It used to take NBC a very long time to get clips from “Saturday Night Live” on the Internet, which is the whole reason that “Lazy Sunday” became a YouTube sensation.*

Fast-forward to today, where NBC and its social media helpers distribute SNL clips in the wee hours of Sunday night, just as soon as the show wraps up. Even more advanced: Now NBC has started showing clips of bits that never made it to TV, period.

Here’s a couple of sketches that never aired on last week’s season finale. But you can see them because they made it to the dress rehearsal, which the show tapes in its entirety.

I think the stand-up satire is pretty great (loved the Bears fan and the Denis Leary guy, in particular). Media omnivore Jason Hirschhorn loved the Jay Pharoah thing.

And that’s what’s great about SNL on the Web in general — it lets everyone pick and choose their favorite bits, Chinese-menu style, and skip the many parts they don’t want to watch. Adding in stuff that was good enough to get staged but not good enough to make the 90-minute broadcast can only be a good thing. If you’re a certain kind of SNL fan, you’ll even get a kick out of dress rehearsal versions of stuff that did air.

I don’t know how long SNL has been putting up un-aired bits on the Web — looks like for all of the past season, at the very least. Perhaps NBC PR will get back to me before the holiday weekend with a more accurate date. But regardless of when they started, I hope they keep it up.

*Which you could argue is one of the reasons Google ended up buying the company for $1.6 billion. Which led to NBC and Fox creating Hulu as an anti-Google/YouTube hedge.

So it’s a good time to get some perspective on what he learned during the experience, and how he deals with the Web at his newish job at Turner’s TBS.

In some ways, O’Brien told fellow Time Warner employee Piers Morgan at the cable industry’s annual convention yesterday, things haven’t changed that much: In an ideal world, he’d like people to watch his show live, when it airs.

But he also knows it doesn’t work that way, at all. And he’s okay with that, and he’s learned to embrace YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.:

When I got started in the business in ’93, the obsesssion was: Never give anything away. Don’t tell anybody … you want it to be a surprise when they watch the show. You want to tease them, but get them to watch the show.

And what we have found is true is that this is a different generation. It works differently now. You can show them exactly what Will Ferrell did [on O'Brien's show], and get it out there, so there’s no “surprise” …

The days of, “I only want people to experience me at 11, on TBS” — those days are over. The audience is too fragmented, they’re too distracted, and a whole generation is growing up that doesn’t watch television that way.

You can watch the entire 22-minute interview, which moves along quite quickly, below. Thanks to the NCTA for the video.

First, a successive series of ups: The app scored tens of millions of users via Facebook over a period of no longer than a month and soared to the top of the iTunes App Store.

Then, a few downers. Members of the press (including yours truly) started sniffing around after Socialcam (and rival app Viddy) rose so high up in the ranks in such a short time. Socialcam’s viral growth was due — in part, at least — to successfully gaming the system by incorporating YouTube videos designed to spread like wildfire.

I posed the question then: Now that Socialcam has millions of Web video users and at least a few million app installs, how will the company keep those users around?

The team’s answer is starting to trickle out. As TechCrunch reported earlier, Socialcam released a new design to it Web interface Tuesday morning, an update focused squarely on the social experience. It features everything you’d expect in a modern social Web interface: Friends-to-follow suggestions, user popularity leaderboards and recent friend activity.

But make no mistake: This is more than just a tacking on of better social features.

Think of it this way: With Socialcam’s initial Open Graph integration, Web traffic flooded into the Web app. Yes, that drove installs on the mobile phone, but what Socialcam realized is that it needed to keep its Web experience in top shape to keep its users coming back. That’s entirely unlike Instagram, the photo-sharing app to which Socialcam is compared almost ad nauseum.

“Ultimately, Instagram had an app-focused strategy,” Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel told me in a telephone interview. “Instagram was trying to get people who were using other photo apps to use their app.”

Why? It’s because photos are different; we “consume” them easily with our phones, requiring no more than a flick of the thumb to scroll through scores of snapshots. And if you nail the mobile app like Instagram did, you don’t need to worry about the Web interface (which Instagram, for the most part, clearly ignores).

Video, on the other hand, is a different animal entirely. We’re used to watching video via the Web interface, not our mobile devices. Over the seven-year rise of YouTube, Google has trained us in our streaming video viewing habits.

So as Seibel sees it, the challenge for Socialcam isn’t to compete against other mobile social video apps. It’s to compete against the Web.

“This is really a social video and mobile video vs. YouTube narrative,” Seibel said. “Theoretically, YouTube owns this space. But as our phones have grown into powerful devices for capturing video, YouTube has done virtually nothing to keep up.”

“We’re the first ones to attack YouTube’s flanks,” Seibel said.

Ground zero was getting the user base. Whether or not you agree with Socialcam’s user acquisition strategy is another matter entirely. The first step after that, according to Seibel, is nailing your Web experience — hence Tuesday’s timely update.

And it’s only after mastering the Web that apps like Socialcam can convert its users to a mobile-centric video world. If we enjoy watching mobile videos through our Web browser, Seibel hopes that will inspire us to start shooting our own. After enough of us do that, perhaps they’ll slowly transition to the mobile app.

It’s rather ironic that Socialcam seeded old YouTube videos in its plan to lure us away from YouTube and into fresh, user-generated content. But I guess they had to start somewhere.

But here it is: See, Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell are older, healthier, and they go to Broadway shows, not movie matinees. But they’re still rapping about Rachel McAdams.

The best line, of course, is Samberg’s shout-out to Google — a reminder that he’s still waiting for a “fxxxing YouTube check” for the first “Lazy Sunday,” which NBC doesn’t allow on the video site anymore.

But Samberg’s other viral videos are all proudly displayed on a YouTube channel. And while the clip helped build YouTube into a powerhouse that sold to Google for $1.6 billion, it also helped revive SNL and build Samberg’s career. So everybody did just fine.

And here’s the original (which on NBC’s SNL page, at least, came bundled with an ad for… “Sister Act”).

And some new numbers from Nielsen that chronicle the rise of “AppNation” on Android and iOS between March 2011 and March 2012 back up that notion. The study shows the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped from 32 apps to 41, and growth in time spent on app usage outpacing the growth in mobile Web usage on smartphones by a hefty margin.

And while Nielsen’s measure of the top five apps — Facebook, YouTube, Android Market, Google Search and Gmail — remained constant, the rest of the top 50 was more of an open playing field, with more than 20 percent of the remaining spots entering as new players, and plenty of maneuvering going on.

Data courtesy Nielsen

There’s a popular maxim in Silicon Valley: Find your user base and the revenues will come later.

For a while, it seemed to be the easiest way for a founder to explain his or her way out of a proper business model. But with Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of the entirely revenue-free Instagram, that adage now carries more weight than ever.

Enter Viddy and Socialcam, two of the hottest start-up apps, both of which have the buzz of being the “Instagram for video.” The pair have exploded in popularity over the past few months, with each garnering user bases in the tens of millions seemingly overnight.

But the growth of one of these apps is not like the other.

Using a combination of fortunate timing, Facebook’s Open Graph influence and a new way of playing the system, Socialcam has effectively gamed Facebook, YouTube and the App Store to keep a strong grip on that ever-so-valuable user base. In the short term, at least, the three-man Socialcam start-up team has discovered a method to beat the 20-plus person outfit that is Viddy.

The method is so effective that Socialcam skyrocketed from around 1.4 million monthly active Facebook users to a whopping 40 million in a span of little more than two weeks. Socialcam surpassed Viddy in the Facebook app rankings last week, and currently sits fat atop Apple’s powerful App Store as one of the most downloaded free applications.

Some have started picking up on Socialcam’s tactics. Threads arose on Quora and Hacker News questioning the validity of the app’s growth, and TheNextWeb picked some of this apart on Thursday.

But there’s far more to it.

History

The concept of social video has been simmering for some time. Viddy was founded in December of 2010, while competitors like Mobli, Klip and Socialcam came along at various points during 2011.

But it was only over the past few months that the mobile social video concept began to boil. Socialcam hit the three million user mark in December. The Instagram acquisition announcement hit the web on April 9th. Two days later, Viddy hit 4 million users.

At some point on April 24, social video apps exploded, and it suddenly became clearer that Viddy and Socialcam were leaving all of their competitors behind.

Web view traffic to Socialcam through Facebook skyrocketed from around 10 million monthly active users to an astounding 40 million MAUs over a period of two weeks. Viddy jumped from around eight million MAUs to upwards of 36 million over that same period.

It was as if someone had flipped on the awesome traffic switch.

What Happened That Fateful Day in April?

What isn’t clear is just who or what flipped that switch. But I’m hearing many different theories.

Theory No. 1: Socialcam received its Facebook Open Graph integration around this time, thus increasing the app’s visibility in users’ Timelines. But Viddy’s Open Graph integration had already occurred on March 12, more than a month previously, at South by Southwest, and both apps received immense boosts in traffic during that same time period.

It’s possible that Socialcam’s Open Graph jumpstart fueled Viddy’s growth by mere virtue of being another social video app. Or perhaps it was the announcement that Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, Shakira and Jay-Z would back Viddy financially, the news of which occurred two days before Socialcam’s Open Graph integration.

Theory No. 2: A more conspiracy-like theory in which Facebook itself made changes to its News Feed in favor of the “Watch” action for social videos on the whole.

Consider this: When the once-popular Facebook social reading apps like the Guardian and Washington Post Social Reader recently started tanking in their monthly active user ratings, Ryan Kellett, a Washington Post employee, confirmed to TechCrunch that it was indeed changes in Facebook’s News Feed that led to Social Reader’s decline. It’s feasible, then, to think that Facebook could tweak things in the other direction, in order to favor video apps.

And, indeed, SocialCam, Klip, YouTube, Viddy and DailyMotion all saw spikes in Facebook traffic on April 24 — some more than others — with Mobli’s traffic following suit shortly thereafter.

Facebook declined to comment to AllThingsD on the near instantaneous rise on April 24, although it did shrug off the date in question to the New York Times: “The popularity of videos and other user-generated content on Facebook is not new, so it’s no surprise that social video apps are growing as friends share with each other and as more developers experiment with this type of content on Facebook.”

In a tweet on Saturday, TechCrunch writer Josh Constine noted that the sudden burst of growth on April 24 was due to a reporting error from Facebook to third-party app tracking site AppData. That also seems reasonable, although doesn’t fully explain the sudden traffic explosion that occurred over that two- to three-week period.

Whatever actually happened, Socialcam saw the chance to seize its moment.

Gaming Facebook

After receiving the boost, Socialcam’s founders discovered the perfect way of keeping that veritable fire hose of Facebook Web traffic pouring in.

According to multiple sources, it was around this time Socialcam began scraping video content from Vevo and YouTube to add to its own network of users, which essentially amounts to ripping content directly from other services.

As you might imagine, it’s not a welcome practice.

Then, sources said, Socialcam uploaded that video content to its own servers, where it began distributing it via different dummy accounts on the Socialcam network. There’s a slew of “YouTube Popular” accounts doing much of the distribution, along with others.

So, in effect, when a Socialcam user on a mobile device clicked on what he thought was a Socialcam video, he was taken into SocialCam’s Custom player, where the ripped YouTube video was played from Socialcam’s servers.

Herein lies the cleverness of the plan: Scraping and ripping stripped each video of its YouTube wrapping, or in the case of Vevo, its pre-roll advertising. So initially, users weren’t even aware they were watching YouTube videos. Socialcam systematically targeted a number of the most viral videos uploaded YouTube in the past four to five years, said sources, aiming to harness that viral success and bolster Socialcam’s network.

Why go to this trouble, especially since it’s against the terms of service to rip off the YouTube APIs? That risks sullying a relationship with a large and powerful online content powerhouse. Embedding the YouTube code within a Socialcam video instead of ripping YouTube’s content would comply with YouTube’s ToS. It’s also potential fodder to get its app booted from Facebook’s platform.

When asked if Socialcam was ripping YouTube videos, YouTube was cagey, only telling me this:

“While we don’t comment on individual cases, however, we take any violation of our open API’s Terms of Service seriously and take action against known abusers,” a spokesperson for YouTube told me.

A Facebook spokesperson concurred: “If it comes to our attention that an app is violating our policies, we will take action. We have no further details to share at this time.”

Vevo declined my request for comment.

Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel responded: “Socialcam has weekly and often daily interaction with the developer relations teams at both Facebook and Youtube. To the best of our knowledge, we are not violating the terms of service of either company.”

But what apparently happened, said sources, was that Socialcam got caught scraping and was told to knock it off. So to continue with its plan but stay compliant with Facebook and YouTube Terms of Service policies, Socialcam then began embedding the YouTube videos into Socialcam posts, effectively doing the same thing as before, only with the YouTube branding in place.

As of last week, nearly every top trending video on Socialcam’s site was a YouTube video.

Combine the viral nature of those YouTube videos with Facebook’s traffic-driving Open Graph, and you’ve got a recipe for success. If an app is integrated into Open Graph like Socialcam and Viddy are, using those apps publishes activity to three sections of Facebook: Timeline, Ticker and the News Feed. With every click, each user would broadcast the videos they had just watched, and that traffic fed on itself.

Despite the fact that social video on the whole received early initial traffic boosts by some yet-to-be-pinpointed variable, Socialcam was able to retain that traffic through proliferating YouTube videos throughout Facebook.

In a way, the guys behind Socialcam are brilliant, cracking a method of using YouTube and Facebook together to extend the app’s reach in a matter of weeks.

And it worked: The app still sits atop the App Store, using its Facebook viral success to boost download numbers immensely. It has soared beyond Viddy and other similar apps, most of which have been around much longer than Socialcam has.

Is All Fair in Apps and War?

And here’s the thing: Aside from the alleged initial screen-scraping, doing what Socialcam is currently doing isn’t breaking any rules.

Sure, its largest competitor, Viddy, is definitely not a fan of the practice. The company spent the past 18 months building its subscriber base out with user-generated content, not to mention raising tens of millions of dollars in venture funding in order to do so.

And Viddy CEO and co-founder Brett O’Brien is making no bones about his discontent.

“Viddy is built on 100 percent community-generated original content, which we feel is the only way to build a true social community as Facebook, Instagram and others have done,” O’Brien told me in an interview, a thinly veiled slight at Socialcam’s YouTube video poaching. “Our active community of over 27 million Viddyographers is passionate about Viddy and is actively growing the community through sharing. Viddy is clearly filling a consumer need to easily create, beautify and share original video content.”

The problem for Viddy is, others are catching on. Of the top 10 fastest growing Facebook apps from the past week, half of them are social video apps. Most recently, Chill gained more than eight million users in as little as two weeks. All but Viddy use a mix of content, both user-generated and user-curated — although Socialcam still remains the most adept at working the larger ecosystem.

It seems, however, that in light of the recent negative press Socialcam has received, the company decided to tweak its app on Tuesday afternoon, incorporating a handful of subtle changes. YouTube videos are now labeled much more explicitly. A bug which kept users auto-sharing their videos to their feeds — whether they turned the option on or off — has been fixed. And now Socialcam’s “Trending Bar” — the one replete with YouTube videos — is gone from the site.

Still, as the social apps using these methods proliferate, it’ll only get harder for non-viral videos to rise to the top. According to one source, Facebook’s News Feed only allows for a certain percentage of its inventory devoted to video. The algorithm that determines which videos make it into that inventory is based on click-through rate, as well as the number of comments, likes and shares it received. Still, click-through rate weighs heavy on that scale.

In that case, it’s obvious that when Socialcam — and apps like it — seed Facebook with the most viral YouTube apps of all time, click-through rates and shares will skyrocket, and those apps will take a much larger portion of the video News Feed pie.

The question, then, becomes a philosophical one: Is it fair? Since Socialcam essentially cracked the video sharing code, does it not deserve its seat at the top of the charts?

That point remains contentious. As Socialcam CEO Michael Seibel told me, the company’s “simple goal is to allow users to create amazing videos and watch videos shared by their friends.” And as Seibel explained on Bloomberg West last week, “people want to see the videos that their friends are watching.”

But, if all that is being watched are the most viral videos Socialcam has seeded, are users not just watching what Socialcam directs them to?

The war isn’t over. Perhaps Facebook will tweak its algorithm to compensate for the types of videos. Or perhaps Socialcam and others like it will ride to the top on YouTube videos, then see an influx of user-generated content after reaching a critical mass of subscribers.

And again, like that old Valley adage goes — it’s all about the user base, right?

Capstone analyst Rory Maher thinks so. He’s been polling ad buyers and thinks they may collectively be spending 40 percent more on YouTube than they did a year ago.

He also thinks YouTube’s strategy of grouping its new channels into “genres” — like “women,” “pop culture,” etc. — and selling those as megapackages is attractive to advertisers, and that they’ve at least placed tentative commitments on all 18 packages YouTube is selling.

But those dollars aren’t going to come from TV, Maher thinks. Instead, advertisers will take money they would have spent on other Web ads and move them over to YouTube. That’s still a win for Google, but it’s not the win it really wants.

Last week’s event didn’t win everyone over. Several folks I’ve talked to — including people who are making stuff for YouTube’s channels — say they’re underwhelmed with the actual content they saw onstage at the Beacon Theater.

“It looked like Web video,” one Web video maker told me. That is, it didn’t look like the stuff the TV guys show off at their advertiser events.

Some of the stuff may get close to TV.

YouTube is brimming with pride over WIGS, a series of soapy dramas featuring actresses you’ve heard of, like Jennifer Beals and Julia Stiles (News Corp., which owns this site, had a hand in putting the series together). The teaser trailer they’ve put out looks like a reasonable facsimile of Lifetime, at least to my eyes. And Machinima is planning a series based on Halo, the hit Xbox game, and the few seconds of that they showed looked pretty slick.

It’s more likely that most of the Web video YouTube produces with its channels this year really will end up looking like Web video. But if that doesn’t bother the people who watch it — and there are some 800 million people watching this stuff every month — then it shouldn’t be a problem for the ad guys, either.

That is, more people are watching Web stuff on Microsoft’s machine than on the iPad, iPhone or any Android machine, anywhere. And when it comes to home viewing, competitors like Apple TV, Google TV and Roku are so far behind they’re not even competitors.

This data comes from Freewheel, an online video ad company, and it comes with caveats. We’ll get to those below. But first, take a look:

Now the asterisks: Freewheel is only measuring “professional content” that runs with ads, because that’s how it makes its living. So that means it’s counting stuff from companies like NBC, CBS, ESPN and Vevo, but not YouTube cat videos. It’s also not measuring Netflix usage. On the other hand, this isn’t a poll or sample, but data compiled by the company’s own ad servers.

So it’s possible there’s some variance here with the larger Web video world, but it seems reasonable to assume that this is at least directionally correct. At the very least, it gives credence to Microsoft’s claim that Xbox users are spending more time watching videos on the machines than playing games, and that its deals with conventional TV programmers may be bearing fruit.

And it shows you how much ground Google will need to make up as it gets ready to relaunch its Google TV. Ditto for Apple, if and when it ever gets serious about transforming Apple TV into something other than a “hobby.”

Earlier today, Demand Media turned a Q1 performance that beat expectations and also raised its outlook for the year ahead.

Revenue was $82.9 million, up 9 percent, compared to an estimate of $79.6 million. Earnings per share, adjusted for one-time costs, were seven cents, above the expected five cents.

You can read it all here in these lovely Demand slides:

Demand_Media_Q1 Supplemental Data FINAL

Not bad, given many investors have been down on Demand, for a variety of reasons, mostly centered on traffic pressure due to search algorithm changes on the all-important Google. The low stock price resulted in a deal, in which Demand recently almost went private.

So what does CEO Richard Rosenblatt have to say for himself about all this? Here’s a liveblog of the conference call with Wall Street analysts, taking place at 2 pm PT.

Earlier:

2:05 pm: The call started a little late, but Rosenblatt was quick at it, noting the news was a lot better than was thought.

Always a jaunty dude, he was jauntier than usual, if possible, throwing in a lot of terms like “growth,” “momentum” and “Those fiddling geeks from Google did not kill us, after all!” Okay, not the last one.

It was a strong performance, indeed, which is a cause for happiness, I suppose, and especially since Demand’s stock has been in the doldrums since it went public earlier this year.

Not Groupon bad, but that’s a moon crater.

“It was a strong performance,” said Rosenblatt. He gets to say that.

More on the specifics, which showed growth in pages views, engagement and such things on its flagship sites, such as Cracked and LiveStrong. Its juggernaut, eHow, is still recovering from the Google search changes, in an effort deceptively called Panda.

This was not a cuddly panda, but Panda Gone Wild.

2:18 pm: The CFO guy who just repeats the numbers in the press release. (This is the part where I go to the bathroom.)

2:28 pm: Back! Sorry I took so long, but I was getting a computer science degree. (You knew that Yahoo joke was coming!)

The CFO is still chitchatting, still positive about the year ahead and saying “growth” a lot.

2:30 pm: Time for Q&A!

The first is about the mobile arena and monetization there.

Important, but no one is anywhere on this, due to the fact that it does not monetize very well at this point in time.

Everyone has a smartphone now, but the advertising part of it is still a wee baby.

“The monetization will come later,” said Rosenblatt, pointing out the obvious, although he did note that Demand was focusing in it.

Whee! Get on it, Chief of Revenue Joanne Bradford (I know you work hard, but work harder)!

Now to video. More monetizable, obviously, and Demand has a lot of videos to offer, being one of the bigger content providers to YouTube.

I am now officially tired of this question. Next!

2:35 pm: Ooh, a future and direction question about eHow.

“How should we think about its utility in the world?,” asks the analyst.

You should think about it as a place to learn to boil an egg, which is what Rosenblatt mentions. Who doesn’t want to know how to boil an egg? And who doesn’t forget how long to do it, resulting in rubber balls or drippy messes?

These are the great queries of our day, people!

The next question is about “bullish” YouTube upfront last week, in which Google pretended to go Hollywood.

Google will never go Hollywood, by the way, since it requires charm and glamour.

Demand was not there, but it is all up on the YouTube channel thing.

And, why not, since Google is giving away dough to become Hollywood. (Not … gonna … happen … ever, but take the money, all you celebs!)

2:40 pm: Next question is about mobile, again. Quantify that, and when is it going to be big?

No one can say yet, but why not ask!

Still, Rosenblatt makes a college try (I wonder if he has a CS degree?), noting it is “happening fast.”

Another question on YouTube channels and then on registar business.

Rosenblatt and Google are apparently going to see if they can make a go of this thing! Like kids putting on a show in the barn! Let’s see if we can make something of this dang talented group of kids!

The questions never end. Wait, the analyst asks about All Things Digital and my story on their private equity deal!

I can check another one off my bucket list: Being mentioned on a Demand Media earnings call!

Rosenblatt cannot say much, but notes, “We have a duty as a public company to look at anything that comes across.”

Which means it’s true, though he might have taken a moment to compliment my scooptastic skills.

Sigh.

2:51 pm: I am bereft by the slight, but shall recover.

And now it is over, so it is back to boiling my egg.

It has been relatively quiet there in the Utah desert ever since, which is odd, because it had been such a chatty company, throwing parties to kill old outdated identities, holding complicated math contests to guess its new name, things like that.

Now it’s about to get noisy again. Effective today, you’re going to start hearing a lot more from Domo and from its employees, and not because its new product is ready. Not quite. (James tells me the company will be talking about it this summer.)

No, starting today, all employees — everyone in the company — will be required as a condition of employment to get seriously engaged on social media in all its various forms in order to make Domo part of the wider conversations taking place on Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and Pinterest and the rest. It’s called the #Domosocial experiment, and will last eight weeks. James puts it thusly in a post on the company blog:

“The program is designed to get everyone here engaged with and learning from consumer and social technologies. The goal is to help us develop a better product, understand the viral nature of web offerings more effectively, assist in getting the Domo brand out there, enable better customer conversations and see what impact it all has on our business.”

Part of the intent, James told me, is a matter of geography and culture. Being based in Utah, Domo employees are probably better than their equal numbers at other Utah start-ups when it comes to being facile with the ebb and flow of the daily global conversation that takes place on all the social spaces. But they’re probably not as familiar with it all as their rivals in Silicon Valley.

James has seen this sort of thing before. He started Omniture in Utah in 1996 and by 2009 sold it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. “With Domo, I wanted to ensure that we are every bit as adept at understanding and leveraging social as any other bleeding-edge startup,” he wrote.

But on top of that, he’s turning the effort into a live case study to see just how much of a difference it makes in Domo’s business prospects, if any. The company will track important metrics and share them with the world. “We’ll track how things change week after week. The good, the bad and the ugly, it’s all going to be public,” he told me.

Though not about everything. There’s a list of “don’ts.” Don’t tweet about deals in the pipeline, don’t debate with or quarrel with the boss on Facebook. Don’t post about meetings or leak financial information.

What do employees stand to benefit? The best among them will be getting cash rewards for their performance, extra days off, that sort of thing.

What does he expect? He’s been exploring social media pretty seriously for the last six months, and occasionally now gets stopped in the local mall by people who recognize him. “You start having influence in ways you didn’t before,” James told me. He learned with a 10-page article he shared on Twitter, where he has about 12,000 followers, that he experienced a 15 percent click-through rate. “The influence will increase dramatically,” he told me. Also, Domo’s development team will have their eyes opened to the finer points of what works and what doesn’t with social features that are under development at Domo. “We don’t want to re-invent what Facebook and Twitter did, but if you’re not intimately familiar with how those things work, then how can you learn from their mistakes?”

But over the last several years, the Internet has upheaved the aphorism.

It used to be that media was linear. And in that world, content and distribution were married. The HBO channel had HBO content. A New York Times subscription bought you New York Times content. And Vogue and Cosmopolitan each month delivered exclusive and proprietary content from … Vogue and Cosmopolitan.

Until the Internet came along. In every single one of the varied businesses the Internet has touched — from commerce to media to communications to payments — there has been one common impact: disaggregation.

Content and distribution have parted

In the case of the hundreds-of-years-old media business, the Internet has fundamentally separated content from distribution.

Today I can watch hundreds of South Park and Jon Stewart clips, all without a cable box — on my Apple TV, my Android phone, or YouTube on my desktop.

But wait, South Park and Jon Stewart? Content is king, you say. It’s now even more free to reign, unfettered by distribution channels!

No; because content is no longer enough. Content has always been a means to an end. And the end has always been audience.

Content isn’t the goal. Audience is.

When it comes to the business of media, there’s no question: advertisers don’t pay to reach content. They pay to reach an audience.

What’s the first item in every brief from every advertiser? It’s not Target Content, it’s Target Audience.

Media has been slow to adjust to this new dynamic. Companies have sunk billions into content management systems — using CMS as the cornerstone of their modernization — under the impression that they traffic in content.

But they don’t. They traffic in audience. And how much have they spent on audience development systems? Not much, if any at all.

Now that distribution of content to audience is no longer linear, distribution decisions are suddenly more complicated. And, at the same time, they are immensely more important — and more dynamic — to create the impact media companies are looking for: drawing an audience! Social distribution can outperform search, if you use it wisely. Day-parting your postings can boost post performance by 100 percent or more. Packaging can triple the effectiveness of content in reaching an audience.

And yet, few in media have even begun to optimize these decisions.

Who’s your Chief Audience Officer?

Distribution decisions are just as important as content decisions in building and serving an audience, and yet they are being largely ignored. Everyone has an Editor-In-Chief or a Chief Creative Officer. But how many have a Distributor-In-Chief? Or a Chief Audience Officer? A Head of Digital Programming?

The myopic focus on content over distribution is widespread, and it’s a bad business decision. It ignores a critical access of leverage, and one of competitive advantage.

The smartest media companies will do three things to take control of their digital opportunity:

• Put someone in charge of audience development.
  Give them latitude to think about the interplay between distribution and content, so that they can marry the two. Like a head of programming for a cable network, they should be tasked to realize the full potential of your digital channels. They should support the delivery of your content, and they should also provide back pressure to your content creators. Don’t merge it into your editorial jobs — that’s too precarious. Make it its own discipline.
• Adopt an audience development strategy.
  There are three basic components you have to master: insights (know your audience segments, and what each one will like); channel selection (identify the highest value distribution outlets for your brand, whether it’s search, social, YouTube, Hulu, or your own channels); and optimization (use data to create a feedback loop and tune your content, packaging, and timing to what works for your audience).
• Systematize it.
  You have sunk millions into content management systems. But how much have you spent on your most monetizable asset, your audience? You should be as systematic in audience development as you are in content creation, if not more so. Whether it’s with established processes or dedicated algorithms, make audience development a competitive advantage. Get so good at it that you truly know how to maximize every piece of content you create — and multiply your ROI. Use technology for what it does best: Systematize your advantages over your competitors.

With the rise of new distribution platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Hulu, there’s no question that the next generation of digital media is as much about distribution as it is about content. Media companies that orient their organizations to prize audience development above all (with distribution as a key component) will catch the upside of these tectonic shifts. And they will be the ones that survive and thrive in the digital age. After all, audience is the ruler of media companies’ fortunes.

This article by Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is an exclusive selection from his Media Success newsletter for digital media leaders. Elowitz is the co-founder and CEO of next-generation media company Wetpaint and the author of the Digital Quarters blog about the future of digital media. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile (NILE).

The search giant is set to invest in Machinima, one of the most popular networks on YouTube, via a funding round that should close within a month. Machinima focuses almost exclusively on YouTube videos for and about videogame players, and generates more than a billion views a month.

People familiar with the round tell me it should end up raising more than $30 million, and will value the company at around $190 million, post-funding. No comment from Google or Machinima.

Google will be one of several investors backing Machinima in this round. And even if it put in the entire amount itself, it wouldn’t be material for a company that did $8.1 billion last quarter.

But the move has significant symbolism, because it’s the first time Google has openly backed a content company by taking an equity stake. YouTube is spending more than $100 million on its much-publicized channel program, but it is writing those checks as loans to content makers, and it recoups the money via ad sales.

The deal may ruffle some feathers among other video makers, some of whom already complain that YouTube favors Machinima and a handful of prominent content partners. And people familiar with the funding round tell me that at one point Google considered routing the investment through its Google Ventures arm to try to allay those concerns.

The counter to that argument: Why shouldn’t Google back content producers who make stuff for its properties? After all, YouTube is trying to become more like TV. And most of the big TV networks own their own studios outright.

Here’s a proof point: Discovery Communications, parent of the Discovery Channel, has purchased Revision3, a Web video start-up that makes and distributes its own shows, like “Tekzilla” and “Epic Meal Time.”

Discovery isn’t disclosing a purchase price, but multiple sources familiar with the transaction tell me the cable guys will pay around $30 million for the start-up. The company ended up raising about $10 million during its six-year lifespan, with the last chunk coming from a group of investors that included Mark Cuban.

All of Revision3’s 50 employees are supposed to stay on, and there’s a chance that they could end up pulling down sizeable earnouts. But they probably won’t, because that’s the nature of earnouts.

TechCrunch reported the deal talks earlier this week.

This deal isn’t an “acqhire,” as Discovery intends to keep Revision3 operating out of its San Francisco headquarters. The idea is that Revision3 will continue to make its own Web shows, which generate some 100 million streams a month, and that Discovery will eventually figure out ways to sync up some of its own stuff into the mix.

“We want them to continue doing what they’re doing, and to continue developing native digital talent,” says Discovery’s digital boss JB Perrette. To date, Discovery hasn’t done a lot with Web video, and has traditionally kept most of its cable programming off the Internet. That has changed a bit recently, via library deals with Amazon and Netflix, and may ramp up a bit more in the future.

The deal comes as big Web players are trying to convince advertisers that their video stuff is just as good as TV — see Google’s big show in New York last night.

But Discovery thinks there’s still a distinction between TV and the Web — which is why it wanted to buy Revision3 in the first place.

“We produce content on a $500,000 to $750,000-an-hour scale,” Perrette says. “Producing something at a tenth of that cost means it has to be very different.”

Meanwhile, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, who used to write blog posts with titles like “Cable TV Is Screwd,” now says there’s life in the cable business, after all. “One’s not going to destroy the other,” he says. “I don’t think any new media destroys the other. I think it just creates its own path.”

This is the strategy that all of the big Web portals are suddenly employing. And they’re making a particularly big deal about it right now, because they’re all putting on fancy showcases for advertisers, modeled on the “upfront” presentations the TV guys put on every year.

YouTube’s was last night, at New York’s Beacon Theatre, and it was by far the most extravagant shindig of the bunch. (This included the post-event dinners, where YouTubers schmoozed advertisers at many of the city’s nicest restaurants: Ma Peche, Del Posto, A Voce, etc.)

If you didn’t go last night (you really did need a ticket), here’s the finale, via an unofficial shakycam grab. If you can’t pick this up from the clip, I can attest that the crowd really did get a huge kick out of this. Perhaps the YouTube folks will put up a fancier version later on:

And here’s a list of famous, semi-famous, or kinda-maybe-famous people that joined Jay-Z onstage:

Neon Trees
Pharrell Williams
Miri Ben-Ari
Chris Hardwick
Jon Avnet and Rodrigo Garcia
Julia Stiles
Sarah Jones
Jennifer Beals
Caitlin Gerard
Virginia Madsen
Brian Robbins
Flo Rida

(Image courtesy of Life and Times)

Really! Because you’ll need to get to one between now and 6 pm Wednesday when the event kicks off, in order to… print out your invitation. See below:

I know what you’re thinking: It says you have to print this thing out. But you don’t really have to, right? Because you don’t need a paper ticket to get on an airplane these days. Surely the geniuses at Google — the guys who are making virtual reality glasses — could figure out how to check you in digitally to an ad event.

Right?

Nope, says a YouTube rep. Bring that paper. See you there!

(Shutterstock/Alice Day)

So today Pinterest announced it has signed four content hosting sites to use a new attribution tool: Flickr, Behance, Vimeo and YouTube.

The tool was developed in conjunction with Flickr, which is interesting because the photo-hosting site had previously implemented code provided by Pinterest in order to block pinning of copyrighted images. This is a separate project, said a spokeswoman for Pinterest.

Now, content for which the creator has enabled sharing on these four sites will include a “Pin it” button — on Flickr this is in a menu alongside Facebook, Twitter, email, Tumblr and WordPress. Once pinned, an attribution statement will be displayed that automatically includes a permanent link and can’t be edited as it’s repinned by other Pinterest users.

Here’s what it looks like:

Asa Mathat / AllThingsD.com

If there’s one thing the co-founders of YouTube don’t need, it’s money (Chad Hurley and Steve Chen each made an estimated $300-plus million from selling to Google). But, in the form of their new company, AVOS Systems, they do seem to see the value in plugging into the venture capital system — and back into the Google system in particular — by accepting a Series A investment today from Google Ventures, NEA, Madrone Capital and Innovation Works.

On the VC side, the deal is obviously more about the team than about its current products. AVOS has been working on the challenge of reinvigorating Delicious, which it bought from Yahoo, and now is planning an upcoming digital magazine called Zeen.

AVOS said that Alex Kinnier of NEA, and Gideon Yu — who is now president of the San Francisco 49ers and was formerly at Khosla Ventures, YouTube and Facebook — would be joining its board.

They all seem pitched toward the same mythical viewer, presumably the one prized by Internet advertisers, whose mind appears to be occupied with a sticky mix of celebrity gossip, blockbuster movies, video games, zombies, action sports and news of the weird.

– Mike Hale of the New York Times, writing about new channels on YouTube

The collaboration is part of a broader trend of characters from mobile games being turned into brands that can be used by Hollywood in made-for-Web TV series.

This time it is OutFit7’s turn.

The game maker is behind such characters as Talking Tom Cat, Talking Ben the Dog and other Talking Friends, which will be used by Disney Interactive Media Group. The series will run on Disney.com, Disney’s network on YouTube, and will be accessible through the Talking Friends mobile apps.

In the apps, the animals serve as virtual pets, which respond to your touch. You can pet them, poke them or grab their tail. A popular activity is recording videos of the pet and sending messages to friends.

Before this, Disney leveraged Swampy the alligator from its “Where’s My Water?” iPhone app to make videos for YouTube. Disney and Google collaborated on that partnership and others, spending a combined $10 to $15 million for the clips. Obviously, studios are still a bit reluctant to spend even more money on turning apps into a major motion picture.

The Talking Friends franchise by Outfit7 is not talked about as much as Rovio’s Angry Birds, but it has global reach, resulting in more than 390 million downloads worldwide. It also has a big following on YouTube, making the video partnership all that more logical. For example, the Talking Friends franchise has more than 750,000 user-generated videos uploaded to YouTube that have been viewed more than 354 million times.

So the lesson here is clear: If you want your start-up to break out from the pack, you need a viral video — five million YouTube views and counting — too. Right?

Right. Except you probably can’t make a viral video. Because if it were easy to do it, then everyone would do it.

Still, you can improve your odds. Dollar Shave CEO Michael Dubin stopped by the Ad Age conference this week (he was picking up a “Viral Video” award) and gave us a couple minutes and a couple tips. One how-to he could have mentioned to me beforehand — don’t shoot your stuff in a stairwell.

Side note: The thing I find most interesting about the Dollar Shave Club video is that Dubin had the video before he had the start-up: He shot a rough cut of the clip last fall and used that as part of his funding pitch. And once he rounded up his money — from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins — he figured he’d use the clip as an ancillary bit of media, not his primary launch tool.

His backers set him straight, he says. “They told me, ‘The video is the thing,’” he says. And they were right.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120419/use-a-bear-if-possible-viral-video-tips-from-the-dollar-shave-club-dude/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120416/why-you-cant-see-snls-great-game-of-thrones-sketch-on-nbc-com/ http://allthingsd.com/20120416/why-you-cant-see-snls-great-game-of-thrones-sketch-on-nbc-com/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2012 20:35:26 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=196858 The great thing about Saturday Night Live and the Internet is that you don’t have to watch Saturday Night Live anymore. Because of the Internet.

Do whatever you want on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning, you can see all of the show online, legally, for free. Your cyber-pals will have already told you which clips you should seek out, and NBC has gotten so good at this that it now hires a “social media marketing” firm to seed the Internet with embeddable highlights.

Easy. Except when it’s not. Periodically, NBC ends up in a position where it can’t use the Internet to distribute its TV show, because someone complained about a copyright issue after the show aired.

And that’s apparently what happened this weekend to this excellent “Game of Thrones” parody, which you can see on Gawker but not NBC or Hulu.  (The clip stays up on Gawker, apparently, because either no one complained or because Gawker hasn’t listened to their complaints; I’ve asked Nick Denton and company for clarification.)

So who griped? Not us, say HBO’s reps, and that makes sense, since the clip is first and foremost a great ad for the pay channel.

“Rights issue,” says NBC, without elaborating. So the best guess here is that someone who owns the rights to the “Game of Thrones” soundtrack complained.

That soundtrack comes from LA-based Varèse Sarabande, which specializes in film scores and soundtracks, and is distributed by Universal Music Group. I’ve asked Universal to confirm that the label complained, so we’ll see. But it’s a pretty good bet, because music rights are almost always the cause of this kind of thing.

That’s because music is particularly difficult to clear, even by byzantine digital media rights standards. Each song is composed of two elements, the recording and the underlying composition, and each one of those elements can have multiple owners and … ugh.

Amazing anything gets cleared, ever. And for a show that gets built on the fly, like SNL does, every week, even more amazing.

So nothing to do here, I guess, but shrug. Things are a lot better than they were way back in 2005, when NBC was befuddled by “Lazy Sunday” and YouTube. And at least Saturday Night Live’s writing staff can still point us to the Gawker clip, which has racked up some 300,000 views in the last couple days.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120416/why-you-cant-see-snls-great-game-of-thrones-sketch-on-nbc-com/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120413/the-republican-party-endorses-google/ http://allthingsd.com/20120413/the-republican-party-endorses-google/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2012 18:36:46 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=196354 The GOP has picked Google as its “official social platform and live stream provider” for this summer’s Republican convention in Florida. The announcement is all about video streaming rather than social networking, but in addition to live streams of convention events on YouTube, there are to be some interactive Google+ Hangouts as well.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120413/the-republican-party-endorses-google/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120412/live-from-google-q1-earnings-a-new-class-of-stock-eight-years-after-going-public/ http://allthingsd.com/20120412/live-from-google-q1-earnings-a-new-class-of-stock-eight-years-after-going-public/#comments Thu, 12 Apr 2012 21:00:16 +0000 Liz Gannes http://allthingsd.com/?p=196061 Google today gave investors a bunch of material to work with: first quarter earnings close to expectations, an effective stock split, and normally reticent CEO Larry Page’s second public letter (this time co-authored with co-founder Sergey Brin) in a week.

Here’s how Page and his deputies explained it on their quarterly earnings call:

Page said his three main priorities as CEO are velocity, execution and focusing on the future with big bets. Major launches this quarter included Chrome for Android and Google Play.

Responding to criticism of Google+ usage numbers, Page called this “confusion over metrics” and acknowledged that Google+ actually has two parts. One, it is a “social spine” for all of Google; and two, it is a “social destination.” The social spine has 170 million users, and the social destination is “growing very fast … with very healthy growth,” Page said, with all the clarity in the world.

As for Google creating a new class of shares and awarding equivalent stakes to existing investors, Page read out the letter he’d already posted. “We don’t have an unusually big acquisition planned, in case you were wondering,” he said.

Chief Legal Officer David Drummond assured his listeners that despite the effective stock split, all existing Google stockholders will essentially be treated equally and everyone will retain same voting interests, including Page, Brin and Eric Schmidt, who will agree to a “transfer restriction agreement.”

Onto the quarter at hand. CFO Patrick Pichette repeated those three big goals, with a slight twist: “velocity, focus and optimism.” As for perceived dips in numbers, “The most important thing to understand is that our business is healthy,” he said.

It was up to Nikesh Arora to cover the various business units (Susan Wojcicki, who usually helps out, is on spring break with her kids). He talked up YouTube’s progress to become a “key buy” for advertisers, and bragged about new Google Apps customers like Roche and the State of Colorado, accelerated growth in Asia, an underwater Google Hangout from the Great Barrier Reef and Google Street View in Russia.

Onto the analyst questions:

• Headcount growth seemed slower (Google now has 33,000 employees) — why? Pichette said this is just “short term variability.”
• Page said it would be reasonable to expect coming Google+ integrations in products like Wallet, Offers and Maps.
• Success of YouTube advertising shows growth of brand advertising online, said Arora. Page expects that mobile cost per click will improve over time because of local transactions and communication.
• Most resources are still going to core businesses, said Page — still following a 70-20-10 split among core businesses and near-term and long-term bets. Android took six years to get to where it is today, much of that before the public saw anything, he noted.
• Pichette declined to break out U.S. and international cash balances.
• Arora wouldn’t break out traffic acquisition costs for mobile, but said it’s not any different of an arrangement than on the desktop, with OEMs and carriers sharing revenue from Google Play and search, etc.
• Page said social does improve search. He gave yet another shout-out to that Ben Smith guy, who is now highlighted when Larry searches for his name because he’s Larry’s friend.
• As for tablets, Page talked up their media capability. “We definitely believe there’s going to be a lot of success at the lower end of the market as well,” he said.
• Pichette talked again about how lumpy growth and spending is good, and investors shouldn’t be worried.
• How do you account for the value of Android, an analyst asked. Page asked him to think longer-term. “We don’t get very many new operating systems. Only a few in my lifetime, and they’re very important.” He continued that Android is in its early stages, but it’s about the pace of innovation and improvements in user experience, and money will be a part of it, too.
• Page didn’t want to say tablets will eventually be more important than any other device, as an analyst asks him to do.
• Advertisers are interested in ROI — they don’t care about platforms, said Pichette. Google is working toward “dynamically allocating” advertising across its products in order to maximize ROI.

Despite more than a couple repeat questions in there, I don’t think I heard a single analyst ask about the new class of stock. Either they don’t really care, or they were surprised by the announcement and hadn’t prepared for it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120412/live-from-google-q1-earnings-a-new-class-of-stock-eight-years-after-going-public/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20120409/l-a-stories-whats-the-frequency-for-web-video-discovery/ http://allthingsd.com/20120409/l-a-stories-whats-the-frequency-for-web-video-discovery/#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:04:19 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=194172

Earlier this year, Peter Kafka wrote an update about Los Angeles-based Frequency, which is essentially a social TV Guide for online video.

I stopped by Frequency’s HQ — on a recent visit there to check out SoCal start-ups — to chat with its founder and CEO, Blair Harrison, who created and sold iFilm to Viacom several years ago, and to talk about how the Web video hub is doing, even in the face of a range of video-recommending competitors. That includes big-dog Google, which is both a rival and a partner via YouTube and its niche channels.

But, with a slick interface, which Harrison has compared to Flipboard for online video, Frequency is an interesting effort. Here’s the interview I did with him:

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