Over at Advertising Age, Keith Richmond is writing about the importance of distribution in the next decade. His piece is called Is Content King? Then Distribution is Crown Prince, subtitled Great Content Does Not Mean It Will Find an Audience:

In the next decade, we will see significant changes to the way that content is created, monetized and experienced. During the next few years, existing media players will begin to increasingly face the realities and challenges that those of us online have always dealt with -- an audience with a short attention span and a whole slew of viewing options.

Sumner Redstone famously called content "king." Rupert Murdoch recently upgraded that to "Emperor." While there is certainly some truth to that when looking at online content -- see Hulu's rapid growth as an example -- there are far more cases where great content does not seem to matter at all. At the very least, I think it is fair to say that even if content is king online, then distribution and marketing are the "crown princes." Good content or not, understanding and embracing digital distribution and marketing will prove critical to everyone in the entertainment industry.

These days, when I'm thinking about creating content, I'm thinking about distribution and marketing right from concept. How can I build elements into the narrative that will help it spread?

There are the mysteries of SEO to unravel -- an art or science that seems ripe with charlatans. Beyond search, there is the social web, a brilliant way of spreading content, but by no means a slam dunk. You have to know what you're doing and really work at it. You can't just sign up for a twitter account and figure everything's suddenly going to go viral.

Viral! I hate that word because of the ease it implies. Nothing goes viral without a brilliant strategy, plenty of effort and a certain amount of money.

Money. Indeed, an ad buy is important. Especially if you aren't an SEO ninja or a social media star with a zillion followers.

The new kid on the block is social recommendation. People consume things they see their friend's consuming on Facebook and click on the links on Twitter. You have to make your content shareable, embeddable and wigitizeable. You have to give your audience a Creative Commons license that gives them the right to goof with your content because that's another way to make it popular.

Because content may be king and distribution may be the crowned prince, but the audience? God.

The Age of Stupid is a documentary film about the oil industry and climate change. It was directed by Franny Armstrong and produced by Lizzie Gillett. I haven't seen the film, but I've watched the making of (embedded below) and perused the web site and I suspect it's a very good film.

The business model behind it is brilliant; totally amazing. Much of the financing was raised through crowd sourcing which has reulted in Gillett and Armstrong owning all the rights to their film. They have used a distribution agent for some territories but they have made a lot of deals on their own, managing to organize a global premiere of over 500 screenings in 40 countries with live transmissions via satellite from New York.

Gillett and Armstrong have created web-based software that allows anyone to book, license and organize a screening.

Anyone in the world is now able to buy a licence to screen The Age of Stupid whenever and wherever they like. Our cunning software will calculate the license according to who you are, where you plan to screen, how many people you're screening to and where you are in the world. You can even keep the profits for yourselves or for your climate campaign.

In the Power to the Pixel 2009 video (below, the filmmakers talk with great excitement and charm about how they raised the money for the film and how they are profiting from it. They give numbers. But according to them, the biggest advantage of retaining all the rights has not been the profits (although they seem quite delighted with those), but the total editorial freedom they enjoyed.

The video is long (23 minutes) but totally worth viewing because it offers a glimpse to one possible future of entertainment, one that is artist controlled -- and in which the artists actually make a profit from their work.

Based on the making of video below, it looks like The Age of Stupid is a terrific film.

The Making of The Age of Stupid from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

This from the ShareThis blog:

• Sharing can make up 5-10% of your overall traffic.
• Sharing can make up 15-30% of your search traffic.
• Sharing drives 25-50% more engagement (page views/unique) than search.

Not enough to convince you how important it is to give your audiences opportunities to share your content? Then consider this:

ShareThis network saw a 200% increase in “shares per page view” in 2009

ShareThis, which provides handy sharing widgets to integrate into your sites and blogs like the ones on this page, is currently beta testing an analytics feature which I imagine will open up to the public soon.

The audience may not be your number one distributer YET, but their importance in spreading your content is on the rise. As the new year dawns, we should all be thinking about that relationship a little more deeply. As with any distributor, providing great content won't be enough to maintain the relationship. Old school distributors take a cut, as we know. Making sharing easy by providing buttons, widgets and shareable assets is only the first step. As this distribution mode grows and matures we will have to think of other ways to encourage users to share and share often.

Yesterday, Facebook was at it again. Talking about privacy settings.

There was a lot of buzz and I wanted to catch some of it promote Hailey Hacks Privacy Settings. I wanted to find a way to use the buzz to drive some more hits to the video.

My majorest stumbling block was that I am here in Niagara-on-the-Lake helping to run a crossplatform training lab. We were just hitting the most intense part of the program as the Facebook privacy news hit so it was hard to find time to work the social media.

I came up with an alternate plan: email my community and ask them to help by using status updates, tweets and comments to the Facebook blog video which was in the newsfeed to draw people’s attention to the video.

I sent out an email asking people to come up with funny status updates etc that said why they were sticking with Hailey’s suggested privacy settings instead of following the ones that Facebook is now suggesting.

I have many good and supportive friends. Here are some of the resulting tweets and updates.

I love that my community came through for me, but when I looked at the initiative I’d started, I realized it felt way too much like advertising.

Meanwhile, Illia responded to my call for support by sending me a bunch of images of funny and embarrassing things people have said on Facebook. If you set up your account the way Facebook is now suggesting all these kinds of gaffs won’t be visible just within Facebook’s walled community (where at least they disappear fairly quickly off the front page) but will be findable through Google. Not that’s entertainment!

So I quickly (well not so quickly, it took me till about midnight last night to do it), I crafted a blog post that included those images. It ended with

Do yourself a favour, keep your life off Google. Set your privacy settings the way Hailey suggests in the video below and when the transition tool comes out? Stick to your old settings!

Followed by an embed of Hailey Hacks Facebook Settings:

The results? A spike in views. But not thousands of people by any means and complete failure to achieve viral.

Conclusion: more work -- a lot more work -- is required to get the view count up. It’s important from here on in to get the word out beyond my own community. I need advocates with big communities of their own, communities who include parents of tweens and people who teach them.

I’ve got my work cut out for me.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 7, 2009

HAILEY HACKS WEB SERIES MAKES TECH COOL & FUN FOR TWEEN GIRLS

TORONTO – For girls who are tired of tube socks for Christmas or Chanukah when all they want is the new Robert Pattinson poster, special holiday season episodes from web series Hailey Hacks makes creating, sending and shopping with wishlists easy and fun.

Check out:

• Hailey Hacks Creating Wishlists
• Hailey Hacks Shopping with Wishlists
• Hailey Hacks Sharing Wishlists

Using step-by-step educational videos, the series makes technology entertaining for girls at an age when they’re starting to see math and science as frustrating or irrelevant.

Studies show girls are falling behind in tech and it only gets worse as they get older: Only eleven per cent of students enrolled in computer science and engineering at the post-secondary level are female. Many girls are opting out of science and math at Ninth Grade and Hailey Hacks is aimed at tweens, getting them into technology before they bail out.

Cheerful, bubbly Hailey offers them a different perspective by making tech useful.

Other videos in the Hailey Hacks series show girls how to navigate the online world to get schoolwork done in exciting, new ways, to enhance their social lives and to have fun.

BACKGROUND

Hailey Hacks, created by Jill Golick, produced by Story2.OH and starring Marlee Maslove, is a series of YouTube-style videos aimed at making kids of all ages more technologically literate.

A hack is a clever or elegant solution and Hailey has plenty of them -- for getting school work done, socializing with friends and just having fun.

Join her fan page on Facebook to keep up on the all the links to cool websites she shares. Follow her on Twitter, FriendFeed, YouTube, 12 Seconds.

Hailey Hacks is available wherever fine video is shared.

For more information visit Hailey Hacks, Story2.OH, Running With My Eyes Closed or contact Jill Golick.

I found a very cool blog yesterday called The Google Geek and reading the posts I thought Ron Hall -- the Google Geek -- might be interested in Hailey Hacks, especially the coming-in-the-new-year-episode, Hailey Hacks Google Maps.

I dropped Ron an email and attached a press release. We exchanged a few emails back and forth and lookie here, not only has Ron blogged about Hailey Hacks, he's shared it. Excellent!

Got an interesting email yesterday. From a young woman named Jill Golick about a sneaky way she is using to get young girls, like my daughter, interested in web technology - Hailey Hacks. It is an area of interest of mine because I have a great Mom (dove into the computer/web at 78), I am married to a great lady (still has trouble getting her messages from a cell phone - but has a degree in educational systems), a daughter that is a budding tech wiz, and a sister that is an expert in the field of women's education.

I checked out a couple of the videos and some of Jill's background bio (my daughter - who is also my I Phone mentor - loves creative writing). I sent her a link to GirlEffect.org - something my sister brought to my attention.

One of the beauties of the web environment is how generous people can be. Ron has gone well beyond what any old media journalist would ever do for me. He hasn't just mentioned the project to the readers of his blog, he's helped me distribute it.

I have not yet done much in the way of promoting any of the newly released Hailey Hacks videos. And the view counts show it.

When I released each of the videos, I tweeted the links both through my personal Twitter account and through the Hailey Hacks twitter feed.

I also used Facebook, putting the videos on Facebook and encouraging people to look at the videos through my status updates and the status updates of the Hailey Hacks fan page. I’ve sent out some Facebook emails asking friends to join the fan page and then tried to keep the Hailey fan page in the newsfeed, by posting lots of links.

And I’ve done a little blogging on this site and my other one.

The first video I posted was Hailey Hacks Creating Wishlists. And these methods drove 150-200 views to it. There were diminishing returns for each of the two Wishlist videos that I released over the next couple of days. Two weeks in there aren’t many views coming into these videos.

Then I released Hailey Hacks Facebook Privacy Settings. I did all the same things on Twitter, Facebook and my blogs, maybe with a little less enthusiasm because I was busy with other stuff. But for this video, I also visited some blogs and web sites that cover the web safety terrain and commented leaving the link to the video.

There have been a few more views to this video. Some of these are directly off the links I left, but some of the people who have seen the link have spread it. They’ve sent it to friends, Twittered about it or embedded it in blog posts.

Still, we’re not talking astronomical numbers. I hope to see it keep growing.

My strategy this week will be to leave links to the other videos on some potentially interested blogs and send out some press releases that Karen Hill kindly crafted for me.

I spent the morning with some guys who are producing what will be an awesome web series when it's done. We spent a lot of time talking about how they'll roll it out, distribute and promote it. I love the ideas and can't wait to put them into action.

Here are some of the links I shared with them. If you don't know these sites already, a whole weekend full of fun lies ahead!

Video sharing (great places to upload to and launch from):

• blip tv
• Tubemogul
• Vimeo

Sharing sites:

• Reddit
• digg
• StumbleUpon
• Delicious

Social sharing tools:

• AddThis
• Add to Any
• WidgetBox

Covering the web series world:

• New TeeVee Station
• Tubefilter
• Tilzy TV

AdAge has an article about the trouble many web series are having holding and building their audience:

In the short history of web series, most have struggled to replicate the TV model where audiences come back -- and even build -- from the first episode. And retaining audiences is key, given that brands marketing around web video are paying according to that old TV model: for eyeballs.

Online audiences are spotty, fickle and distracted. Even the best web series have trouble getting numbers when they're not getting front-page promotion on a major video portal such as YouTube or MySpace Video.

They commissioned a study to find out how audience trends were playing out:

What it found is that the series lost 64% of their audiences, on aggregate, from the first to the second episode. The decline becomes less steep from there, but it shows why many series don't last past the 10th episode; by then there just aren't many viewers left. TubeMogul stats include the largest video sites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, MySpace and Yahoo, but don't include Hulu and iTunes sales.

Typical for a web series is a big first episode, partly because portals like to promote new series, followed by choppy up and down numbers. Take Mr. Eisner's "Prom Queen," which went from 405,000 views for episode one to a mere 38,000 for episode two.

According to Adage, in order to provide their advertisers with guaranteed audience numbers, many web series are turning to paid distribution:

It's a change in approach in part driven by the economic model for online video, where the video itself is as much an ad as it is entertainment. Brands are eager to underwrite a series that reaches the right audience, but they're asking for guaranteed audiences in return. "The basic principle is there aren't enough views to go around," said Tremor Media CEO Jason Glickman.

Tremor, like Broadband Enterprises, has developed a side business of syndicating shows across their ad networks, making the ad unit a video player, much like Google is doing with "Family Guy" creator Seth McFarlane's web series "Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy," which has racked up nearly 30 million views since July on Google's AdSense network. Broadband Enterprises recently entered the content-creation business as well to provide advertisers with both content and distribution.

Indy Film Wisconsin and Blogtalk radio has an interview with Polly Frost and husband Ray Sawhill about her funny, horrifying and filthy filthy work. In addition to writing and producing The Fold, they have also released an "audio entertainment" called Sex Scenes.

The interview is a really interesting discussion about working and producing in the digital world:

At yesterday's Playback Innovation Forum, Digital Theory's Kate Hanley was probably the best part of the five hour day.

Kate talked about online video syndication in simple easy to understand language. At the same time she provided incredibly valuable high level information. No easy task.

For me, by far the most interesting fact she brought to the session was how Seth McFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy is being delivered through Google's ad network. Net result: 14 million viewers.

Think about how insanely brilliant this is. Rather than delivering ads, they're using the network to deliver content. Google ads are everywhere. Therefore so's the Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy. Those videos can turn up pretty much anywhere in the digital space where you might travel.

And then, like that snake swallowing its tail which seems to be everywhere in my life this week, the content is branded… carrying the advertiser's message and making money for its creators. And plenty of it, thanks to the massive distribution.

If you're thinking of producing a web series -- and who isn't these days? -- you've got a lot of work ahead of you.

I find it useful to slot the producer's tasks into five major areas:

1. Production

Everything from pitch to post. Come up with an idea, write it, cast it, shoot it, edit it, add music, titles and effects and output the sucker in a web friendly format. Do it all again for the rest of the episodes in the series. This alone will kill you but it's only one of five. Did I mention make it good?

2. Financing

Oops. You can't actually get through the first task if you haven't figured out where the money is going to come from to pay for it. You'll need a budget that includes the costs associated with production and whatever you're spending on promotion and distribution. Conventional wisdom puts average web series' costs around $10,000 an episode, obviously you can do it for a lot more and probably a lot less -- but that's going to cost you in quality and probably viewership as well. Multiply by the number of episodes you want to do and you're in the ball park for how much you need to raise. There aren't a lot of places to look for the money so you're going to have to be creative.

3. Distribution

You got your money, shot the show, now it's time to get it onto the web. Where are you going to put it? Are you building a site of your own? Making it exclusively available on a single site like Blip for example? Or distributing it far and wide to every video sharing site around? Whatever you choose, you'll need to know how to upload it. Then you'll have to tag it and make sure you are showing the screenshots you want. Oh yeah, you'll need some metrics on who is viewing it -- if you're planning to make it all the way to Task 5 Monetizing.

4. Publicizing

Otherwise known as driving traffic. Go ahead, write that press release and send it out. But you better know who is covering the web series beat and my friend, there aren't too many. Tell your friends, tell your family, email everyone you've ever known. And then get to work. There is a tons of bloggage on stirring up traffic and you better start reading. You're going to have to try all of it and then some.

5. Monetizing

Yay, money. Oh wait, there is no business model for web series yet. So, huh, another tough one. There are a few ways to go: subscription, advertising, product integration, rev-sharing sites like MetaCafe or all of the above.

Go get some rest. You're going to need it because producing a web series is an uphill battle. On the other hand, I have a feeling it is going to be creatively satisfying and maybe, eventually, lucrative. So let's give it a shot. Over the coming months, I'll be blogging about your five tasks in more detail.