The following is a Q&A I did via email with a newspaper. I asked them if they’d mind if I reposted it on the blog, since they’re doing an article and not a Q&A they said go ahead… so here you go, I was gonna publish a post myself but copying the Q&A and pasting it here made more sense. Enjoy.
Q. This morning, you published the first video ever that was not produced by WatchMojo.com staff, correct?
Yes, we published Robert Lewis’ documentary on the 9/11 Truth Movement. Here is a link to Part 1.
Q. Was there a political reason to choose that topic?
Nope, not really, not at all in fact. It was a coincidence, basically we had produced a series to commemorate the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks last year, Robert had seen those videos and he emailed us asking if we wanted to publish his documentary.
Q. So why should a filmmaker work with WatchMojo.com?
Well, technically, they should not. For one, up to now, we’ve only produced and published short form clips. But over time the nature, form and length of our content will evolve… this is a progression of that. Anyway, if a filmmaker has marketing skills, is very entrepreneurial and what not, they should try to build awareness and build distribution themselves. It all depends on what the objective is. But they will find out pretty quickly that along with producing quality content they also need to produce content frequently.
I’d say that content creators - both traditional and new - vastly underestimate this requirement. They’ll upload something and expect it to sit at the top of the pile, whereas what is happening now on sites like YouTube, Metacafe and what not is a deluge of content being uploaded at a ferocious clip, and that drowns any individual clip that is uploaded. File sharing sites will brag about the total number of clips and total number of streams, but do the math, each clip is seen very little if you only post the odd clip, and infrequently at that.
Q. What’s the idea behind WatchMojo.com Presents?
We’ve seen more and more filmmakers approach us and ask to publish their material on WatchMojo.com because they appreciate our editorial approach to present videos on our main page, in sections, cross reference them in a more orderly fashion.
Mind you, we’re not reinventing the wheel here, but in today’s UGC euphoria we forget that publishing has been somewhat consistent for over a century now (ie. someone presents something to an audience) but we want to think that services like Digg, Delicious or YouTube will totally change that. Yes, social media (be it social networking, social news or social bookmarking) has changed the rules of the game, but the result of this is that consumers have a harder time finding quality and differentiated content and in turn, content creators have - in some ways - a harder time to get their works seen. Distribution is cheap now, but scaling distribution is not that easy. Scale comes via production and distribution, we have both, so that gives us an edge, I presume.
Q. Is this program only for video content?
Nope, that is why it’s not WatchMojo.com Movies or something, but rather, WatchMojo.com Presents.
The idea is to provide a platform for writers, actors, musicians, etc., technically, we’ve been doing this since last year when we launched with actors. One of our first actors, Patrizio Sanzari acted in a couple of our skits and this year has a flick out called Backup Man… we’re just extending this spirit to actual content and not just actors.
Bottom line, media is inefficient. So if someone’s got something they think is good and want a successful new media company help them get the word out, we’ll consider being that company. It’s distribution, pretty much.
Q. Is this something you will be doing more of?
Time will tell. Up to yesterday, we’d yet to publish any videos that were produced by outsiders, but we’ve thought about this for some time and decided to go ahead and launch WatchMojo.com Presents, it’s an initiative we launched today with little fanfare (no press release, yet!) that leverages WatchMojo.com’s property and syndication network to give a platform to artists to promote their works in an editorial fashion instead of the other alternatives out there.
Q. What are some of those alternatives?
Well, people always talk about how some videos become successful viral clips and get seen by millions of people in a short time span on sites such as YouTube… but that is a myth, or at least very a incomplete assessment of what is going on now with web video.
Q. What do you mean by ”What is going on now with web video?”
The fact of the matter is that 1 out of literally millions of videos that gets uploaded becomes anything close to being a hit. Most videos get seen very little (hundreds of people, maybe), a few get seen by thousands of people, and I’d say handful of videos command large audiences.
If you actually look at the most popular clips on any file sharing sites, it tends to be clips that were made by film studios, record labels, etc. The odd “user-generated content” that is actually made by an Average Joe might do well… but keeping the hits coming is hard. So connecting the dots, if you are a filmmaker, for example, and want to have your movie or documentary or short skit seen, good luck, because on many sites you are competing with Britney Spears sans underwear and Chris Crocker’s Leave Britney Alone… and the way those sites are tagged, unless your content is related to Britney Spears or belongs to the same user, guess what, your video might as well be offline.
Bottom line: if you are a filmmaker or an up and coming band and want to get your work seen, simply uploading it to YouTube - arguably the most successful startup ever in the video and music sector - is chaotic and counter-productive because there is so much noise.
Don’t get me wrong: we use YouTube and all of the other players, but because we’ve published over 3,000 clips and do so frequently, the network effects mean that every clip we publish has a higher propensity to be seen my many more people over the course of the subsequent period.
Q. What’s the idea of using WatchMojo.com vs. sites like YouTube?
It’s important for us to maintain a presence online on our property at WatchMojo.com… of course we have partnered with sites such as YouTube, as well as all of their competitors, but it’s very challenging to get your works seen if you have one video to speak of or if you don’t own your own audience, on that front, I don’t care what people say. If you are a content producer, you need a storefront you are in control of. We’ve partnered with many sites, one of them simply emailed us saying “we’re changing the business model” so doing that is foolish.
Q. Who was that site?
I’m not sure I should be saying this, but I doubt it’s private information, so… GoFish.
Q. Why did they change business models?
I have my thoughts, but that’s for a separate post… ask them.
Q. Can we expect WatchMojo.com to showcase user-generated content, next?
No. If UGC was all that, GoFish would still be around.
Anyway, to answer your question, when will WatchMojo.com carry UGC? Probably never, at least not the way we see user-generated published online these days. Last year when WatchMojo.com launched, we got services come up to us and offer us feeds to add UGC, I would politely decline and say “we have the choice to be one of the largest producers of high-quality, professional, ad-friendly content or the smallest UGC site, we’ll pick the former.” It was a very sound decision because this year we’ve seen just how ineffective UGC content is with advertisers.
But, that does not mean that we will turn away talented creative people who would otherwise fall in what we currently consider to be UGC in general. The video market for content creation and distribution is very inefficient in TV and it’s also inefficient online. YouTube is not a media companies, they are a technology company. WatchMojo.com is a media company, we make no qualms about that, we’re proud of it… so we’ll occasionally identify assets that we like and stand out and publish them on WatchMojo.com’s property and network.
Q. You’ve alluded to the WatchMojo.com network and property, what’s the difference between the two?
The network is all of the content you see on the http://www.WatchMojo.com URL, the property represents sites such as YouTube, MySpace, Revver, Veoh, Roo, Canoe, Livevideo, Handheld Entertainment’s Zvue, Azureus’ Vuze, Joost and others.
In fact, technically that network extends to the wireless and out of home digital world too, but we’re not including these two yet in the WatchMojo.com Presents program for a myriad of reasons.
Q. Which are?
Oh man, do you have 4 hours to spare?
Q. No. Will you be financing projects for WatchMojo.com Presents?
Good question. I cannot rule it out, but we’re focusing mainly on financing the short-form, 1 to 3 minute entertaining and informative pieces we’ve been producing in the past 18 months. Invariably, at some point, we might produce longer pieces but those will probably start off with assets that will be written in-house. Does that mean we’ll never finance outside projects? Nope. Eventually, we might, and we will… but I don’t know when that will take place.
Q. Say I have something to submit, what do I do?
Initially, just send an email to content@watchmojo.com with a description, make it brief. If we’re interested, we’ll touch contact you shortly afterwards. Just bear in mind, if we pass, it’s not you, it’s us… we’ll be producing thousands of clips in 2008, as we have in 2006 and 2007, that remains the focus of the company… but there’s a lot of talented people out there, and as we grow, so does what we publish and syndicate.
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