Quite simply, the plaintiffs offered a service and the defendants offered exposure in return, and the transaction occurred exactly as advertised. The defendants followed through on their end of the agreed-upon bargain. That the defendants ultimately profited more than the plaintiffs might have expected does not give the plaintiffs a right to change retroactively their clear, up-front agreement.

– U.S. District Judge John Koeltl, in his decision against the unpaid bloggers who sued the Huffington Post for retroactive payment despite the fact that their original agreement was to write for free

What? You already knew this? Then you were ahead of the U.S. judicial system, which had to spend the last year on a silly class-action suit brought by a former Huffington Post contributor.

Jonathan Tasini, who compared himself and other unpaid HuffPo writers to “modern-day slaves,” was demanding a third of the $315 million Arianna Huffington and her backers got when they sold the company to AOL last year. The logic: He helped build the site up, and, well …

Not really any more logic than that, really. Tasini and other contributors agreed to write for free from the get-go.

U.S. District Judge John Koeltl has a 24-page decision dismissing Tasini’s complaint with prejudice, and I’ve embedded it at the bottom of this post. But I’m not suggesting you read it. Here’s the common-sense essence:

No one forced the plaintiffs to give their work to The Huffington Post for publication and the plantiffs candidly admit that they did not expect compensation … Quite simply, the plaintiffs offered a service and the defendants offered exposure in return, and the transaction occurred exactly as advertised.

Any questions? Right. So here’s the Red Hot Chili Peppers:

huffington post blogging case

What gives?

With all due respect to Lewis, who is one of the greatest innovators in media, I left realizing that there are different ideas of what “social” can mean on the Web, and that not everyone knows where the gold lies. Putting the whole picture together, there are four different models for social that, despite sharing the same name, are completely different concepts.

• Social = Viral Hit
  For those on the marketing and advertising side especially, the word “social” often means that you or your client are jealous of someone else’s success. Viral hits are largely based on breakthrough creative, though great distribution is an often-forgotten second factor. Who wouldn’t want to be responsible for the next Old Spice guy? Of course, these kinds of hits are easy to ask for and hard to achieve. And if you do achieve it, you’ll need another viral hit to bring your audience back again.
  Verdict: Good luck!
• Social = 1,000,000 Fans
  
  Here, the theory goes that social means getting lots of fans, and then something magical is supposed to happen. Like the boys’ adventure with the “South Park” underpants gnomes, it usually ends up with a lot of time and money spent, a big collection achieved, and a big question mark over “what now?” It doesn’t matter how low your cost per fan was, if the value per fan is near-zero. It’s not the size of the fan base that matters — it’s what you do with it.
  Verdict: Bad strategy.
• Social = Comments
  Another concept of “social” is that it’s a medium for conversation. With programs like @ComcastCares, brands have used this approach to shape their brand images and reputations — and it has worked. On the publishing side, the Huffington Post and other publishers have succeeded in using social engagement to drive deep participation and connection among an inner circle of its audience. Hosting a conversation certainly builds a relationship. A “Like,” comment, or share from a user can all get you more exposure on the margin, but, as Lewis noted on our panel, the friends who come that way don’t stay very long and don’t come back much. They came for their friends, not for your Web site. That’s why, even though engagement strategies are great for your core audience, they won’t single-handedly drive the large, loyal audience we all crave.
  Verdict: Smart, but it’s not enough.
• Social = Lasting Relationship
  A lasting relationship with an audience is the holy grail of every brand online. In fact, it has made Amazon the most valuable e-commerce company on earth, and it’s made Disney and the NFL valuable over decades. But what some haven’t realized yet is that the most valuable mode of social is in keeping these relationships connected.

  Do you have any idea how valuable a “Like” is? Any seventh-grader goes all atwitter when his crush says, “I like you.” It’s permission to see someone more, get to know them better, and talk to them all the time — not just once, but every day. If you are doing it right, a “Like” or a “Follow” begins a two-way relationship: One where your audience is asking for programming from you every day, week and month; and giving you their interest data about what works and what doesn’t. With that relationship, you can choose what content you create, and when and how you share it. That relationship isn’t once-and-done — it’s ongoing.

  And data from our experience shows that it translates into a million visits a week from our fan base — almost one visit for every fan, not to mention dozens more impressions right in their home page, the Facebook news feed. Done right, social can already drive more traffic than search, making a new top venue to recruit, and more importantly, retain an audience.

  More and more, I talk to marketers and publishers who have hundreds of thousands or millions of fans and followers, and yet have no idea what to do with them. They haven’t realized that they have subscribers at the ready, waiting for great content and experiences — the currency of their relationship.

  Nor do they understand the tremendous value of those subscribers: If you give your friends what they are after, they’ll keep coming back for more, and they’ll bring their friends. This is exactly how companies like Groupon and Zynga have reinvented their categories and created businesses worth billions of dollars in the process.
  Verdict: There is nothing more powerful than a lasting relationship.

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of next-generation Web publisher Wetpaint, and author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

The Huffington Post co-founder, who sold his site to AOL a year ago, is working on another Web news start-up. But Lerer isn’t trying to replicate his old site. Instead, he’s trying to create a digital video news operation built to attract a generation of Web natives who watch Jon Stewart but not CNN or Fox News.

People who have heard Lerer pitch the start-up say he has been vague about the details but broad about his ambitions. Here’s what I know for now, which doesn’t include the project’s name:

• The site/service is a joint venture between Lerer’s Lerer Ventures and Bedrocket Media, the video start-up that Lerer invested in last year.
• Lerer is telling potential investors and employees that he’ll be actively involved in the project, along with former HuffPo CEO Eric Hippeau and Bedrocket’s Brian Bedol.
• The service, which will launch this summer in advance of the U.S. presidential elections, will use a mix of livestreaming video and taped reports, and a mix of professionally produced segments along with contributions from amateurs.
• While Bedrocket has landed four YouTube “channel” deals for its programming, the new venture won’t be confined to any particular platform. Lerer and company have been promoting the idea that the service will rely heavily on social media like Facebook and Twitter for distribution.
• The site/service has started hiring production/back-end staff but hasn’t brought in “on air” talent yet. When it does, it will likely look for relatively unknown reporters, not established/expensive TV folks.

There are plenty of other folks trying to figure out how bring TV-style news to the Web, including the TV people themselves. And Web sites that have their roots in “print” journalism are diving into video news, too. That formula usually involves positioning a couple reporters in front of a newsroom camera to discuss the day’s events (if you’d like to see me talk, for instance, I’ll be on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” show at 1 pm ET today). Interesting to see if Lerer and company can figure out a new take.

(Image courtesy of Shutterstock/Daboost)

Solve Media has an idea. The ad tech company will let you skip the “pre-roll” commercials before Web clips. But only after you’ve typed a branding message into a text box.

So, rather than watch an ad for Toyota’s RAV4 before you watch a video on AOL’s Huffington Post, you can now type in “no time to waste” and go right to the video. You can see it in action here, and there’s also an explainer video at the bottom of this post.

This may sound familiar. Solve Media employed the same mechanism — “type a branding phrase, and we’ll give you access to something” — a couple years ago, when it used it in place of captchas, the random text strings some sites use for security reasons.

Like that one, this gambit has conceptual logic working for it, especially for marketers — getting someone to type your brand’s name or campaign slogan, in return for something they value, seems like a good thing.

This one seems harder to sell to Web video watchers, though. The work/reward ratio seems off.

Yes, pre-rolls can be annoying, especially when the ad is long and the clip is short. But I’ve generally gotten pretty good at tuning out whenever they pop up. Asking me to lean forward and type in order to skip them — particularly when YouTube and Hulu often let me skip them with a single click — seems like a lot of work, when I could just zone out instead.

But maybe I’m particularly zen when it comes to ads. I don’t really mind most of them, anyway. Particularly when they help pay my bills.

Some of you seem more agitated by this sort of thing, so you tell me: Are you willing to type a marketing message in order to avoid watching a marketing message?

Solving the Pre-Roll Blues from Solve Media on Vimeo.

[Shutterstock/iQoncept]

Have you never heard of Starboard Value?

Me, either!

But the New York activist fund is readying to make a splash as soon as today, several sources said, if it follows through on the expected naming of an alternate board to challenge AOL.

Saturday is the official deadline to nominate directors to the board of AOL, also based in New York, which will have all eight up for reelection.

Sources said Starboard has talked to several Internet types, but that it has plans to put up a slate made up more of Wall Streeters to present at the company’s annual meeting later in the year.

In a filing last week, Starboard said it had been in discussions with AOL management about its concerns, so it is certainly possible the investor and the company could come to some agreement over board seats and strategic direction before it gets Yahoo-ugly.

That would make it a kind of an East Coast proxy battle version of what’s been going on over at Yahoo and its tussle with Third Point’s Daniel Loeb. He recently followed through on long-expressed unhappiness with the Silicon Valley Internet giant, and named a slate of directors — including well-known media exec Jeff Zucker — to replace current ones there.

The same kind of thing has been in the works at Starboard, which sent a letter in late December to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, saying his much-touted strategy around content was not a good one for investors.

Like Loeb at Yahoo, Starboard is one of AOL’s largest shareholders, with a stake of just over five percent.

The letter signaled an increasing impatience with the pace of Armstrong’s turnaround efforts, which are still in turnaround. Meanwhile, AOL’s stock has rebounded from last summer’s lows of near $10 a share.

The stock is up more than 22 percent this year, to $18.44. But that’s still down almost 20 percent from when AOL spun off from Time Warner and went public in late 2009.

The grumpy (and opportunistic) Starboard entered the picture late last year.

According to The Wall Street Journal:

“Starboard, which focuses mainly on small-cap companies, was spun off from Cowen Group Inc.’s Ramius Capital LLC in March. In October, the fund successfully waged a proxy fight against hair-salon chain owner Regis Corp. when three of its director nominees were elected to Regis’s board. AOL, which was spun off from Time Warner Inc. in 2009 after a failed merger, is its most high-profile target yet.”

One of the investment fund’s bugaboos is Patch, the local news network that AOL has sunk a lot of dough into. Also under fire is Armstrong’s content efforts and the pace of its display advertising sales, including the high-profile acquisition of the Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

I have emails into all the bigs at AOL and Starboard, so we’ll see who calls back first, if at all.

It’s not a big surprise that the giant and perpetual-motion online news site would do this.

After all, in the new age of media, newspaper Web sites are turning more toward streaming and on-demand video, attempting to take text-driven reporting and present it in rich, feed-it-to-me news packages.

But whether consumers want to tune in on schedule or call up news videos when they feel like watching is still up for debate.

In the HuffPost’s case, the video will be streamed to its flagship site, as well as to other AOL Web sites.

Jeff Bercovici of Forbes had the scoop on this a couple weeks ago, laying out Arianna Huffington’s ambitions to meet the increasing demand — at least, on the part of advertisers — for good video content.

Ambitious is probably the right word, since the Huffington Post and AOL plan to stream 12 hours a day, five days a week, with eight hours of content produced in New York and the rest out of Los Angeles.

Eventually, Huffington Post founding editor Roy Sekoff said that the network is aiming to reach 16 hours a day of live daily programming. With 2012 elections looming, the network will also feature lots of political reporters from Washington, he added.

The plan will also be costly — with the AOL media unit putting a hundred employees behind the streaming video effort, culling from the current HuffPost-AOL editorial staff of 320, as well as new hires with video-specific skills.

Will it work?

There’s little question that Web video viewing is on the rise. According to a 2011 Nielsen report, U.S. consumers now spend an average of four hours and 20 minutes per month watching video on the Web, an hour and 10 minutes more than the amount they watched in early 2010.

But Huffington and Sekoff believe that, despite the fact the HuffPost is mirroring the cable TV model and a lot of the programming will be live, consumers still aren’t all that interested in watching on a set schedule.

What Huffington Post is doing is not unlike what the Wall Street Journal Digital Network has been building over the last few years.

(Full disclosure: The WSJ, for those who aren’t aware, is owned by News Corp.’s Dow Jones, which also owns this Web site. I also previously worked at the WSJ’s video unit.)

Like WSJ’s video product, HuffPo will offer on-demand clips in addition to the live-streaming, deploying in-house staff as talent, plus Patch local reporters and sources in from the field using Skype video. It will also distribute the news video content on mobile phones and tablets.

The New York Times has also gotten into the streaming video game with its latest effort, Business Day Live, which launched yesterday.

Sekoff dismissed the idea that HuffPost was mimicking other news organizations, or even cable.

“No offense to the WSJ, but I think we got more comments this month than the WSJ did last year,” Sekoff said, referencing the more than six million comments on the main HuffPost site in January alone. “People don’t want to be talked to when they get their news; they want to converse with.”

And he said that HuffPost has no plans to become a cable TV network, although they’re open to potentially sharing the video content with interested networks. In terms of revenue generation, Huffington Post currently doesn’t have advertisers committed to the streaming network, but is seeking a handful of partners for launch.

Right now, there are no plans for a set schedule of programing, said Sekoff, because he feels that Web video consumers ultimately don’t care when the video is on.

“People don’t come home from work and say, ‘Oh it’s 9 pm, I think I’ll watch sports on the Web now,’” he said. “We just don’t think it’s there yet.”

Huffington concurred and said her own casual Internet video-watching habits — which include bouts of “Saturday Night Live,” Comedy Central and “The Good Wife” — reflect this.

“We don’t think Web video is about appointment-watching.” she said. “But just because people are watching Web video one way, doesn’t mean it’s the end of other kinds of consumption.”

In a deal that was struck some time ago and is close to fruition, BermanBraun is prepping three major Web properties for AOL that will focus on pets, men and, interestingly, the weather.

After I inquired, AOL confirmed that the Hollywood production company — headed by former Yahoo and ABC exec Lloyd Braun and former Paramount exec Gail Berman — will debut the trio of sites around March. The new sites will use rich features and a slick design to attract premium advertisers.

The pair will jointly sell the advertising, but the sites themselves will be operated by BermanBraun in cooperation with AOL’s media unit, the Huffington Post Media Group. The deal was struck in late 2010, before AOL bought the Huffington Post for $300 million in January of this year.

While AOL has partnered with many outside sites, this will be the most prominent one since that acquisition.

Since then, much of the new content development on AOL has been aimed at drastically increasing the number of sites with that brand. There have been more than two dozen of those since March.

In this case, the Huffington Post Media Group, run by Arianna Huffington, has typically either created new topic sites or relaunched old AOL ones.

This week, for example, the company rejiggered AOL TV as HuffPost TV, as well as announcing El Huffington Post, an international Spanish-language version of the Huffington Post that will debut in early 2012, in partnership with El País.

The BermanBraun effort, though, is more independent and large-scale. It will feature extensive video and heavy use of imagery. Huffington Post will be involved in editorial selection, and has been working closely with the firm on incorporating social elements.

“It’s been a very dynamic and collaborative partnership — we’ve worked together on everything from design to picking the editors,” said Roy Sekoff, founding editor of the Huffington Post Media Group, about the arrangement. “BermanBraun brings a distinctive approach to their sites, and we’ve helped infuse that with our focus on real-time, social, and building community.”

Sekoff declined to give more details, such as the names of the sites. (They won’t be HuffPost Pets, HuffPost Weather and HuffPost Dudes, though!)

Pets could be a strong category if done in a new way, especially if designed with new tablet devices in mind. And weather, to my mind, is a sleeper category if reimagined freshly.

BermanBraun — which also develops television shows and movies — has a lot of experience in the online content arena. It has previously created Web sites for Microsoft’s MSN unit, including the high-profile celebrity site Wonderwall.

It will be interesting to see how the collaboration turns out. In the meantime, here’s my favorite weather song — Lena Horne rules! — to enjoy until the three sites launch:

Two of the more interesting online media properties are apparently joining up for a year-end online idea festival.

The AOL-owned Huffington Post, and TED, the massive conference organization and online site dedicated to its offerings, will jointly feature 18 of the best onstage speeches from TED’s excellent year-round global events.

The idea-thon will be called “Best of TED 2011: A Countdown of 18 Groundbreaking Ideas to Reshape the World in 2012.” A post on the Huffington Post site noted that it will feature the popular TEDTalks and combine them with “new blog posts written by the people who delivered them, examining how their ideas were impacted by being shared with a global audience.”

Out of a total of 300 possible choices, the number of speeches has been narrowed down to 18, because TEDTalks are limited to no more than 18 minutes. The talks range over a wide array of topic areas, including science, art, music, tech and more.

In an interview today, HuffPost majordomo Arianna Huffington said that the aim was to spur thinking around big problems the world faces.

“We are trying to be people to rethink everything in a super engaging way,” she said. “That is what TED is famous for and we wanted to shed a lot of light on it.”

Here’s today’s, with game developer Kevin Slavin on “How Algorithms Shape Our World”:

Visible Measures says it has attracted more than 1 million views since last night. I can tell you with almost clinical precision that his debate gaffe occurred around 10:18 pm Eastern time, because it was all over Twitter as soon as it left — or didn’t leave — his mouth.

Still, it’s not Perry’s biggest Web video hit (yet). Visible Measures reminds us that his first big campaign ad racked up more than 2 million views earlier this fall.

Meanwhile, for ad/tech/biz types: Note that the moment occurred on CNN’s broadcast, but YouTube attributes the bulk of the views to Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed, which got the clip up with alacrity. [Ugh. As Ethan Mandel notes, this was actually CNBC's broadcast -- easy enough to spot had I been paying attention -- and now CNBC has removed this particular version. Still easy enough to find on YouTube, though.]

Saul Hansell, the prominent former New York Times tech reporter who went to AOL several years ago to head one of its content efforts called Seed, will leave the company to become an entrepreneur in residence at Betaworks.

The move to the New York venture firm is the right one now, said Hansell in an interview today.

“I have been watching people go starts thing for a long time and now I want to go start things,” he said. “I’ve got some ideas around news that I want to explore.”

Hansell, in a blog post, did try to not paint the move as as anti-AOL one:

“I know my friends in the technology press well enough to suspect some of them will see my move as part of a broader trend at AOL. I’m not sure the easy take is the right one. Based on my experience, I am more bullish on [AOL CEO] Tim Armstrong’s clear vision of a company built from the ground up for online journalism and the potential of AOL’s assets to achieve that vision.”

Hansell joined AOL the day after it split from Time Warner to run what he jokingly calls the “free-range, organic content farm” of Seed and has remained through its many iterations, including the purchase of the Huffington Post.

He is currently the “Big News” editor in that unit, which centers around topics.

Here’s Hansell’s blog post on the move:

Heading into the workshop.

Two years ago, when I explained to my children why I left the New York Times, one of the greatest spots ever to be a reporter and writer, I told them that I wanted to be an inventor. Since then, I’ve had the thrilling experience of being part of AOL, which is doing more than nearly anyone else to rethink the way that news is gathered, presented and paid for.

Now it’s time to strike out on my own and seek my fortune as an inventor. I’ve left AOL, and Monday I started as an entrepreneur in residence at Betaworks. If you’re not familiar with it, Betaworks has started and invested in a number of companies that are on the vanguard of real-time social experiences — several of which relate to news and publishing — including Bit.ly, ChartBeat, TweetDeck, and News.Me. It’s run by John Bortwick, whom I first met in 1997 when he sold his startup, Total New York, to America Online. We’ve become friends, and I couldn’t think of a more fertile environment in which to germinate a new idea than the bustle of creativity bursting out of the Betaworks loft in the meat packing district.

I know my friends in the technology press well enough to suspect some of them will see my move as part of a broader trend at AOL. I’m not sure the easy take is the right one. Based on my experience, I am more bullish on Tim Armstrong’s clear vision of a company built from the ground up for online journalism and the potential of AOL’s assets to achieve that vision. At AOL, I’ve had the pleasure of working with some of the smartest and most dedicated journalists, engineers and product executives I’ve ever met. And the brilliant acquisition of the Huffington Post brought in many more people who have been outpacing the industry through journalistic innovation.

I will always be grateful to Tim for giving me the chance to prove that I had more to contribute to a journalistic organization than simply articles and to Arianna for inviting me to join the HuffPost team. And I’m in debt to so many who offered so much advice –some of which I ignored to my own detriment — on the nuances of technology, product design, PowerPoint, and the ways of big companies. Yet as AOL continues to refine its organization, it became clear that this was the time for me to try my hand at starting a company.

It’s too soon to say much about what I’m doing. But I think there is a lot left to invent around both how to present news to people that takes advantage of the technology available today.

I expect you’ll see a lot more soon.

Important points from our chat:

• AOL’s domestic display-ad sales — a key metric for the company — were up 14 percent, but those numbers include new revenue from the Huffington Post and TechCrunch, both purchased in the last year. If you stripped those acquisitions out, domestic display would be up 4 percent — down from 6 percent last quarter.
• AOL’s traffic, meanwhile, which includes Huffington Post and TechCrunch, has flatlined. Armstrong says that’s in part because his access business is declining (once people stop paying for AOL, they visit less often) and, in part, because of integration issues. But he predicts that number will tick up again.
• Asked to identify AOL’s key competitor, Armstrong passed, and instead offered “the usual suspects”: Yahoo, Google and Facebook.
• What’s up with Yahoo? I expected some squirming from Armstrong on this one, and if you watch the video, you’ll see he never denies that he has talked to Yahoo about some kind of deal, or bankers, or whatever. But he also insists that he wants to keep the company independent, which is as close to a denial as we’re going to get.

Here’s my quickly edited transcript of that discussion (I’ve paraphrased my questions, but quoted his answers), which kicks in around the 3:35 mark.

Me: So what’s going on with Yahoo? Are you talking to them?

Armstrong: “… when I think about our company and where our future is, and those things, it’s really as an independent entity, and being very focused on our core strategy.”

Me: Ah. So you want to be a standalone company, and you don’t want to merge with Yahoo. Right?

Armstrong: “From our results today, and from what you’ve heard me say publicly, and what we’re focused on, the answer is yes.”

Wall Street seems to share Armstrong’s enthusiasm, at least for today: Shares are up 11 percent in morning trading.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111102/exclusive-aols-tim-armstrong-says-he-doesnt-want-a-yahoo-deal-video/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111102/aol-beats-estimates-posts-another-sales-ad-increase/ http://allthingsd.com/20111102/aol-beats-estimates-posts-another-sales-ad-increase/#comments Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:05:57 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=139301 Here’s a first look at AOL Q3 earnings: Revenue of $532 million and an earnings loss of $0.02 per share. Wall Street estimates for the company tend to be all over the map, but Yahoo Finance thinks the consensus was $524 million and a loss of $0.06 per share.

But Wall Street will quickly scrutinize the breakdown of CEO Tim Armstrong’s sales performance. Last quarter, the company posted a 5 percent ad bump, but investors hated the details: Much of the growth was coming from the company’s low-margin network business, in addition to gains from its HuffPo and TechCrunch acquisitions.

What Wall Street really wants to see (or at least what it wanted to see last quarter) is organic growth in the company’s core display business, and improving earnings.

Overall, AOL’s ad sales are up 8 percent, and display is 15 percent. Investors might raise an eyebrow over the fact that domestic display growth of 14 percent is a sequential decline from last quarter’s 16 percent rise, though. And bear in mind that these numbers include both TechCrunch and Huffington Post boosts. Also worrisome — a mere 1 percent increase in the company’s owned and operated properties — again, that’s after accounting for those two big acquisitions. (Click image to enlarge.)

 

Another flag for AOL: Even though it has added TechCrunch and the Huffington Post over the last year, traffic to AOL’s own sites has barely budged: A year ago, AOL attracted 106 million monthly unique visitors to its sites; this year, the total only moved up to 107 million.

AOL earnings call starts at 8 am ET, and beyond this morning’s release, investors will also want to hear what Armstrong is seeing in the ad market in general. Until recently, digital ads have been booming for just about everyone except for AOL and Yahoo, but recently we’ve heard about softness/slower growth making its way to the Web, too. (Though no sign of that from Google.)

And, of course, Wall Street will also want to see if Armstrong has anything to say about eternal speculation that he wants to link up with Yahoo itself.

 

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111102/aol-beats-estimates-posts-another-sales-ad-increase/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111028/youtube-and-hollywood-finally-link-up-and-come-clean/ http://allthingsd.com/20111028/youtube-and-hollywood-finally-link-up-and-come-clean/#comments Sat, 29 Oct 2011 01:00:23 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=137878 YouTube and Hollywood, which have been circling each other for years, are finally getting together.

But instead of moving movies and TV shows to the world’s biggest Web site, they’re trying something different: Google is handing out more than $100 million to dozens of partners to create new “channels.”

The idea is to make “professional” content that advertisers will pay a premium to be near, instead of the grab bag of videos that dominate the site and that often sell at very low prices.

This isn’t news, of course: YouTube reps have been holding meetings and auditions for most of the year, led by former Netflix executive Robert Kyncl. And we’ve known about the deal terms, and many of the partners, for some time.

But now the site is finally talking about them publicly and promising that it will start unveiling some of the new programming next month. Some of the channels — each of which will have a couple hours of original programming per week — will feature people you’ve heard of, like Madonna, Jay-Z,  Ashton Kutcher and “Modern Family” star Sofia Vergara.

But the channels aren’t all premised around the idea of celebrities and Hollywood per se — just the idea that someone with some idea of how to make good stuff will start making stuff specifically for the site.

For instance, BedRocket Properties, the video start-up backed by the Huffington Post’s Ken Lerer and run by cable TV veteran Brian Bedol, will do four channels, including a soccer-themed channel in conjunction with Major League Soccer, and an action sports channel produced along with Wasserman Media Group.

Another example: IGN, the videogame Web site being spun off by News Corp., will produce a game-themed channel along with the Shine Group, the TV production house recently purchased by News Corp. (News Corp. also owns this Web site).

It’s worth noting that some of the channels will be run by people who are well-versed in creating Web video — and video for YouTube in particular. Machinima, for instance, which also specializes in game-themed stuff, is already one of YouTube’s most prolific partners, and essentially runs a network within YouTube’s network.

Maker Studios, which is producing three channels, is another outfit that already specializes in YouTube. And Demand Media went public this year, in part because it had figured out the art of cranking out Web videos very, very, quickly, at very, very low prices.

YouTube may not be releasing all of the channels and partners today, perhaps because it doesn’t actually have all of its deals signed yet. And at least one partner told me that some of the mechanics of the deals, like control of ad sales, had yet to be worked out.

That’s hard to imagine, given the amount of time that YouTube has been at this. But it’s also hard to imagine why you’d announce a big consumer-focused deal at the end of a Friday. So, who knows.

We do know the general outlines of the deals, though: Google will advance most of the creators up to $5 million, and in return will get commitments to produce a couple hours of programming a week for the channel. Once the programmers have earned back their advance from YouTube, they’ll split ad revenue with the site. The programming will be exclusive to YouTube for at least the first year of the three-year deals.

What we don’t know is how this stuff will actually work: $5 million won’t go very far if the partners use traditional TV and film budgets, so many of the partners are going to have to supplement that money with investments of their own — and they’re going to have to work on a tighter budget. And just because there’s a bit of Hollywood shine associated with this stuff doesn’t mean that people will actually watch — or, most crucially, that advertisers will pay up.

Google may also try other methods to get high-end video stuff. The company made a stab at Hulu when that video site was on the block. And it has indicated that it’s interested in licensing some content in international markets, where it thinks it can get more bang for its buck.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111028/youtube-and-hollywood-finally-link-up-and-come-clean/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20111028/viral-video-occupy-wall-street-headline-making/ http://allthingsd.com/20111028/viral-video-occupy-wall-street-headline-making/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 07:58:09 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=137638

This is one of the funnier takes on Occupy Wall Street, looking at how various news organizations come up with headlines about the movement.

Funniest? The Huffington Post.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111028/viral-video-occupy-wall-street-headline-making/feed/ 0