Disqus - Latest Comments for gordonmattey

Re: @SpaceMonkey launches $100k @Kickstarter camapign to build devices that store encrypted pieces | LAUNCH

gordonmattey — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:00:51 -0000

This could be the next social network but enabled through P2P hardware.. users would truly "own" their posts/photos etc. spacemonkey could be an app on your phone using the phone as a device in the network storing encrypted data.

Re: Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model

gordonmattey — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:34:17 -0000

Bigger stars already do both, up-front and % of revenue so this could be a lot closer than we think.

Re: Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model

gordonmattey — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:30:33 -0000

A studio rolls up financing and marketing, and does the distribution deals.

On the internet, distribution = hosting.

Thank you Youtube.

The challenge with any media or service delivered on the internet is demand, not supply.

So there's marketing.

Building an audience is hard. You can't spend enough on advertising to drive demand for every movie you produce.

Tools and investment/patronage vehicles that enable talent to build a viable long term career in creating film and video is where it's at.

That's why kickstarter is such a big part of this movement.

Kickstarter is the new studio.

Re: Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model

gordonmattey — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:15:09 -0000

This kind of started happening 4 years ago in South Korea, people watching TV on their laptops in coffee shops

http://en.trend.az/news/soc...

Re: Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model

gordonmattey — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:48:22 -0000

Exactly..

Just read the last ten years of news from the music industry and you can see the future of movies for those who are of the old value system..

Re: Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model

gordonmattey — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:41:06 -0000

There is some discussion here a few layers deep in the thread, but the MOST critical part of this value network is the financing and funding of movies.

This is where it all starts. Everything downstream from production exists to protect the up-front investment.

Publishers [Studios, Broadcasters, Networks] currently constrain the whole media value system by absorbing the financial risk of investment in media supply, controlling media demand by ensuring distribution scarcity [controlled by them and possibly by regulation]. In return they take a lions share of the value, financial and otherwise. This strategy works.

However, when there is no distribution scarcity and an abundance of media supply, i.e., on the Internet, the model is blown. The current value system can no longer efficiently [and effectively] allocate financial resources to invest in the right Talent to ensure a blockbuster. In fact, the blockbuster can no longer be realised using todays methods.

Any change to the existing model means shifting who participates in the risk of funding media, without guaranteed returns. Looking across the rest of the value system, there are candidates who can take this of investing in supply; the Viewers, the Marketers and the Producers.

A. Viewer Funding. One or more Viewers fund the production of for-profit and non-profit media. The Viewers take the risk (crowd-funding), and could have an option and desire to participate in the return. However, funding with an expectation of a return is treated as a security, limiting the options for how this model works due to regulation. Although the Startup Exemption framework being included in some new laws will change this.

B. Marketer Funding. One or more Marketers take the risk and fund the production of media (This was how soaps were originally created). The current ROI revenue model for video entertainment, in-stream advertising, is driven by marketer money and this model flips the investment to the beginning of the production process. By committing marketing money up front, and by participating early in the process, marketers have an opportunity to be significantly more involved and relevant to the experience and therefore more than just an interruption to the experience. This however should not mean branded programming and heavy product placement. This is an opportunity to innovate how marketing experiences are created for video.

C. Producer Funded. One or more Producers take the risk and self-fund production. This gives Producers complete control but the only people that can do this are the ones that have funds at their disposal; These are a) Producers with existing revenues to reinvest (high up in current Publisher funded hierarchy like George Lucas) b) Producers with VC backing who are trying to establish a pedigree in the market (these came and went a few years ago), and c) Producers of user generated content, mostly a labour of love from people with financial and/or time freedom. However, producer funded systems are not financially or creatively scalable as they are inherently limited by reinvestment of revenues. A series of failures, and a Producer could fall just like the Studios today.

So, which will it be? or will a combination of two or all three of the models above?

Re: Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model

gordonmattey — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 12:07:17 -0000

Universal (owned by Comcast) tried to release Tower Heist on VOD three weeks after theatrical release, for $60!

The theatre chains threatened to not distribute the movie, which was enough for Universal to change it's plans.

http://latimesblogs.latimes...

Re: Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model

gordonmattey — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 11:23:49 -0000

Download it, then send a check to the movie theatre company.

Re: Getting to Know Maker Studios

gordonmattey — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:38:01 -0000

Mark

On the surface, you've invested in what is economically the wrong side of the chain. The supply side.

For viewers, there's already an overwhelming array of choice, investing in a business that gives people more access to tools (cash and tech) to produce content simply increases the amount of content, but it doesn't change the equation.

Individual content producers suffer from a lack of demand.

Viewer attention is relatively scarce.

Maker is clearly investing in talent which on the surface seems awesome, but like any other media publishers (record labels, book publishers etc), digital disintermediation is knocking at their door, and the publishing game is now one of thin margins, where there is still huge risk. In fact it's even more risky than before because of the lack of ability for marketing and distribution to directly control sales like it did before (physical theaters, million dollar marketing budgets, end caps on shelves, radio chart rigging etc).

The opportunity for an internet business with internet scale (as you would coin it), is to invest in platforms that match viewer demand to content supply in a way that is efficient and meaningful to the producers and the viewers (and of course the advertisers, assuming they are the primary source of funding).

The sad truth is that still many of the most talented individuals will continue to be unknown.

Maker doesn't help with this. Presumably they are centralizing ad sales, and helping distribute outside of YouTube. But then they aren't really a pure production studio.

And if that is the case, they want to be able to maximize distribution and ad sales, which will inevitably mean locking up the rights to the programming. Which is exactly how the old studios work today. I pay you for the rights up front so I can maximize my profits = arbitraging talent.

It is not revolutionary.

Of course I could be making many incorrect assumptions here as to Maker's vision and principles...

Re: What’s Your Bulletproof ZQ Sleep Score? The Zeo Hack Every Sleep Hacker Needs To Know

gordonmattey — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 10:12:48 -0000

i just tried it for the first time. 4.5 hours sleep, REM was only 25 minutes! deep sleep was 1h 48m.

Re: Clone Canvases to Experiment With Customer Segments

gordonmattey — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 12:29:02 -0000

Did this feature get pulled? I don't see it

Re: New design for Lean Canvas

gordonmattey — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 19:58:01 -0000

brilliant, very helpful!

Re: New design for Lean Canvas

gordonmattey — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:14:18 -0000

i wish i could copy a canvas

Re: Web 2.0 Development and Business Lessons: The Economics of Dropbox

gordonmattey — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 15:59:54 -0000

Another thing to think about factoring in, is a custom deal they could have done with amazon.

At this level I am sure they would have negotiated pricing with amazon to further discount from the published list pricing.

Re: What Books Will Become

gordonmattey — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:04:02 -0000

The best networked book I have experienced to date, the books of the bible - youversion.com

Re: What Books Will Become

gordonmattey — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:04:02 -0000

The best networked book I have experienced to date, the books of the bible - youversion.com

Re: Demand Media + Google = Mutually Assured Destruction

gordonmattey — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 12:40:23 -0000

There's a larger problem here, the arbitrage of human talent.

demand media knows more about the potential value of on article on a particular topic.

They seek to maximise the difference between the cost and the revenue,

how much they pay the content creator < how much revenue they predict they can make

it's like Hollywood, but on a mass scale.

Demand Media is the new talent agent, although in reality the emphasis is on agent rather than talent.

Re: Google To Acquire fflick For $10 Million

gordonmattey — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:37:33 -0000

2.5 years ago Twitter bought Summize (http://www.crunchbase.com/c... who was doing exactly the same thing, except they also did music, books, TV etc.

The Summize team and technology became twitter search, essentially killing the sentiment based media review service.

Re: Want to Know the Difference Between a CTO and a VP Engineering?

gordonmattey — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:19:03 -0000

I think the confusion also holds with technical people too. For many architects, the CTO role that many aspire to be, includes the engineering management responsibility.

The confusion comes from starting first with "titles" and then backing into the responsibilities.

Your map serves well to clear this up. On my team, I like to separate the responsibility by roles first and titles later, here's the product development trifecta,

- Technology Leader - what you call lead arch->CTO, but could come from any level, from rockstar developer, senior developer, principal architect, chief architect etc

- Engineering Leader - VP eng but could be at various levels of experience - from process-oriented developers to development managers to Eng Director

- Product Leader - for web/media products where tech+product are entwined/symbiotic, this fits into your Program Manager segment. This also works particularly well where teams are doing agile development, as the engineering function is self-organising (in terms of project mgmt), based on the priorities of the product roadmap.

Re: Q&A: Social Media Continues to Rewrite the New Rules of Advertising and Marketing

gordonmattey — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:33:35 -0000

Ignoring whether or not twitter will be adopted across all age ranges in the US, but do you think twitter facilities this type of engagement? There are no rules over person-person, it's not a social network per-se, I don't have friends, it's all about following...

Re: Q&A: Social Media Continues to Rewrite the New Rules of Advertising and Marketing

gordonmattey — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:31:11 -0000

Lateefivy, I'd like to explore this as it's an extremely valuable point and thinking about this number can help us as marketers understand our role in society...

For the sake of argument, let's say of all marketing today, 1% results in one-time or multiple purchases. The other 99% is wasted, and could turn people off and do more harm than good (that's how I read your suggestion). In fact it's a nuisance (hence ad blockers, dvr ad skipping etc).

Ralph - I'd suggest that with the 99% of people, it does more harm than good - 99x more harm in fact. In your example this is 2,970 ads that I saw but didn't respond to. I suggest this is very harmful. As marketers, we are accepting that sending irrelevant messages to 99%+ of people, interrupting them, providing zero or negative value, infringing on privacy - is all ok.

Even if social media takes this 1% and turns it into 50%, which would be a phenomenal and unheard of 50x increase, you still have 50% investment wasted and you are potentially turning 50% of people off.

The people in the 50% are still suffering with nuisance, and if you used technology to monitor behaviour and mine [ugly word] the social graph, you are potentially even elevating privacy and freedom concerns.

If we don't measure this number, we don't measure the external costs of our business, the cost to people, to society. If we want to help rewrite the rules of advertising and marketing, I suggest this is exactly where we should focus.

Re: When is “done” done?

gordonmattey — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:38:05 -0000

I totally agree too, in my value stream, "Gathering Feedback" is the last stage before done.

This could be quantitative or qualitative, so your example of metrics could be interviews with users.

Re: Software Is Media

gordonmattey — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:29:28 -0000

it's interesting to see other areas like Retail becoming media - see http://www.theopenskyprojec... for a great example.

Re: Promoted tweets – the tip of the social media iceburg

gordonmattey — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 23:11:00 -0000

using amplification to describe this is perfect.

there are huge incentives to tweet useful, interesting stuff that is important to people.

I think resonance is a proxy for so many things - customer service, reputation, trust, usefulness, desire.

People control what is amplified. The cost of a brand not being useful to people and meaningful in their interaction is to lose placement in the results..

If you lose placement, there’s not enough money in the world that can make up for it. Unlike every other kind of advertising out there, where you can always pay for placement.

Resonance = Amplified Feedback Loop

Re: http://gordonmattey.com/post/517531265

gordonmattey — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:09:40 -0000

Thanks!

I like where you are going with your thought.

At the simplest level with you could start with open sourcing the ranking algorithm, then the tech platform, and then even a public benefit organisation and service like you suggested.

I think it's an awesome idea.

I can only think that this would create a bigger pie for everyone and everyone would have to differentiate themselves on top of the core, open algorithm.