by Andrew Einspruch
Filmmaker Andrew Einspruch attended Screen Forever 2013, the conference of Screen Producers Australia, this past year and wrote a series of articles for the event, which he’s kindly allowing us to reprint here. These articles originally appeared in Screen Hub, the daily online newspaper for Australian film and television professionals.
The world of content and culture is moving online. And search giant Google is in the driver’s seat to know what the trends are. But the digital world unfolds in a fraught way for many creators. In the opening session of this year’s Screen Forever conference, Derek Slater, Global Public Policy Manager, Google USA, gave a glimpse into this changing world, as viewed by the advertising behemoth. Andrew Einspruch reports.
100 hours.
That’s how much content currently gets uploaded to YouTube every minute. That`s a week`s worth of viewing in less than two minutes, and a year`s worth in less than two hours. That`s the supply side.
On the demand side, six billion hours get watched every month, or just under an hour per person on the planet, whether they have an Internet connection or not. It is a staggering change to the world, especially when you consider that YouTube did not exist nine years ago.
Google USA`s Derek Slater, a self-confessed fan of the Australian show “Frontline,” discussed this boom in creativity, and put it in the context of creators and money. Put simply, you have more content creators than ever before, and more ways for them to make money from all the connected consumers out there. He cited statistics that said digital music revenue was more than $5.6 billion in 2012, and that digital movies were nearly 30% of revenue in the US in 2012, up from 19% in 2011. Ebooks show a similar jump, with 457 million sold in 2012, up 43% from 2011.
It is still a developing market, but it represents a massive shift from the previous decade.
Slater also described Australia as a huge net exporter of video, with eight times as much Aussie video consumed off-shore than on-shore. Looked at differently, twice as much Australian content is consumed in the US than in Australia. From Slater`s perspective, it shows that local content is thriving, and contributing to a trade surplus in that category.
The power in this is the democratic nature of it. Individual creators can find an audience, and then profit from them. Slater cited four examples of Australians doing well for themselves, including Michael Shanks (timtimfed), Janoskians, Natalie Tran (communitychannel) and former Perth baggage handler Rob Nixon (Nicko’s Kitchen). All have thousands tens of thousands of subscribers and millions of views.
Slater said that partner revenue across YouTube has increased by 60% over the past year, and that “thousands of channels are making six figures a year”. While those are vague statistics at best, it shows that, overall, money is following the eyeballs to this new way to produce and consume content.
Production models are changing as well. Netflix has had celebrated success with original content, including *House of Cards* and *Orange is the New Black*. YouTube experimented with seed funding, mainly in the US, with $1 million advances against ad revenue share with their now-finished Original Channels initiative. Venture capitalists are starting to back successful channels, and Dreamworks Animation recently paid $33 million for YouTube success Awesomeness TV.
Australia is dipping its toe into these same waters, with Screen Australia`s joint project with YouTube called Skip Ahead (see the guidelines) which will pick four or five established YouTubers who want to extend their reach with new content, supporting them with up to $100,000.
Looking at the audience for online content, Slater used the term “Gen C,” which is defined by four words starting with that letter:
* Connected – they watch where and how they want on the device of their choosing.
* Creation – not only do they watch, but they create and upload content.
* Community – they thrive on sharing, and a shared link on Facebook, Twitter or other social platform is a common form of content discovery.
* Curation – they are expert curators who find content that matters to them, and help make that available to others.
Gen C is a powerful demographic because they are cultural tastemakers. They also spend money — around $5 billion in the US alone. Slater`s point is that it is a group that content creators need to focus on, and think about how best to serve them.
Slater spent a great deal of time talking about another challenge presented by the move to digital content — piracy. In short, he said you *can* compete with free, that piracy remains a problem, and that Google takes it seriously.
He described a kind of carrot and stick approach.
On the carrot side, you have to provide consumers with a legitimate source of content that is both available and affordable. Services like iTunes, Netflix and Spotify have shown that people will, on the whole, opt for legal if they can do so reasonably. Slater pointed to Sweden, where they calculate a 25% reduction in music stealing since Spotify was introduced there. Netflix, too, correlates to a drop in piracy when it moves into a country.
But this means that producers and distributors have to make that material available. From *Doctor Who* to *Game of Thrones*, fans have proven unwilling to wait for a local provider to get around to showing things at a time they choose. Pirating is, at one level, an act of impatience (rightly or wrongly), and not providing legitimate access is money left on the table.
On the stick side, Google provides tools to help with content protection. Their Content ID system helps owners control their content when it appears on YouTube. He said that more than 4,000 partners have provided them with more than 15 million reference files. New uploads are matched against these reference files, and if there is a match, it is flagged as a potential issue.
If it is a legitimate copyright violation, the content owner has two options — take it down or monetise against it. The latter is the option of choice, and Slater said that a third of monetised views come from the Content ID system. It has the advantage of giving fans a chance to engage with content they love and content owners a chance to profit.
A classic example is the Harlem Shake meme, based on an unremarkable song from a musician named Baauer. A fan-made video featuring stupid dancing sparked a meme, and millions of views racked up against uploaded versions of the song. It was a chance for the content creator to claim those views, and as the rights holder, make money — from ad revenue share, and from links that let people buy the song. Song purchases pushed the tune to #10 on the charts. It was a huge opportunity for the artist, and YouTube`s Content ID system helped him with the “ka-ching” part.
Also on the stick side are policies and education. Slater said the Google does not want to be in business with pirate sites, and has anti-infringement policies, monitoring systems, and a complaints process. Along with this is a three strikes system, where users who get a takedown notice receive a strike. A strike leads to reduced privileges on YouTube (for example, they can only upload shorter videos). If they go to YouTube`s online Copyright School, they can remove a strike, but if they get three strikes, their account is suspended.
But policing copyright disputes is a tricky task to scale. Google put a Trusted Partner Program in place, where verified participants can submit takedown notices in bulk. The risk here is false positives, where the match is bad, or where a legitimate fair use of material is taken down. And these things do happen, although it is hard to tell from the outside how often.
Slater said that 55 million web pages were requested for removal in 2012, and that 97.5% were, in fact, deleted, with an average turnaround of less than six hours for copyright notices. They also removed 46,000 sites for piracy in 2011. His point is that Google is working to protect the content of producers.
But in the end, he returned to the need for legitimate supply of copyrighted content, because giving people good, legal options is where the real opportunity lies.
Andrew Einspruch is a producer with Wild Pure Heart Productions. His latest projects are the feature film The Farmer, and the web seriesWisdom from the Paddock. You can follow him on Twitter at @einspruch and Facebook at Andrew Einspruch.
