb mountains and eat pancakes with. Both the random person and the IRL friend are marked down as “Friend”. There’s no meritocracy. Even with facebook‘s relationship qualifiers, that’s a SECONDARY trait. It’s like having everyone in your military with the rank of ‘Private’, and you have to go to each Private and ask them what their actual importance is in order to determine who out-ranks whom. No. It doesn’t work like that. You can tell from the bars or whatever emblem on their shoulders who’s running the show and who’s going to be digging the trenches.

In the absence of actual distinctions, I think the best approach to accepting/rejecting social site “friends” is innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around. It’s always a good thing when you can see the applicant’s friends list in order to tell who might know them that YOU know and whose judgement you trust. When I know certain people don’t like jerks, and those people are “friends” with someone, I’m more likely to take my ACTUAL friend’s word that this other person is cool. That would seem to go against what I was saying earlier, because what if my friend is using the same “innocent until proven guilty” style that I am? :) I would be accepting an untested “friend”. However, checks & balances will come into play. If the untested person actually interacts with the community, they’ll start getting “reviews” which will help you decide whether you want to keep them as a friend or not. Ultimately, the circle polices itself.

I was thinking about Kroosh’s “Friendiverse” yesterday, while I was watching Drew‘s live stream from PodCamp Philly. It’s a much more intimate format… giving personal, “hand-written” recommendations of places to go, people to see and things to do. I saw many people from MY Friendiverse on Drew’s stream yesterday… Kathryn, Eric, Jackson, Jonny, Steve, Grace, Charles… and ran into others in the text chat who were also watching the stream.

Ultimately, I’ve been inspired to focus more time & energy on the upper echelon of my own personal Friendiverse. In the game called “keeping up with the net”, it’s very easy to miss out on telling the people that matter to you how cool you think they are. :)

Bill Cammack • New York City • Freelance Video Editor • alum.mit.edu/www/billcammack