Calling all videographers

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The Supernova conference ends today in San Francisco and though not able to attend I checked in this morning at the weblog to scan a transcript of the panel discussion (Rise of the Videonet) moderated by J.D. Lasica of Ourmedia and found this comment by Mary Hodder, founder of the video tools & community site Dabble:

 

“Most of remix culture now is parody. The issue is control. People want to be compensated for their contributions. The harder issue is attribution. Do you let someone chop up something and remake it, and thereby assume ownership of it”

A good but answered question, as is the issue of who pays for production. During the same discussion Jeremy Allaire, founder of the Internet TV distribution site Brightcove said:

“The UGC sites aren’t generating meaningful revenue yet. Media are experimenting with video ads.”

What Hodder calls “bottom-up” (as opposed to top-down, studio-generated) video is as starved for revenues as the rest of the original-content generating Internet. As MarketWatch.com recently reported:

“The top 10 online sites on the Web, including the Big Four (Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN) captured 99% of gross ad dollars in 2006, up from 95% in 2005.”

Unless that changes, unless the flow of advertising revenues to online media are more broadly distributed w’ll end up with a future media even more concentrated than the current setup.

Meanwhile on the frontiers of advertising, Michele Gershberg of Reuters has filed this concise and interesting report that posits behavioral advertising as the answer to audience fragmentation — and, I think, as the possible support mechanism for bottom-up media.

“As people now get their entertainment on everything from cell phones to video games, the audience has dispersed from their living rooms. That makes them harder to track down, but offers the advantage of more precise information once they are found . . .Internet advertising agencies . . . figure out where to find a specific audience and build campaigns tailored to the Internet as a medium. ‘This is going to be a Golden Age of advertising,’ said Scott Howe, president of the DRIVEpm behavioral unit of online marketer aQuantive Inc. ‘It’s the ability to deliver messages in sequence and tell a story. Advertising is going to become fun again. It’s going to become serialized.’ “

Trust an ad guy to put a gloss on things. Thanks to Deep Cuz for pointing out this article.