Plyometrics through Paypal

This is the rough draft of an article I’ve written for the next issue of TEN4 magazine. I’d like to know what people think about this subject and of the article. All comments appreciated as usual!

Thanks to Dan O’Connell for the interesting title.

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Plyometrics through Paypal

Digitalization has profoundly altered the creative industries.

For the price of an hour in Abbey Road Studios it’s now possible for anyone to make a film, an animation or an album in their living room.

However, getting that “digital content” distributed to people can still very difficult. If you make recorded music you generally need to be signed to a record label before anyone will hear it. If you make films you generally need the backing of much larger companies to get them distributed through the cinemas and onto DVDs.

Digital Ebay

But times are changing, new technology is starting to allow creative people to sell their digital content to the people who want it, directly through the internet.

We’ve already seen a huge growth in small independent retailers making their living selling physical goods through systems like Ebay. The doors are also now being opened for individuals and small companies to start selling non-physical content.

Whether we’re talking about films, animations, music, podcasts, e-books, live webcasts or anything that’s digital, if you can produce it then you can sell it. Many people are now saying that we are on the verge of a revolution which will see a new breed of creative people making a living from doing just this.

The Numbers

I’m not suggesting that the big record labels, the cinemas or the television networks are going to be brought to their knees by individuals selling their content. The market is big enough for everyone.

If it costs very little to produce and distribute a piece of content over the internet, the producer doesn’t need to make anywhere near as much money to make a good profit. Even if a tiny slice of a multi-billion dollar market swings towards the individuals, a huge number of people will begin to make their money in a profoundly different way.

A Theoretical Example

In her spare time an ex-teacher and animator creates fifty short pieces of simple, high value educational animation. Each animation lasts three minutes and she charges a pound each time one is downloaded.

The content becomes extremely successful and she starts to sell a hundred of each of the animations a month generating an ongoing income of sixty thousand pounds per year.

If this sounds like pie in the sky, a real world example of this is Ricky Gervais’ podcast which receives hundreds of thousands of listeners a week. Recently he started to charge people to listen to it. At $2 a play the potential income is staggering. And the best thing is, a podcast costs very little to produce.

Getting it out there

Obviously Ricky Gervais’ reputation and a big marketing drive was a major factor in the success of his podcast. However, the internet is changing very quickly at the moment and techniques like viral marketing and the use of new online communities mean that if your content is good, it’s not difficult to become well known to a high number of people worldwide.

A good example of this was our game Mansion Impossible which without any marketing whatsoever was played by over a million and a half people, through a simple process of players sending to their friends.

So if your content is good enough, it will market itself.

The next step on from this will be a whole new breed of internet technology which will intelligently decide what kind of content a viewer is likely to enjoy. Similar to E-commerce sites like Amazon which present you with books and CDs it thinks you will like, these systems will look at previous viewing habits, what your friends have enjoyed and so on.

Quality and Relevance

The first objection most people have to the idea of people selling their own content is about “quality”. If anyone can produce and sell their own material, won’t that lead to a sea of mediocre rubbish?

The answer is inevitably yes. But it doesn’t really matter. When we’re talking about such a high volume of production only a tiny proportion actually needs to be of high quality – as long as a potential buyer knows how to find it.

The internet as a whole is largely comprised of pointless, uninteresting content but people still use it. The reason it works is because we now have:
1. Intelligent search engines to help you find what you want
2. Friends and links pages to recommend content to you.

Now here it’s also important to look at what “high quality” actually means. Obviously it depends who you are. If you are not interested in trains then a podcast about steam locomotives might not particularly interest you. However, if you interested in trains then you may find that this is the only podcast that exists in the whole world that deals with a subject you’re interested in. In fact you’ll probably be pretty excited about it!

And here’s where things start to get very different from the traditional distribution model. As the amount of content being produced increases dramatically, more and more niche content will be created. A radio station specifically about steam locomotives could never have been started in the past because not enough listeners would have been interested to have justified the cost associated with getting it broadcast.

Content on the Cheap

With the internet two things happen. Firstly the market becomes worldwide – anyone, anywhere can access your content. Secondly the costs can be reduced so dramatically that creating a sustainable business around content that is relevant to thousands of people rather than millions becomes possible.

Although this will lead to a huge explosion in high quality, niche content it will also mean that producers have to start thinking about what they do in a completely different way. There’s a romance and kudos associated with getting a record deal or a book publishing deal and producers may have to let this idea go to be able to fully embrace this new way of working. However the ones who do it first are probably going to be the ones who do well.

Plyometrics through Paypal

Simon Hunt is a high jumper with over 12 years’ athletics training experience. He’s also learning to be a film maker and has started to produce a large bank of video all on the subject of “plyometric” or jump training, invaluable to thousands of budding athletes around the world. Although the training is far more effective when delivered through video rather than text diagrams, nothing of its kind currently exists on the internet.

Using the Google Video system, Simon will sell these short, two minute videos through a simple, free to set up website. Viewers will pay around a pound to download each clip, which they can watch on their computer, or download to a video iPod or PSP (useful for taking to training sessions).

Simon believes that by selling short videos at a low cost, there will be enough people willing to buy them that at the very least, the business will become self sustaining. His costs are extremely low. The videos are produced in a simple way so up to six pieces can be scripted, filmed, edited and uploaded ready for sale within one day. The blog site was set up for free using the Wordpress system, as was the Google Video account.

As with any kind of niche content, the marketing will be mainly done through forums and links with other specialist websites. The potential market is huge.

Cost Blindness

Simon’s example illustrates another point about the economics of buying content in this way.

Currently his only competitors distribute their training information through DVDs, each costing around $25 and containing roughly 20 minutes worth of footage. Minute for minute, simon’s content costs roughly the same amount to watch. However when buying on the internet, viewers only have to buy the particular parts they want to see.

£1 is a figure that to most people is low enough to spend without having to think about it too much. This is one of the reasons for the gigantic success of iTunes. When each piece of music costs less than a pound, the listeners don’t even really feel like they’re spending money.

Cash Cows
Many creative people lead a hugely unstable existence, living from one job to the next. It can be very tiring and demoralizing not knowing where your next job is coming from or when you’ll next get paid.

Larger businesses often avoid this problem by developing a “cash cow” product, so called because once you created it, you can go on milking it without having to put too much more effort in. Many creative people would hugely benefit from having a product like this.

Coming back to our theme, once a piece of content is produced, marketed and is selling well, if the producer is lucky he or she should be able to sit back and watch the money roll in month after month. Imagine how much easier life would be if every month the rent and bills were paid without having to do anything.

How does this apply to me?

This article probably raises more questions than it does provide answers. It’s too early at this stage to write a practical guide on how to make money from selling content as so few people are doing it yet. It’s also impossible to say at this stage how soon and to what extent these changes will happen. No-one knows.

What I’m trying to do is to provide a vision for how things could be, and encourage the producers in this region to start thinking about how they can take advantage of these new opportunities. Whilst the others are spending all of their time trying to get their big break by constantly changing their ideas to fit into what someone else thinks will sell, we can be quietly getting on with doing what we love doing and simply finding enough people that will pay for it.

So it isn’t just a financial reward that’s at stake. There’s a creative reward too. When you rely on a middleman, not only does he take most of your money, he also tells you what you can and can’t do.

So ditch the middleman, Do it yourself.

Links

http://www.e-junkie.com/, http://payloadz.com/
Sell software, eBooks, music, podcasts, movies, digital art or anything digital through PayPal

Video.google.com
Soon to be offering sale of video to the general public

wordpress.com / myspace.com
Set up your own website in ten minutes

emusu.com
Get an affordable website and sell your music directly through it

Lulu.com
Publish your own books, CDs and DVDs. When an order is made, Lulu print the copy and send it to the customer, giving you 80% of the profits.