The Economics of Aggregation - Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBloggers

I had a conversation with a Web designer whose work I very much respect.

After we got past the pleasantries, she shared an emotion with me that I haven't heard before about Video Aggregation - anger.

Real, honest and deep seated anger.

She was angry most broadly about what she called "attribution," but I think really at the root of that word was the question of ownership and control.

I want to share with you her questions, and my answers, and why - in hindsight - they reflect a larger unsolved issue around Web content and the so-called ecosystem that is evolving.

The first question around attribution raised the issue of who is the 'owner' of the link to content. If I post a video on YouTube today, and allow it to be embedded, I'm sending it out into the wild. And the person who grabs an embed code, and places it on a contextual page is adding 'value' by adding both traffic and (we presume) related content. So who are they? Are they publishers? Are they 'remixers'? At what point is the maker compensated and is the publisher compensated?

The current state of play says that big owners of content collections have some leverage in the world, but individual makers - unless their content goes viral - don't have much control over where their material goes. Currently, the choice is binary. Share, or don't share. But clearly that's not a great set of choices. Creative Commons has addressed this with a series of flavors of licenses; share and share alike, non-commercial, and others. Currently, Magnify.net supports those flavors for video that is posted to our service. But the sharing sites don't support flavors of licenses, and they don't necessarily apply well to video in their current form.

Clearly, there needs to be clarity around who is a "maker," who is a "submitter," who is a "Sharer or Re-Poster," and around the various roles emerging in the sharing environment. Without proper attribution there's not going to be fair sharing of revenue as it emerges. So this isn't an inconsequential question.

When I tried to answer this question my response was that the issues around attribution were much like the questions facing "mash-ups" in the music world - and in fact, just as complex. When a musical artist creates new work out of elements of existing work, how is the value attributed? Similarly, when someone who's created a strong and engaged community around, say, knitting, finds a single video that a maker has created and brings that to The Knitting Channel, how is the value ascribed? Clearly the channel creator has added value by creating community, but the video maker has a piece of value as well.

Further complicating this is the fact that different makers have different goals and objectives. An author may want to give away video to sell books, a consumer goods company may want to share tips and techniques around ways to use their products, but a filmmaker whose work 'is' digital media is looking for a way to earn a living making media - a different goal with different near term objectives.

The media folks have tended to say, "We'll sort it out later." If you're a big media company that's putting content on YouTube, you can afford to continue to benefit from your current income stream of cable TV franchise fees and ads or magazine subscriptions and ads (even if both of those businesses face challenges) and say, we'll continue to explore Web video and sort out revenue once there's some clarity around distribution.

But for smaller makers, and independent content creators, the idea that content can move around without compensation or attribution isn't a philosophical argument, it's trying to sort out a livelihood. It isn't theoretical - it is essential.

So, let's start to think about Sharing 2.0, and ask these questions:

What are the things a content owner cares about?

Visibility (mass distribution)

Control (ability to approve / reject uses)

Revenue (either payment or revenue share)

If it's a revenue share, is it based on pages, ads sold, traffic, or another metric?

Revenue share (how do copyright owners want to share with aggregators /publishers)?

While there are changes in the market that impact us all, like the transition from DRM to a sharing ecosystem, conceiving and implementing controls for creators so that the right mix of exposure and attribution that leads to control and revenue is going to be a conversation that is going to include lots of parties. It's a conversation that is worth starting now.

Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO and Co-Founder of Magnify.net - a fast-growing video publishing platform that powers more than 50,000 web sites, media companies, and content entrepreneurs to aggregate and curate web video from a wide variety of web sources. Currently Magnify.net publishes over 50,000 channels of Curated-Consumer Video, and is working closely with a wide variety of media makers, communities, and publishers in evolving their content offerings to include content created by, sorted and reviewed by community members. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur, Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, and well known innovator in the field of user-generated media production. Rosenbaum Directed and Executive Produced the critically acclaimed 7 Days In September, and his MTV Series Unfiltered is widely regarding as the first commercial use of Consumer Generated Video in US mass media. Steve can be contacted at steve@magnify.net Follow Steve Rosenbaum on Twitter: www.twitter.com/magnify

Read all Steve’s MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Steve Rosenbaum - MediaBizBloggers.