Crowdfunding: The Future for Generating Capital
Crowdsourcing has become one of the fundamental concepts on which modern Internet culture is built. Crowdsourcing is the general idea of using the Internet to bring together the collective efforts of a large number of people to accomplish a goal. Often, but not always, this goal is prohibitively difficult or time-consuming for an individual to do alone, but with the help of the collective efforts of people around the world, both physical and/or mental, it can be done. A prototypical example of this is Wikipedia.
Wikipedia has become the go-to quick reference for almost any fact imaginable, from the career of an obscure poet in the 1800s to the line of succession of the French monarchy. The astounding depth and surprisingly high level of accuracy (studies show it matches Encyclopaedia Britannica for accuracy) is all thanks to its crowdsourcing approach to the aggregation of knowledge. It is such a popular and successful way to use crowdsourcing to create massive, accurate databases of information that it popularized a subgenre of crowdsourcing sites called wikis (or wikias), where people submit their collected knowledge on the wiki’s specific niche, such as a popular video game like World of Warcraft, and over time this builds a complete, easy to access and search, compendium of all of the knowledge on that subject. But wikis aren’t the only subgenre of crowdsourcing. There are also forms of crowdsourcing that ask for something from its participants other than their labors. read more…
Television on the Web; It’s Inevitable
In the wake of SOPA, PIPA, and the protracted MegaUpload court proceedings, it seemed worth discussing Internet piracy and what lessons can and should be learned about how to deal with what appears to be dwindling viewership numbers and the increasingly difficult task of monetizing content.
Movie and television studios show a pattern of declaring the sky is falling with every change to the status quo of their distribution model. An example of this is their reaction to the arrival of the VHS. Movie studios were convinced that the ease with which consumers could record to VHS tapes would cause rampant copying and sharing of their intellectual property. Despite these fears, VHS basically created the home video market, allowed rental companies like Blockbuster to come in to existence, and, most importantly, funneled huge sums of money into the studio’s pockets by creating an after market where one didn’t exist before. This same pattern can be seen again when VHS began to give way to DVDs. Many studios resisted the change, fearing that digital technology made copying even easier than before, and that since anyone with a PC could rip, burn, and share their intellectual property, they were teetering on the edge of ruin. Like before, this turned out to be a lot of worry over nothing, since DVD’s convenience, durability, and portability made them sell better than VHS ever did. In every case, adapting to the new technology turned out to be a major boon to the industry and not the end of world as was predicted. And then the Internet came along. read more…
ARGs and Marketing
I wrote this as part of the application process for Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners (goodbysilverstein.com) about five or six months ago. I’m pretty proud of it, so it seemed like a good enough way to kick off my blog. The prompt was to describe an innovative or cutting edge advertising campaign that impressed you and explain why.
One of the best campaigns I have ever seen is the “I Love Bees” project crafted by 42 Entertainment for Bungie/Microsoft/Halo 2. It took the concept of Alternative Reality Games (ARGs) as advertising and elevated it to a whole new level of interactivity, engagement, and promotion. I am fascinated by ARGs and I think they present an incredibly interesting and cutting edge way to engage fans and potential customers in whatever product or experience is being promoted. read more…