Showing posts with label Susan Boyle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Susan Boyle. Show all posts

Friday, May 29, 2009

Boyle Web sensation: A massive missed opportunity?; Associated Press, 5/29/09

Jake Coyle via Associated Press; Boyle Web sensation: A massive missed opportunity?:

"According to rough estimates by the Times of London based on online ad rates, the first Boyle video could have earned close to $2 million with minimal advertising on YouTube.

Eliot Van Buskirk, a writer for Wired.com who has covered this territory, thinks a unique opportunity was missed.

"This video of Susan Boyle is quickly becoming the most viewed video of all-time — and nobody's making money," said Van Buskirk. "It's been sort of a growing pains stage of ad-supported media."

Van Buskirk said the situation showed the need for content creators and distributors to have agreements in place for when a sensation strikes.

"We're still in the early stages — somehow — of media on the Internet," he said.

A percentage of the would-be ad revenue also would have gone to YouTube. Instead, the Google Inc.-owned company has earned little directly from what might become its biggest hit since launching four years ago."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090529/ap_en_tv/us_web_susan_boyle

Monday, May 25, 2009

Payoff Over a Web Sensation Is Elusive; New York Times, 5/24/09

Brian Stelter via The New York Times; Payoff Over a Web Sensation Is Elusive:

"[Susan Boyle] has already won a popularity contest on YouTube, where videos of her performances in April have been viewed an astounding 220 million times.

But until now, her runaway Web success has made little money for the program’s producers or distributors.

FremantleMedia Enterprises, a production company that owns the international digital rights to the talent show, hastily uploaded video clips to YouTube in the wake of Ms. Boyle’s debut, but the clips do not appear to be generating any advertising revenue for the company. The most popular videos of Ms. Boyle were not the official versions but rather copies of the TV show posted by individual users.

The case reflects the inability of big media companies to maximize profit from supersize Internet audiences that seem to come from nowhere. In essence, the complexities of TV production are curbing the Web possibilities. “Britain’s Got Talent” is produced jointly by three companies and distributed in Britain by a fourth, ITV, making it difficult to ascertain which of the companies can claim a video as its own...

YouTube, a unit of Google, has been keen to make money from its hulking library of online video by signing contracts with copyright owners and sharing the revenue from ads it sells before, during, after and alongside the videos. Major media companies have shown varying degrees of interest in these deals, in part because they are reticent to split much money with Google...

The broadcaster and producers allowed the copies to stay online because they created buzz for the program. The clips have received more than a half-million user comments.

The view counts continued to grow as people awaited Ms. Boyle’s next performance. Visible Measures, a company that tracks online video placements, said Ms. Boyle was responsible for the fastest-growing viral video in the roughly five-year history of Web video."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/25/business/media/25youtube.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&hpw=&adxnnlx=1243267357-yx358QnSV0PSvbz5bZMDwA