Vloggin' For Dollars

So whenever people get involved in new ways of relating to one another, eventually money comes into play. I mean, this is like one of the definitive laws of humanity for me. I mean, we I think most human activities that eventually end up, have ended up becoming commercial, have started off as non-commercial. People make things, made things long before we sold things to one another. We started by making clothes for ourselves and ended up making clothes that others wanted to buy from us. And the next thing you know, people figured out how to make clothes, especially to sell to other people. People started singing long before there was any way of buying and selling music. We sang because we sang. People started writing stories long before there was any way to publish novels. People start, you know, this is, this is, I think, the way commerce evolves for us. We start off by doing things, and then money comes into play when others want to acquire the things that we're making. Or as commerce has evolved, others wanted to be associated with the things that were being sold. Advertisers, you know, they wanted to buy others to— they wanted people to see them associated with the things that people liked. Now, in the world of— let's call what we do here publishing. Let's get grandiose. Let's call what we do here publishing. In the world of publishing, There are two ways to make money: subscriptions and advertising. That's it. Two ways: subscriptions or advertising. Subscriptions on the internet have become a very difficult model. Not too many subscription fee, subscription, uh, uh, sites that have ended up working over time. They just, you know, we've— habit plays a large part in what we end up spending money on. So we've gotten used to getting stuff for free, but nothing's for free, right? Nothing's for free. So now we have advertising being kind of the most popular model from— for commerce around content on the internet. Here we have now YouTube and other sites. I went to a great meeting the other night in New York of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, people creating content around videos, and it's all about— it was all about video, all about the— what, what people are calling the internet video space. That's venture capital talk for this kind of place. About 150 people. I'll post to my blog that I wrote about it over here in the description. Advertising is what people are talking about. Advertising. Now, because we're involved on YouTube, the advertising model that Google's put together is of course going to be the advertising model that most people are gonna think about as making sense. Google's advertising model, AdWords, you know, the little words over in the side of the web pages and blogs and other things that you see and read every day on the internet. That's become a hugely, hugely successful model. Google's making an enormous amount of money using that model. Now video sites are starting to approach people who make videos and wanting to pay them essentially to become advertising vehicles. Live video approached some people. YouTube clearly approached some people. Renato's video was very clear about that. I saw this before with blogs. What happened with blogs was that bloggers were blogging and people started becoming interested in ways to monetize— awful word— the bloggers and started thinking about putting ads on their blogs. But they also did other things. They started to think about how to get bloggers to say nice things about things, essentially to endorse products or endorse sites and so on. And in order to incentivize— another nice word— bloggers to do so, companies started paying bloggers money. To do that. This started a couple of years ago in the blogosphere, and it was called buzz marketing. You're creating buzz. I don't care if people get paid to promote what they say and people get paid to encourage other people to do things, but what I do care about is disclosure. Now, back in the Buzz Marketing days, I wrote several blog posts about deception. What I meant by deception in that world was, look, if somebody's paying you to promote something and you promote it without revealing that you're being paid to promote it you are engaged in deception. You're acting as if your endorsement of whatever it is you're endorsing comes simply from your desire to let other people know that this is a good thing, when in fact you're being paid to promote that thing. Again, doesn't matter to me if you're getting paid. Let me know that you're getting paid because if I find out that what's happened is that you've told me, "You know what's a great car? An Audi. Audi is such a terrific car. I mean, it's great in bad weather. It's quick. The instruments are terrific. I've had 5 Audis in a row. I love—" If I say that about my cars, That's what I'm saying. I'm saying I love my cars. Now, if Audi's paying me to say that about my cars and I don't tell you that, I feel like something has been violated in our relationship. I think I've deceived you. Now, Mike, Argent009, um, was taking Guarriello to task for breaking his contract. I have a different tack. I would take people to task for signing such a contract. Signing a contract which says that I'm going to take money in order to, um, promote something but not reveal that I'm taking money to promote it is, for me, by definition, duplicitous. Now, what I've done is to say, okay, I will take this money and I'll talk you up real good, and I of course won't tell people I'm getting paid. Why won't they tell people that we're getting— they're getting paid for? And why don't the people who write the contracts want people to reveal that they're getting paid for promoting? Because we're suspicious of people who are being paid to say that they like something, unlike the lack of suspicion that we have when somebody just tells you, hey, I really love my Audis, you know. Nobody's paying me a dime to tell you that. So where I come down on the money piece is, you know, as we all of us in New York are Yiddish at some level, as we would say here in New York, mazel tov, very good, good luck, good fortune on you for being paid for doing something. Let us know. Do not be duplicitous, because if you, if you tell us that you're doing something because you like doing it and we find out that in fact you are telling us that because you're getting paid, you're not going to get trusted anymore. You're not going to get trusted. We trust people on commercials who tell us that they like things and we know they're getting paid, so it isn't like we universally don't trust any commercial endorsement, but we put it in a different category than person-to-person, unaffected, unrewarded, unincented kinds of endorsements. So my two cents on that matter, and have a great weekend. Take it easy. Bye-bye.