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Digital Content Monetization West – Panel Video and Event Report

Posted by Joel Flynn | July 12

http://www.themusicvoid.com/2011/07/digital-content-monetization-west/

With two events out of the way and one more scheduled for the fall, the Digital Content Monetization (DCM) conferences have reached a crossroads of conversation. This particular junction may present an existential crisis for the event, that is, a fundamental question of what is DCM’s purpose going forward.

Alternately, from a different perspective, DCM may actually find that it’s been presented a tremendous opportunity: to be able to engage precisely the key topic that underlies much of the discussions, intentions, and actions around digital content in networked environments. The question for DCM is largely the same one faced by many of the events sponsors, speakers, and attendees: to sustain or to disrupt?

In previously covering the DCM East event last October in New York, I remarked that the conversation taking place literally down the street at the Vimeo Festival and Awards would have provided a very useful set of counter perspectives to what was taking place at DCM. Whereas DCM had a “top-down” flavor around industry questions of how to generate and control monetizable content, the Vimeo discussion took on a more “bottom-up” market-centric feel, that is, around user engagement with the Vimeo social video platform and how user generated content is produced in the process. Ultimately, the matter of monetization came into the Vimeo picture, but more as a question of how it improves or gets in the way of what users want to do with content.

What was needed from both events, I felt, was a common forum to have these related discussions take place in each others’ faces, with some fireworks thrown in for good measure. Earlier this year, the Rethink Music event in Boston did manage to hit a little closer to this kind of discussion (while leaving the cheap shots tucked away in reserve for the Bruins-Canucks Stanley Cup Final). Maybe this was possible for Rethink by focusing only on topics related to the digitization of music, rather than opening up the more general digital content umbrella.

In that sense, maybe the idea of a DCM+Vimeo event might only work by narrowing the debate to digital video only, but it really is a much larger discussion. The focus on music worked for Rethink, perhaps due to a greater appreciation now of the influence that music’s digitization has provided in foreshadowing changes to take place in digitizing other forms of content. Digital music as the lead user, if you will, in the larger content ecosystem.

With this point in mind – i.e. digital music consumers as the early adopters or lead users of digital content – I recorded the following panel from the recent DCM West event in Burbank, California (held June 21-22, 2011):


Along with the panel on content aggregators vs. content owners that featured Dan Weiner of Pandora, this panel was one of the few panels/presentations that explicitly addressed digital music. Sponsored by PayPal, whose Senior Director of Digital Goods, Carey Kolaja acted as moderator, the panel featured Caroline Burruss of Austin City Limits (ACL), Analyst Paul Sweating of Concurrent Media , Bismark Lepe of video analytics experts Ooyala, and Dean Alms of Milyoni, who worked closely with Burruss and ACL in launching the first “Social Theater Concert” on Facebook.

Even in the case of this successful Facebook launch by ACL and Milyoni, the panel discussion centered primarily on digital video and social networking angles of producing live music events for web distribution, rather than having digital music as the focus. But there’s something else going on here, the same key idea at the crossroads where DCM now finds itself: Disruption.

Some scenario-based thinking is in order:

Consider YouTube as the established distribution channel for digital video, and Apple’s iTunes as the established model for monetization of digital content. The ACL-Milyoni launch of the “Social Theater Concert” took place on Facebook – not YouTube. And while this inaugural event involved payment though PayPal or credit card transactions, subsequent events will incorporate the virtual currency of Facebook Credits. Are we looking at what might be the most disruptive threat to digital content monetization as it is currently established?

Now consider Facebook-delivered content exchanged for Facebook Credits. Let’s say Facebook begins subsidizing a significant amount of this content by setting up all its members with “free” starter accounts already stocked with credits. Why would it do this? Because it can. Even with over 700 million users, the company’s market position and valuation gives it the clout to give away Facebook Credits just as Google’s dominant position across the tech industry allows it to give away seemingly endless “free” apps and “open” to its online and mobile users.

Google’s variety of free apps provide valuable information for the company’s overall design focus around the user, which in turn drives its advertising models. In the same way, the user information gathered around Facebook Credit transactions provide valuable and competitively advantageous information for Facebook, i.e. insights into the emerging characteristics of online commerce that other companies would not be able to easily replicate…perhaps not even Amazon! So if you can’t beat’em, well, you know what they say…

The crossroads that future Digital Content Monetization conferences now face is whether to keep on with the same discussion about how to monetize content in the digital age – the same repetitive conversation that has been going on for years. That is, should DCM keep on with its status quo, sustaining the same speakers, panels topics, and overall preaching-to-the-choir discourse? Or, should it disrupt this very premise? How? By explicitly creating panels that position established vs. disruptive monetization models, as well as companies, organizations, and individuals that reflect and can represent these alternate positions.

With the 2011 New York edition of DCM East coming up again in October, we’re moving towards a vanishing point in time where all content will be digitized, or will at least have the potential to be digitized at some level. In this Sterlingscape, digitization not only involves redundancy, the digital adjective itself is basically redundant, an artifact from the past as we move out of a world of gizmos and into… well, we’re still figuring out what to call it.

In the meantime, can’t we use the “D” in DCM for something else instead? Something perhaps a little more… I don’t know… disruptive?