Edison Project Book

THE EDISON
PROJECT
THE EDISON PROJECT
Lead Authors:
Erin Reilly, Jonathan Taplin, Francesca Marie Smith,
Geoffrey Long, Henry Jenkins
18 Havas is the global The Annenberg Innovation

research and innovation Lab is a high-energy,
center within Havas. In fast-paced Think & Do
the offices of Los Angeles, Tank in the Annenberg
Seoul, Tel Aviv, Bogota School of Communication
and Shanghai. 18 develops and Journalism at the
research projects, strategic University of Southern
partnerships, and business California. We define
opportunities for Havas innovation as a social,
and its client portfolio. collaborative process
We work to be 18 months involving artists, scientists,
ahead at the convergence of humanists and industry
media, content, technology, professionals working
and data science. We scout together on new problems
new talent and startups, and opportunities raised by
activate supporting technological and cultural
academic research, develop change. Our mission
actionable insights, and is to foster real-world
facilitate deal-making innovation at the dynamic
through local learning intersection of media and
expeditions. culture.
Copyright 2016. University of Southern California.
All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION I
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS VI
THE NEW METRICS + MEASUREMENT: 8

Erin Reilly
THE NEW FUNDING + BUSINESS MODELS: 33

Jonathan Taplin and Anjuli Bedi
THE NEW SCREENS 51

Francesca Marie Smith
THE NEW CREATORS + MAKERS 69

Geoffrey Long, Rachel Joy Victor, Lisa Crawford, Malika Lim,
and Juvenal Quiñones, with Ritesh Mehta and Anna Karina
Samia
CONCLUSION: IMAGINING POSSIBLE FUTURES 92

Henry Jenkins
The Edison Project • I
INTRODUCTION
Thomas Edison invented both the phonograph and the

kinetoscope more than 100 years ago. But the business of
distributing music and movies hasn’t really changed that much
in 100 years. In the fall of 2012 the Annenberg Innovation Lab
asked the question: “Could it be that the current production and
distribution system are simply not capturing the possibilities of
the digital revolution? What would a system look like if we started
from scratch like Edison?”
Thus The Edison Project.
As part of the Edison Project, the Lab:
• Facilitated Think + Do Workshops, to deliver

research insights and offer playful learning
experiences to ideate the future as a community
• Created prototypes that demonstrated the real-
world applicability of our theories, and
• Shared our learnings through diverse media to
advance the understandings around society, media,
and culture
Through the Edison Project, the Lab posits a transition from an

Information Economy to an Imagination Economy, creating a
vision for a new media and entertainment ecosystem and working
with a range of strategic partners to accelerate its arrival by
turning what most perceive as signposts of disaster into signposts
of opportunity.
Introduction • II
This shift from an information economy to an imagination

economy may represent the beginning of a new global boom:
1. the rise of ubiquitous, natural, and affordable

technology,
2. the rise of participatory culture and the new
maker movement,
3. the rise of a global broadband distribution
platform, and
4. the rise of a rapidly growing global middle class
These are all converging to reshape the media and entertainment

industries and quite possibly every other industry as well.
Though our focus for this research has been on the Media and
Entertainment Industry, we see similar shifts happening in other
domains, such as journalism, publishing, and education, and our
hope is that we offer some insights and recommendations that
can be applied more widely.
What Is an Imagination Economy?
John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox’s Palo Alto

Research Center (PARC) who currently serves as a member of
AIL’s advisory board, has discussed the concept of the imagination
economy in this way:
We are in an era of networks, sensors, smart

matter, transmedia, Uber, Kickstarter, and Airbnb.
It seems fair to say the world we are living in is
advancing at exponential speed, which as a result
is challenging the status quo.
This new era is one of creating contexts and

experiences rather than producing the same
thing over and over for mass consumption. But
The Edison Project • III
an important question is, “What is the purpose

of building these contexts?” Perhaps to enhance
emotional connections, serendipitous encounters,
epiphanies and “aha!” moments in our everyday
lives. . . .
We have entered into a world of what-if and why-

not. In some sense, if you can imagine it, why
can’t you do it? Our digital tools and networks are
more democratized than ever before and present
incredible possibilities. In this networked society,
we are more limited by our imaginations than by
our resources.
Welcome to the imagination age—where everything

from food to fashion to housing to the arts can be
seen through the lens of what-if. We now have 3D
printing, the internet of things, and radical new
ways to construct green buildings. Cars not only roll
from point A to point B, but are being thought of as
computational platforms. There is so much more
to come in this networked world, if only we let our
imagination take us places we couldn’t go before.1
Simply put, if an information economy is powered primarily by

the exchange and valuation of information, then an imagination
economy is powered primarily by the exchange and valuation
of imagination. The Edison Project explores a world wherein
technology makes it easier to do or make virtually anything, and
its findings reflect a simple truth: when the ability to execute is
no longer scarce, then we instead begin to value (and monetize)
imagination, and the creativity with which new ideas are generated,
implemented, and translated into sustainable business models.
Introduction • IV
Why Now?
The media and entertainment business is in turmoil. Revenues

are struggling to outpace inflation, production and marketing
costs are skyrocketing, the Hollywood blockbuster model is
collapsing, and broadcast TV is dying as ad revenues drop and
viewers, brands, and entire channels shift to over-the-top models;
in short, everything from news to games to music to publishing
is in the midst of massive change. However, what most perceive
as signposts of disaster can in fact be interpreted as signposts
of opportunity. This shift from an information economy to an
imagination economy may represent the beginning of a new global
boom: the rise of ubiquitous, natural, and affordable technology,
the rise of participatory culture and the new maker movement,
the rise of a global broadband distribution platform, and the
rise of a rapidly growing global middle class are all converging
to reshape the media and entertainment industries—and quite
possibly every other industry as well.Thus, the Edison Project was
designed to explore how industry leaders, creative professionals,
and all others looking to flourish in this emerging imagination
economy might best orient themselves moving forward.
Mapping the Future: The Edison Project Trends
What follows is a summary of the work we’ve conducted over

the three years of the Edison Project (from 2013 through 2015),
based on four research pillars: The New Metrics + Measurement,
The New Funding + Business Models, The New Screens, and The
New Creators + Makers. Each of these pillars forms a core part of
the media and entertainment industries’ scaffolding, but they are
also inextricably linked, continually informing and influencing
one another. We begin in our first chapter by looking more
closely at the ways audiences engage with media in this new era
via novel metrics and measurement, which invites us to consider
in the second chapter a range of possibilities for distribution and
The Edison Project • V
monetization. The third chapter shifts the conversation towards

the technological promise of new screens and other devices, while
our fourth chapter considers how new players in this imagination
economy might take advantage of its opportunities to build
strong, rewarding relationships with audiences. Our concluding
chapter, written by Henry Jenkins (AIL’s chief advisor and
senior research fellow), synthesizes the insights laid out in the
foregoing chapters in order to construct a vision of what the
future, or different possible futures, might look like, offering a set
of observations and provocations that might guide our thinking
as we take individual and collective action to determine what sort
of world we want to live in.
The Edison Project • VI
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not be possible without the support of the spon-
sors, board of advisors, research council, lead researchers, and sup-
porting researchers and practitioners of the USC Annenberg Innova-
tion Lab.
Sponsors: 20th Century Fox, Cisco Systems, Inc., DirecTV, EPB,

Fox Broadcasting, Havas Media Group, Home Box Office, Inc.,
IBM, Spark 44, Verizon Foundation and Warner Bros. Entertain-
ment.
Board of Advisors: Sarah Banet-Weiser, Willow Bay, John Seely

Brown, Steve Canepa, Anuraj Goonetilleke, Henry Jenkins, Peter
Marx, Thomas Middleton, Cory Ondrejka, Ernest Wilson, Irving
Wladawsky-Berger.
Lead Researchers: Geoffrey Long, Erin Reilly, Francesca Marie

Smith, and Jonathan Taplin.
Research Council: Sasha Anawalt, François Bar, Elizabeth Currid-

Halkett, Robert Hernandez, Lian Jian, Gabriel Kahn, Seon Ho Kim,
Matthew Le Veque, Anthony B. Maddox, Shrikanth (Shri) Naray-
anan, Susan Resnick West, Jose Sanchez, Cyrus Shahabi, Brian K.
Shepard, Renée Smith-Maddox, Jen Stein, Bill Swartout, Burghardt
Tenderich, and David Ulin.
Supporting Researchers & Practitioners: Tushar Aggarwal, Andrea

Allano, Meryl Alper, Andrea Arellano, Danna Bailey, Jeff Balis,
Anjuli Bedi, Jonathan Belisle, BC Heavy Biermann, Marc Bovee,
Alec Boyle, Daniel Burwen, Althea Capra, Bella Cavallo, Jingrong
Chen, Shangyi Cheng, Matthew Cheung, Chandrashekar Chimbili,
Michelle Choi, Bessie Chu, Abraão Coelho, Lisa Crawford, Todd
Cunningham, Jake de Grazia, Esin Demirci Can, Flint Dille, Carol
Dixon, Austin Drexler, Benjamin Dunn, Jennifer Ellis, Katie Espes-
eth, Brooklyne Gipson, Hui Guo, Ken Hays, Fenni Huang, Jim In-
Acknowledgements • VII
graham, Christine Jambazian, Eric Jung, Alisa Katz, Farhan Khwa-
ja, Niveditha Kumar, Maria Leturia, Ruohan Li, Vanessa Li, Zhao
Li, Malika Lim, Sophie Madej, Haley Madigan, Charles MaGovern,
Aninoy Mahapatra, Peter Marx, Ritesh Mehta, Rachelle Meredith,
Joan Miller, Juvenal Quiñones, Sachin Raja, Daisy Ramirez, Shane
Reilly, Payam Rodd, Andrew Rodgers, Samantha Rothschild, Vin-
cent Routhier, Anna Karina Samia, Avi Sanadhya, Tatiana Santos,
Nishant Saurav, Vanya Saxena, Mitchel Thompson, Nancy Tucker,
Rhea Vichot, Rachel Joy Victor, Cynthia Wang, Steven Weber, Su-
san Resnick West, Robert Ashton Winslow, Danwei Wu, Avery Xie,
Justine Yu, Haoming Zhang, Taoran Zhou.
And a special, double thanks to Ernest J. Wilson III, John Seely

Brown and Henry Jenkins for their vision, leadership, and contribu-
tion to the Edison Project book.
THE NEW METRICS + MEASUREMENT:
LEVERAGING ENGAGEMENT
Erin Reilly
Erin Reilly • 9
In 2014, I spent a lot of time around soccer fans. I regularly visited
the local sports bars, especially the one where LA’s official Real
Madrid fan club hangs out. I never missed a Champions League
game. My friends were constantly sharing with me via email
and social media soccer-related websites, articles, and videos
highlighting soccer fans and their love of the sport. I posted on
blogs, curious to learn more about the sport, and my credit card
had many purchases in Brazil in July—the exact time the World
Cup was happening there.
Assuming that my smartphone and other devices were collecting

all the data associated with the places I went, the people I spoke to,
the sites I visited, and even the purchases I made, it could easily be
concluded that I am an ardent soccer fan. Now if you know me,
you know that this isn’t exactly true. Most of the people in my life
would say I’m not particularly a fan of sports in general, let alone
soccer. However, I was asked to step out of my comfort zone
and study sports fans, to understand their passions and how they
engage with brands—especially the brands that sponsor players,
teams, and events in hopes of giving sports fans experiences that
they want. In doing so, I wound up becoming an interesting sort
of case study in my own project: I became a de facto soccer fan,
based purely on my data trail. Even though there was a specific
motivation at play, and even though it was a specific work-related
goal that drove me to this madness, the label of “soccer fan” is
now a part of my identity that persists today, its remnants visible
in the automatically generated recommendations and ads that are
served to me online.
My experience is, of course, not unique: each of us increasingly

leaves behind trails of data that become crucial in shaping our
digital identity. Especially with the proliferation of mobile
devices, there has been a radical shift in how we think about,
understand, and participate in the world. We are more connected
and informed than ever before. Sometimes by permission (but
often without our awareness), we funnel our locations, habits,
The New Metrics + Measurements • 10
desires, and selves into a pool of knowledge that every company

wants to drink from in order to better understand and serve us.
In fact, marketers, creatives, and nearly everyone else in the

media and entertainment ecosystem are doing everything in their
power to acquire and understand that data. They want to create
relationships with their consumers, so that they remain loyal
audience members, customers, and fans who really love their
show, their team, their brand. Media producers are trying so hard
because our attention is increasingly fragmented across myriad
devices (and, of course, the content that appears on each of
these devices)—or, as described in our chapter on New Screens,
audiences have become ever more “distracted, discerning, and
demanding,” which makes it that much more important for
content creators to attract our attention and foster meaningful
relationships. Whether we’re getting directions, playing a game,
or chatting with our friends, marketers and creatives see these
devices as opportunities to connect with us, across all forms of
media, to leverage us as their audience and/or customers.
But that’s where marketers and creatives are wrong. In fact,

they’re all too drunk on the seemingly boundless promise of
our data, and it’s time to sober up. Data is only one part of the
equation. New technological advances like big data and machine
learning, combined with more direct access to audience sentiment,
behaviors, and preferences via social media and over-the-top
delivery channels, theoretically give the media and entertainment
industry unprecedented insight into what the audience actually
wants. But as a professional in the television industry shared
with us, “We’re drowning in data and starving for insights.” No
matter how much data you have, it can’t quantify all that we are
as humans. A more balanced approach is called for: one that
blends what we can learn from data with a more human, fan-
centric perspective, thus shedding light on the social and cultural
context the data is situated within.
Erin Reilly • 11
Take, for example, the Black Twitter community, a powerhouse
on social media. To be clear, this community is not as segmented
along lines of traditional racial demographics as the name might
suggest: Black Twitter is not solely comprised of Black people,
and not every Black person on Twitter is necessarily a member
of Black Twitter. Rather, Black Twitter is more of a collection of
people displaying, and participating in, a keen understanding of
the cultural norms primarily defined by the African American
culture. Consider the FOX television show Empire and the
following insights provided by AIL Research Assistant Brooklyne
Gipson:
Throughout the first season the show has rewarded

its followers with a multitude of cultural references
that require a pre-existing understanding of the
African American community to understand—i.e.,
Hakeem’s desire to perform at the Highline (a place
where all rappers perform to signify that they’ve
made it), the art of Kehinde Wiley (a notable black
artist) being featured in Luscious’ residence, guest
appearances of artists as big as Fantasia and stars as
well known within the community as Chef Roble.
These are all genuine cultural references that serve
as prime fodder for discussion amongst this highly
social community.
This type of information and understanding of a particular

social group interested in a property could never have been
discovered through traditional market segmentations that focus
on demographics such as age and gender, nor could it have been
identified using the current practices of “audience insights” or
“customer acquisition” that focus mainly on traditional Key
Performance Indicators of engagement that are based on volume
analytics (such as the number of shares on a given video or data
about those key influencers that can help pump up the volume)
or sentiment that quickly provides a pulse of a given group’s
reaction.
There are ways to effectively use data to offer insights about

engagement while still ensuring that we don’t see big data as
the magical box with all the answers (or, for that matter, as the
monster under the bed). The first step in the right direction is
for marketers and creatives to stop thinking of people only in
terms of their identities as audience members or customers of a
given product. Audiences are seen as an assembly of listeners or
spectators, often in a passive position. Customers are regarded
in a similar vein, and at the core of each term is this notion of
quid pro quo—an exchange of money for goods, services, or
experiences.
A better approach is to understand that we all have the potential to

become fans because building a relationship is better than a one-
night stand. Broadly defined, fans have a continued connection
with the property they are passionate about. Some are willing to
declare their affinity through engagement, some have an eagerness
to learn more about their passion, and some want to connect with
others who share their interests. Fans are emotionally linked to
the object of their passion, and they experience their passion
through their own subjective lenses.
We all start out as audience members, but sometimes, when the

combination of factors aligns in just the right way, we become
fans. And most likely, you’re not a fan of everything, but I
bet you’re a fan of something.
The key to leveraging engagement is not just knowing

demographics but understanding the different types of fan
motivations and how to turn that data into actionable insights.
Even if you and your best friend are fans of the same show,
the same team, or the same brand, you’re likely passionate for
different reasons, which means you’ll respond very differently to
different situations and content. Each fan engages in different
Erin Reilly • 13
but discernible ways, and the more we know about their nuanced
behaviors, the more value we can create within their media
experience. Though traditional demographics may give us basic
information about who fans are and where they’re located,
current methods of understanding and measuring engagement
are missing two essential questions: WHY is a fan motivated
and WHAT triggers the fan’s behavior?
At USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, I’ve been leading a research

group to develop a new model called Leveraging Engagement to
better understand fan behaviors and motivations. The Leveraging
Engagement model seeks to address the why and what of fan
behavior, and it can be used as a framework when designing
media strategy—from collecting and analyzing (the right type of)
data to creating new content and, ultimately, building stronger,
long-term relationships with fans.
WHY Is a Fan Motivated?
At the core of the Leveraging Engagement model are certain

motivators of fan engagement, which describe the various ways fans
approach the objects they are passionate about and the goals that
drive their fan behaviors. Building off of Ivan Askwith’s Television
2.0: Reconceptualizing TV as an Engagement Medium,2 where he
offers an initial framework for thinking about viewer engagement,
the Leveraging Engagement model entails a set of motivations
that is both inexhaustible and agile in that, as we explore new
genres of media—from sports to story universes to music—
additional motivations emerge, some of which prove to be more
prevalent in certain genres than others. Here are a few examples
to illustrate some of the motivators we’ve seen apply in different
fandoms:
In sports, some fans engage through Identification,

which we define as strongly associating oneself with a

passion and defining oneself as a fan. Being a sports
fan connects some fans to the place they call home;
for others, their fandom is important because they
believe the team they support says something
about who they are.
In unscripted entertainment where fans engage

with the personality of a celebrity host, the logic
of Advocacy—championing causes on behalf of one’s
passion and taking positions on issues within the
fandom—shines through, as fans rally to support the
celebrity’s causes or the positive impact they have
on the community. Yet we’ve also seen fans spark
conversations through social media to advocate
for their own causes with the hope of inspiring the
celebrity host to shine a spotlight on their personal
missions.
In music, the majority of music festival fans engage

through Social Connection—participating in a
fandom in order to create or deepen relationships with
other fans—in which being around others who love
the same music and enjoy singing along or dancing
makes the experience.
In superhero story universes, the logic of Mastery

Erin Reilly • 15
manifests via a pronounced interest in learning
and understanding detailed information and stories
about one’s passion. Some fans might want to know
everything there is to know, whereas others might
focus on certain details such as a specific period in
time or a deep understanding of the relationships
between characters.
Motivators act as lenses through which fans’ behaviors and desires

to engage with a specific type of content, people, or brands can
be understood. They are individual touchpoints that facilitate
engagement. A fan might think they have a dominant motivator
they gravitate toward in their behavior, but very few, if any, fans
exhibit only one of the motivators at any given time in their
engagement. Instead, fans are usually engaging through mixtures
of these motivators, and common mixtures are recognizable as
recurring fan mindsets.
For example, in looking at music fans in America, one of the fan

mindsets we’ve identified is the Vocalist. As the name implies,
Vocalists listen to and often sing music frequently, most often in
the car, with whatever type of mood they’re in being the driver
of the choice of song or genre. They often look for new music
to listen to and enjoy learning about music and musicians, and
they’ll gladly purchase albums or other products artists might
offer. However, they don’t go out of their way to attend concerts
or festivals, even though they are more likely than most music fans
to play and create music. The Vocalist mindset is a combination
of Play, Identification, and Creation (see Motivators Table for
definitions), but they are not motivated by Social Connection or
Advocacy, as music is a personal journey for them.
In contrast, fans operating with the Mixologist mindset listen to

MOTIVATORS an agile and inexhaustible list of what drives

fan behavior
ENTERTAINMENT enjoying the overall experience and atmosphere
surrounding one’s passion
SOCIAL CONNECTION integrating oneself in a fandom in order to

create or deepen relationships with other fans
MASTERY consistently learning and understanding

detailed information and stories about one’s
passion
IMMERSION losing oneself in the parallel universe
surrounding one’s passion by shifting one’s
focus from real life
IDENTIFICATION strongly associating oneself with a passion and

defining oneself as a fan
PRIDE reflecting one’s fanship in outward appearance

and public behavior
ADVOCACY championing on behalf of one’s passion and

taking positions on issues within the fandom
PLAY participating (virtually or in real life) in

activities related to one’s passion
CREATION expressing interest in the making of
the original subject, or making original
content/media related to one’s passion
EXPLORATION seeking to discover new points of interest

related to one’s passion and/or be in the know
about what’s new and cutting edge related to
the passion
COLLECTION striving to own a complete set of some specific
objects or other items related to one’s passion
Erin Reilly • 17
music just as frequently as the Vocalists, but their passion is tied
closely to friends, family, and other fans who are eager to discuss
and share their knowledge about music and musicians. It is the
feeling of being connected to a community of fans that matters
most, regardless of whether it’s in person at music festivals or
online via fan sites. The Mixologist mindset is a combination of
Social Connection, Advocacy, and Exploration.
In our research, we’ve seen similar mindsets emerge in fandoms

focused on scripted entertainment properties, as well as among
fans who are passionate about unscripted entertainment. There
are fans of transmedia universes who are just as obsessed as
soccer Connoisseurs, eager to master everything there is to know
about the history, characters, locations, and actions inherent
to a specific storyworld and share their knowledge with others.
However, even if fans have the same motivators, their particular
fan mindsets (or the combination of motivators they’re exhibiting
at any one moment) may lead them to manifest their passion via
unique behaviors.
For example, in one of the unscripted entertainment properties

we’ve studied, the mindsets of Do-Gooder and Supporter are both
motivated primarily by Advocacy and Social Connection.
Yet the Do-Gooder is inspired to advocate for a cause that has
personally impacted them and chooses to connect with like-
minded supporters through social media, especially Facebook;
in contrast, Supporters passionately support causes that the
celebrity personality of the program supports, and they admire
the celebrity for the impact she can have on ordinary people that
they identify with—people like them.
The more we conduct research across sports, music, and other

forms of entertainment with multiple teams, stories, and brands,
the more we see how the broad definitions of the Leveraging
Engagement motivators can be used to understand fans, and how
they can be combined into multiple mindsets situated in a variety
of contexts to better illuminate why fans behave the way they do.
WHAT Triggers the Fan’s Behavior?
While most fans may adopt one of these fan mindsets most of the
time, they may shift to other mindsets according to changes in
their unique situational triggers. These triggers, which can take the
form of tangible objects or discrete actions, can be determined
based on a number of factors:
• Where is the fan?

• When does the engagement happen?
• What does the fan know?
• Whom does the fan engage with, and how?
• How does the fan feel, whether it is a physical or an
emotional sensation?
Understanding the objects and actions that inspire certain fan

mindsets will help media producers create content and activities
that can help these fans engage more deeply with a given team,
story, or brand.
Let’s return for a moment to my experience as a soccer fan. At

first glance, you might see me as just an audience member, a
spectator of the sport. The truth is that, especially after my
experiences researching soccer fandom, I actually am a fan of
soccer. However, I’m not your typical fan, and my experience
of being a fan of soccer has been short-lived so far. In other
words, I’m a noob when it comes to this type of fandom, though
some of the soccer fans who adopt more inclusive mindsets have
embraced me as one of their own.
One of the soccer fan mindsets that emerged in our study was
that of the Follower. Followers are not likely to be aligned with
Erin Reilly • 19
any of the motivators we’ve identified except Entertainment,
the most fleeting form of engagement sparked largely by a
desire to strengthen personal connections with friends and
family. Followers enjoy watching, especially during close games
or exciting finishes, but they are not deeply invested in being
fans. The second most common mindset for women to adopt,
the Follower mindset often represents the mothers and wives of
those who are more avid soccer fans; Followers could also be
the fans who are turned off by some of the crazier elements of
sports fandom such as violence, over-the-top cheering, and poor
sportsmanship. They also don’t care much about understanding
details and don’t possess strong opinions, often because they
just don’t know that much about the history, the players, or the
stats.
Even a year out from my entry into soccer fandom, I identify

as a Follower. I was uncomfortable just starting to watch the
game on my own. After all, watching it on my own wasn’t very
entertaining; all I saw was a group of men either standing around
aimlessly or running from one end of the field to the next, which
didn’t strike me as particularly exciting. It wasn’t until I went to
a sports bar with a friend whose knowledge of the players, the
history, and the game far outweighed my own that I started to
look at it from a different angle. His insights helped to fill in the
blank stares that I would have given the TV if I’d been alone.
It was during these initial viewings that I learned the basics of
the game and began to understand why soccer is the world’s
favorite sport.
However, new triggers push you to engage in new ways, and

thus your mindset (and your behavior) can change when you
move from one situation to another. Traveling to the World Cup
was one of those triggers that exposed me to more information
and buzz about soccer. I also had the opportunity to socialize
with devoted fans and attend specialized, large gatherings that
shifted me from a Follower to a Mascot during the World Cup.

Mascots are loud, high-energy, high-emotion, fun-loving fans.
They get wild when matches get exciting. And they have a
great time being fans. They love stories about the sport, but
they don’t pay much attention to statistics and tactics. Most
importantly, Mascots are often partisan to a specific team or
nationality.
One instance in particular illustrates the shift I underwent in

moving from a Follower mentality to that of a Mascot. Before
going to the World Cup, I had spent a lot of time in Los Angeles
with fans in the local Real Madrid club. The female fans in
LA had told me all about Cristiano Ronaldo, the star player
for this team, so when I headed to the World Cup I brought
my favorite t-shirt featuring Ronaldo, who was playing for his
home country, Portugal. Now, if you recall World Cup 2014,
one of the best games was between Portugal and USA where,
in the last second, Portugal scored the tying goal. We watched
this game in a bar surrounded by American fans, crammed
in like sardines; the energy of the room was electric. Fans
were waving American flags and every few minutes the entire
bar would chant, “I believe, I believe that, I believe that we, I
believe that we can win,” or, “USA! USA! USA!” I had hung
around soccer fans throughout the year so by the time I made
it to Rio, I could hold my own in terms of following what was
happening in the game and who the different players were.
I found myself becoming caught up in the moment and, in
the process, my behavior changed. I’d gone to the bar wearing
my Cristiano Ronaldo T-shirt covered by my USA sweatshirt.
Immersed in the experience, thoroughly entertained, my new
motivators were Identification and Pride. It was HOT in that
bar, but in that context and among that crowd, there was no
way in hell I was taking off my USA sweatshirt and revealing
any affinity for a player on the other team. I was right in there
with everyone else, chanting loudly and feeling the pain of
Erin Reilly • 21
being robbed of our victory at the last second. In that moment,
I was a Mascot of the US team, and I still follow them today.
Enter on Your Own Terms
With so many similarities between the two mindsets I just

described, one might draw the surface-level conclusion that
there is a hierarchical ranking into which we can slot various
fan groups. The media and entertainment industry widely
believes that 80% of its revenue comes from the 20% of its
audience frequently referred to as “superfans.” Some might
not consider Followers true fans; in contrast, Connoisseurs
could be classified as superfans. But this sort of taxonomy
papers over the opportunities that each mindset offers in an
engagement strategy, and you’re most likely leaving money
on the table by not catering to the nuanced behaviors each
mindset demonstrates. A hierarchical view also suggests
that you have to start out as a Follower and work your way
through multiple mindsets in a specific order on your way
to becoming a superfan.
This is not what we’ve found. In fact, looking at fans through

the lens of our two core questions—WHY is a fan motivated
and WHAT triggers the fan’s behavior—reveals there are
multiple points of entry into a fan community, with multiple
versions of meaningful engagement.

Take for example the figure shown on page 23. This model
offers insight on the pathways of potential mindset shifts for
soccer fans.
As shown by one of the black bidirectional arrows, Patriots can

transition into Explorers when they start to get excited about
playing soccer, fantasy soccer, or other soccer-related games.
Shifting from this mindset in the other direction, Explorers can

“retire” into a life of Patriotism when real-life circumstances
demand more time and focus, and engagement levels have to
dial back (or at least shift focus) as a result.
Now, take a look at one of the gray bidirectional arrows.

Observers don’t usually become Mascots without “leveling up”
socially into the Follower mindset first, but they can when the
party atmosphere is silliest (at big international tournaments,
for example). Moving in the other direction, most Mascots
have too much single-team focus (rooted in Identification and
Advocacy) to step back into a role as an Observer, but their
loyalty isn’t as strong as that of a Patriot, so they just might
Erin Reilly • 23
make that move if their team is bad for a long stretch of time.
When we move away from using terms such as “segmentation”

and “profiles” that rigidly relegate fans to specific groups and
instead turn the discussion towards “motivators,” “mindsets,”
and “situational triggers,” we begin to operate within a
framework that encourages agility and evolution while also
recognizing the importance and complexity of each fan, no
matter how they like to engage.
Using the Leveraging Engagement Model to

Understand Data
Fans are increasingly exercising greater autonomy with respect

to their media choices, prompting industry leaders to seek new,
refined ways to engage the majority of the audience, all the
way down to the niche communities. However, if your goal is
to better understand fans in order to capitalize on that part of
the value chain, stop right now. You will fail miserably. If you
plan to leverage data to better understand fans, the first rule
to adhere to is this: Fans are not a commodity. They are
motivated to participate for many different reasons (and
often not just to consume the entertainment). Many fans
understand that you are interested in them, but frequently
they feel misunderstood and think of the relationship as one-
sided.
How can we use the Leveraging Engagement model to develop

new Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are measurable?
How do we successfully make data actionable to ensure it is a

valuable asset for a company while, at the same time, respecting
fans and trying to better understand them the way they want to
be understood?
The Internet has offered fans a new voice to share feedback

with creators and media executives on what they like and
don’t like. For example, it keeps track of what fans are willing
to purchase, and sentiment analysis of online data has proven
to be a useful tool in taking the pulse of a specific time or
situation. All of that data is there to use, but it’s important to
understand that data doesn’t make us who we are. We shape
the role data plays in our lives, and it is up to us to effectively
and ethically make meaning from it. As such, data science
should be a key practice in your company (and if it’s not
already, make it so), because it is essential to the craft of
supporting better decision-making. Similarly, as we consider
the potential of new metrics and measurement, we would
do well to start with basic questions about our data-related
practices.
What data should we collect to leverage

engagement with fans?
We’re constantly bombarded with stories about how much data

is available, but when it comes to data and the challenges of
interpreting it, guidance is definitely needed. The first step is to
know what data should be collected. The worst thing you can do
is to open up the door and let everything in. If you hear yourself
saying, “Well, you never know when we’ll need that particular
data—better to have it than to not have it,” then pause and review
the questions you want answered. Media companies cannot gain
essential insights without first knowing what questions to ask and
then collecting the right data to seek the answers they need. Always
keep in mind exactly what question you want answered, and be
ready to return often to that question and reflect on whether it’s
still the right one. If you make the mistake of collecting too much,
then you’ll be in the same situation as so many others who are
“drowning in data and starving for insights.”
Erin Reilly • 25
The data that is necessary to better understand why a fan is
motivated and what triggers fan behavior is not limited to one type
of data set. For one thing, it’s crucial to expand beyond standard
volumetric analysis of social media likes or shares; similarly,
while aggregate data may be clean, it can’t provide the depth and
breadth of information that would allow your data science team to
track users across multiple platforms and conduct semantic and
textual analysis to gain deeper insights into behavioral patterns.
A mixed methods approach that combines both quantitative and
qualitative data helps to better understand fans. In fact, your
company probably doesn’t yet have all the data necessary to truly
see the full answer to these complicated questions, and relying
only on proprietary data isn’t utilizing the power of the Internet—
or businesses similar to your own—that also are trying to reach
the same audience. These bigger questions are driving natural
scaling beyond institutional boundaries, which in turn changes
how we need to do business. We’re trying to communicate, but
we’re looking in the wrong place (or we’re not looking in enough
places). It’s high time to consider new strategies for data collection
and analysis—ones in which answers are found by moving away
from verticals to explore new horizontal structures. What follows
are a few best practices that can help guide us as we develop these
new approaches.
1. Standardize your data collection across

both inter nal and exter nal par tners
It is important to look at social media in correlation
with other types of data in order to effectively
answer questions such as the following:
• Are certain fans who engage through certain

motivators more likely to contribute to,
participate in, and influence spikes in social
media activity, and if so, at what points in time?
• By looking at personality traits common across
multiple fan mindsets, can we determine
whether certain types of fans cluster together

to discuss certain types of content? If so, what
is the content?
• What triggers fans’ discussions? Is it possible
for brands to trigger substantial/meaningful
discussion with fans?
Bringing together multiple data sets is the first step

towards answering these questions, but in order
to successfully do so it’s imperative to standardize
data collection so each set can truly interface with
and be meaningfully linked to others. When we
studied a celebrity-driven unscripted entertainment
property, we were looking across multiple sources
of data, from the show website to the celebrity
website to Facebook to survey data, yet because
the data sets from these different sources were not
standardized it was difficult to identify relationships
across the whole.
Requests for data collection come in many forms—

web traffic, social networks, mobile phones, and
Nielsen, to name a few.Yet often, these data sets are
owned and/or managed by multiple teams within
a company or even external partners, and often
the protocols for each group are different. With
so much data being collected, there needs to be a
priority on standardizing data collection, such as
including time stamps, fixing broken video links,
and even formatting across all data sets.
2. Step outside your house

Want to better understand your fans? Then step
outside “your metaphorical house.” One of the
filters we incorporated into our data collection was
Erin Reilly • 27
“Authored by the Brand” versus “Not Authored
by the Brand,” with sub-filters that included things
like content properties, characters, artists or team
members, events, writers, and culture. This became
an interesting lens through which to look at the data.
We found that data created and “Authored by the
Brand” vastly outnumbered that “Not Authored
by the Brand” in terms of pure volume, which is
not surprising, considering the amount of posts
and Twitter campaigns pushed out with trailers,
celebrity endorsements, and other mechanisms to
generate buzz and build momentum.
Complementary to “Authored by the Brand”

content, the content most reshared was celebrity
posts and tweets. Even though these messages
were “Not Authored by the Brand,” they helped
bring additional fans into the conversation—fans
who may have been following the actor, artist,
or musician who was offering their endorsement
much more closely than they were the property
under consideration.
A majority of the “Authored by the Brand” and

celebrity endorsement conversations happened on
Twitter and Facebook. The content shared offered
provoked minimal conversation or discussion
that was simple at best. The motivators fans
mainly engaged through were a combination of
Entertainment (with celebrities posting text and
images like “On set. Behind the scene. this set is
amazing!” or “Awesome mix, bad ass soundtrack”)
and Social Connection (with celebrities again
posting text and images like “Circled back with
some ol’ friends” or “Does anyone have a WITTY
CAPTION for this fun look back pic?”).
Though their contributions were not as often

reshared, fans who spread messages ended up
being motivated just the same with comments
like, “I was waiting for this.” It might just be the
affordances of these two platforms, Twitter with
its 140-character limit and Facebook framed by
a quick-to-digest newsfeed doesn’t offer the right
space to foster richer conversations.
The conversations and context on the “Not

Authored by the Brand” pages and sites, some
found on Twitter and Facebook but majority found
on sites like Reddit, provided a more nuanced
understanding of what triggers fans to engage with
the property. Reddit offered longer, more in depth
posts and the motivators Creation, Advocacy, and
Mastery emerged more often than on the other
two platforms. For example, a post on Reddit might
share a potential theory of the story unfolding on
television and ask for thoughts and feedback from
the community.
3. Foster interdisciplinar y teams and

mixed methods when seeking answers
It’s important that a research analytics insights
team consists of both qualitative and quantitative
experts working together to develop the right set of
questions to answer, because this shared expertise
often helps draw deeper meaning out of volumetric,
textual, and predictive analytics. Volumetric
analysis is most prevalent in analytics today and
allows us to identify specific performance metrics,
such as the amount of time spent viewing content
along with numbers of comments, shares, and likes.
A volumetric analysis helps determine problem
Erin Reilly • 29
areas where the performance metrics clearly dip.
However, there can be a huge amount of signal
in this noise of volumetric analysis, so additional
methods are required.
Sentiment analysis has been widely used to begin

addressing the signal-to-noise ratio and provide a
quick way to assess the attitude of a conversation
by identifying the text as positive, negative, or
neutral. However, previous research at the lab3
has identified the pitfalls to this, especially with
inaccuracies related to evaluating language features
such as sarcasm.
Advanced approaches to text analysis using natural

language processing can help provide insights into
motivations, behaviors, and situational triggers
for engaging with content, people, or brands.
In order to conduct such semantic analysis,
text generated from, for example, Facebook
comments are reviewed as a syntactic structure
with meaning and, whether it is a post or a
comment on a post, the content is looked at with
relational understanding. This type of method
requires an analyst to first manually code the
data in order to train learning algorithms to
solve regression problems and help predict a
specific performance metric—which proves that
the understanding you derive from your data is
only as good as your team. The more your team
understands the content, people, or brands they
are researching, the more they can provide the
correct information to the machine that is learning
how to support their efforts. And the best way for
your team to understand the content, people, or
brands is to look at things through multiple lenses,
whether by watching the programming or listening

to the music, interviewing the fans, or personally
trying out what a brand has to offer. The more
they are equipped with well-rounded knowledge of
the different contexts associated with the content,
people, or brands, the more likely they’ll be to grasp
patterns that are not always right at the surface
when looking at the data.
Mapping the New Metrics and Measurement
So what can we say about this new analytical landscape in

which we have all of these exciting new tools for data analysis
and yet struggle to make sense of what to do with it all? When
you move beyond volumetric and sentiment analytics that at
best are descriptive but provide little in the way of actionable
insights, we begin to explore more semantic analytics that offer
new insights into behavioral and textual analytics.
With this, language and motivation become increasingly

important. Language is created by people, and it differs
depending on the culture it is situated within. Take, for example,
the many different ways people talk about soccer (or football
if you’re from a part of the world other than the United States,
where football has a completely different meaning). People,
especially in mediated communication, hardly ever use proper
English. They are complex and metaphorical in how they share
meaning, often using slang and jargon, emojis, and imagery
specific to the culture. And the minute we try to figure it out,
let alone collect data and train a machine, culture evolves and
people mix it up again. As if the challenges of trying to model
machines to understand the nuances of textual language
weren’t enough, we now face rapid developments in terms
of emojis, images, audio, and video (and all the motivations,
representations, and understandings that are bound up with
Erin Reilly • 31
them), which will likely become increasingly more complex in
years to come.
Simply put, the mechanisms we rely on in collecting, processing,

and making sense of data have the capacity to directly shape
the rewards we get in return. Apply, for example, thoughtful
contextualization and a human touch to the process of training
your data models, and you’re far more likely to derive a more
deeply nuanced, contextualized, and human picture of fans,
gaining unique insights as to their mindsets, tastes, proclivities,
and interests. These insights can help you better understand and
appreciate what fans value—and how you, in turn, can value the
fans.
THE NEW FUNDING + BUSINESS MODELS:
BUSINESS STRATEGIES FOR A SHIFTING
MEDIA LANDSCAPE
Jonathan Taplin and Anjuli Bedi
Jonathan Taplin and Anjuli Bedi • 33
The rise of digital distribution has thrown the media industry into
a new era that presents a range of challenges and even greater
opportunities. Never in the history of entertainment have there
been so many distribution options, so much content produced,
and such a widespread ability to reach a global audience. With
these developments comes fragmentation amongst media players
competing for market share. The analogue world that ruled
American electronic media for a century starting in 1890 was
about the allocation of scarcity. As such it had an economic logic
that ensured that the production of content would be remunerative.
In the 1960s William Paley, CEO of CBS, said that owning one of
the three television networks was “a license to print money.”4 It
also ensured a certain kind of collective consensus in our culture.
“All in the Family” could have an audience of 20 million viewers a
week. The digital world that has followed is based on abundance,
creating an extraordinary degree of audience fragmentation,
which destroyed the economics of the analog age as this chart of
monthly deliveries to TV advertisers demonstrates.
The recent 30% decline in major media stocks was brought

about by the realization that both ad revenue and subscription
revenue were in a “secular decline.”5 In the face of this reality,
The New Funding + Business Models • 34
most media companies have turned to the mobile platform as

a possible growth strategy. Today almost 60% of Facebook ads
and 50% of YouTube views are on a mobile device.6 We were
assured by pundits like Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson that
“The Long Tail” of this digital abundance would mean a much
more democratic distribution of the spoils of the digital age.7 But
the Long Tail is somewhat of a myth, at least as evidenced by the
current music business in which 80% of the revenue is earned by
1% of the content.8
And of course these same “winner takes all” economics apply

to the world of mobile. Google has 85% market share in online
search and advertising.9 Google’s Android mobile operating
system has 80% market share.10 Facebook has 77% market
share in mobile social media. Content owners are facing far
more powerful monopolies than the TV networks ever posed.
Some online news organizations are already getting over 70% of
their inbound traffic from Facebook.11 As former Secretary of
Labor Robert Reich recently wrote, “Big Tech has been almost
immune to serious antitrust scrutiny, even though the largest
tech companies have more market power than ever. Maybe that’s
because they’ve accumulated so much political power.”12
The implications for all of this on the future of the media business
are profound as FX president John Landgraf recently pointed
out. “There is simply too much television,” Landgraf said; “We‘re
in the late stages of a bubble.”13 In a world in which 400 hours of
video are uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day14 the
commodification of what was once considered an art (or at least
a craft) became inevitable. While one could argue that the current
“Golden Age of Television” benefits from the proliferation of
niche content, the evidence of art that will survive “15 minutes
of fame” on YouTube has yet to be demonstrated. The economic
underpinning of such a business—online advertising driven
by deep user surveillance—also cannot be sustained, pushing
against the laws of supply and demand. The average “cost per
click“ of a YouTube commercial has fallen 30% over the last
year15 as supply overwhelms demand. Add to that the fact that
even Google admits that 50% of the ad views are “non-human“
(click bots),16 the return to advertisers is riddled with fraud. The
addition of ad blockers to Apple’s IOS 9 platform virtually assure
more problems for the ad supported content model.
All of these factors lead us to surmise only three paths out of a

coming media implosion. First, the number of cable networks will
have to shrink radically from the current 400 to perhaps no more
than 100. Secondly, the online advertising business will have to
dramatically reform a broken system. Finally, many more media
organizations are going to have to adopt a paid or subscription
media model, especially as relates to the mobile platform.
Downsizing Cable
The Innovation Lab was one of the first research organizations

to predict the radical shift17 in viewer demand from the linear TV
format to the on demand platforms that are beginning to dominate
viewer attention, especially in the younger demographics.
The combination of the previously cited decline in ad delivery
with the additional problem of “cord-cutting” will accelerate
the secular decline of linear TV. As the analyst Craig Moffett
wrote in a note to clients on August 7, 2015, the Pay TV sector
is shrinking at about 1% year over year, while “new household
formation has accelerated, supposedly offering a tailwind for new
subscribership. The new households are nowhere to be found in
the Pay TV data. Adjusted for the growth in new households,
cord-cutting and/or cord-severing has claimed nearly 2 million
households over the last year.”
We see the possibility that major cable and satellite players like
Comcast and DirecTV may simply drop significant numbers of
cable networks or demand that they only pick the channels they
want to carry. Networks like Viacom, which has over 30 channels

when only three (MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon) are
viable, will be extremely vulnerable in the coming years. Those
programming firms that can adapt to an on demand consumption
model will prosper, while those that remain tied to the linear
TV format will suffer. Cable operators will allocate much more
spectrum to broadband TV delivery and shrink the number of
linear channels. As media analyst Craig Moffet pointed out six
years ago in “The Dumb Pipe Paradox” (Bernstein)18 cable firms
may actually be more profitable abandoning the linear video
business.
Reforming the Online Ad Business
As programmatic advertising (those ads that follow you around

the web) has become more dominant the problem of ad fraud has
reached epidemic proportions, according to Digiday.
Ad fraud is top of mind in programmatic advertising,

and the only debate is about the extent of the problem.
Rather large, if you go by a bracingly frank

presentation by AppNexus chief data scientist
Catherine Williams at ExchangeWire’s ATS
London event on Monday. According to Williams,
filters deployed earlier this year by AppNexus saw
transactions on its platform drop by two thirds.19
This is clearly an unsustainable problem that must be addressed.

Advertisers clearly are not getting what they paid for and both
agencies and ad exchanges seem in denial about the extent of the
problem. As Bloomberg recently reported:
Programmatic ad-buying systems don’t necessarily

differentiate between real users and bots, or between
websites with fresh, original work, and Potemkin
sites camouflaged with stock photos and cut-and-
paste articles.16
We predict this will lead to a war between Apple and

Google on the mobile ad platform. As The Verge
recently noted, “With iOS 9 and content blockers,
what you‘re seeing is Apple‘s attempt to fully drive
the knife into Google‘s revenue.“20 In general we feel
that the “Ad-Tech” business, which is mostly based
on surveillance marketing using programmatic tools
has been harmful to premium content suppliers. As
programmatic ads are tied to the individual user and
not the content, there is no premium being paid for
quality content. Furthermore the business is like the
Wild West, with many shady operators and should
be ripe for consolidation as the chart below shows.
“I can think of nothing that has done more harm

to the Internet than ad tech,” says Bob Hoffman,
a veteran ad executive, industry critic, and author
of the blog the Ad Contrarian. “It interferes
with everything we try to do on the Web. It has
cheapened and debased advertising and spawned
criminal empires.” Most ridiculous of all, he adds,
is that advertisers are further away than ever
from solving the old which-part-of-my-budget-
is-working problem. “Nobody knows the exact
number,” Hoffman says, “but probably about 50
percent of what you’re spending online is being
stolen from you.”20
If the programmatic ad business was conceived as a solution to

the “I know 50% of my ads are wasted, I just don’t know which
50%” problem, then it is clearly not succeeding. We believe that
this could lead to a total rejection of the programmatic model
on the part of major brands and top publishers. One of the
strengths of the media and ad agency businesses has been their
incredible diversity. Small agencies were able to develop creative
skill sets that led them to growth and consolidation with larger
shops (e.g. Chiat\Day). For traditional ad agencies as well as
established publishers with high quality content, the move away
from programmatic could mean a return to the classic role of
the agency as media buyer, where context matters greatly to ad
placement. This would also prevent the kind of monopoly power
being exercised by Google in the search ad business, spreading
to the rest of the advertising ecosystem. The combination of ad
blockers, bot fraud and consolidation will result in a resurgence
of premiums being paid to advertise on quality content sites. This
of course could benefit major media firms and signal a move
away from the commoditized YouTube platform. But just how
this plays out on the mobile platform will be the key question for
ad-supported media to answer in the next three years.
The New Mobile Model
The mobile platform, which is projected to reach 4.5 billion

smartphones by 2018 will be the key to content’s future. In this
complex and rapidly shifting environment, media companies can
seize the opportunity to scale content, reach new audiences and
adopt new payment and distribution systems. We believe that
many of these new mobile distribution platforms will employ
a subscription or micro-payment models. Conversations with
the CEO of one of the largest MCN’s, points out that they are
already viewing their massive YouTube traffic as a loss leader: an
unprofitable business that hopefully could build awareness and
lead viewers to their SVOD service.
The success of multiple SVOD channels depends on four factors:

1. How well companies can leverage a world of
4.5 billion smartphones to scale content and
generate revenue
2. The number of SVOD players that can compete
in the marketplace
3. Media companies’ ability to facilitate discovery
so consumers can easily find the content they
want
4. How well media companies can work with
existing powerhouses like Netflix, Amazon,
Google, and Apple so the market becomes a
self-sustaining, albeit consolidated, ecosystem
as opposed to an oligopoly
The media companies that can scale their content, be a primary

contender in the SVOD market, enable consumers to find

content, and form partnerships with ISPs, content aggregators,
and other content companies will firmly establish themselves so
they emerge as competitive players in a future media landscape.
Leveraging 4.5 Billion Smartphones
In a world of 4.5 billion smartphones,21 media companies have

the unprecedented ability to scale content to audiences across the
globe. For example, a 50-cent micropayment from 5% of the total
global audience would yield $175 million. Obviously companies
will have to rethink the kind of programming that will be most
successful on a mobile device. This may mean some sort of mini-
serialization formatting of content into ten-minute episodes. Short
web comedies like “The Guild” point towards some early efforts
in this space, but the serialized drama that is so dominant on
TV has yet to be really explored in a short form that would work
for mobile devices. Given that comedy has never really scaled in
the international market, it would seem that short serial drama,
perhaps as sponsored content, is the next real opportunity. But
to unlock that potential, industry players will also need to find
innovative solutions for managing piracy, leveraging emerging
payment systems in tandem with micropayments, and increasing
the efficiency of online advertising.
Piracy
While piracy can both harm and help media companies, it has
certainly grown more rampant as smartphone penetration has
increased. When Popcorn Time was relaunched in the first
quarter of 2014, its app had 1.4 million downloads at the end of
the second quarter.22 That sobering growth rate promoted Netflix
CEO Reed Hastings to call Popcorn Time and other pirate sites
Netflix’s strongest competitors.23 New social streaming platforms
like Meerkat and Periscope have also threatened profit margins
by streaming live events, including the Pacquiao-Mayweather
fight in April 201524.
Search engines like Google provide the main source of customers

for pirate sites, as this chart of European Google searches
demonstrates23 that the pirate competes head to head with Netflix.
While piracy has hurt profit margins, some industry players have
successfully capitalized on piracy to improve their services and
increase the popularity of their content.
HBO’s Game of Thrones, for example, is the most popular and

pirated TV show of all time.25 However, studies show that
many Game of Thrones viewers transitioned from watching the
show on pirated sites to purchasing an HBO subscription.26
Piracy may even be a factor in making Game of Thrones the
most widely popular TV show because piracy has increased
the size of its audience, thereby increasing the number of fans
purchasing Game of Thrones merchandise. Aside from HBO,
Netflix has also parlayed the competition from piracy into a

data mining opportunity to enhance its user experience.
So how do media companies take advantage of piracy? If they

adopt a consumer-oriented strategy in which the right content is
funneled to the right audience at the right price, they can develop
a relationship with devoted fans and upsell them.
Nine Inch Nails adopted that strategy when they released their
much anticipated album, Ghosts I-IV, in 2008. They believed their
fans would be willing to pay for their music while the majority
of listeners would pirate their album. As such, they released the
album for free but also released limited edition deluxe and ultra-
deluxe packages for $300 on their website targeted towards loyal
fans. Even though the music was available for free, devoted fans
pushed record sales to $1.6 million in its first week.27
Emerging Payment Systems and Micropayments
Micropayments exploded onto the marketplace in 2005 with

Apple’s iTunes store, catalyzing a widespread utilization of the
micropayment business model. Paypal defines a micropayment
as any payment below $12.28 For users, micropayments allow
them the ease and flexibility of purchasing exactly the content
they want at a very low cost. For the business, the model allows
them to monetize a wider range of content and still generate high
returns when operating at scale. Paypal for example charges 5%
for micropayments and 2.9% for normal payments,29 allowing
it to generate higher returns from smaller purchases. Facebook
has also adopted the micropayment model with its virtual
currency, Facebook credits. Even with the widespread adoption
of micropayment systems, many businesses and analysts find
significant flaws in the model.
Critics of the micropayment model such as columnist and

Professor Clay Shirky have argued that “It looks like it will work,
but it doesn’t, because users just don’t like it.”30 Shirky defines
micropayments as small digital payments between a quarter and
a fraction of a penny, far below the micropayment rates set by the
iTunes store’s $0.99 and above for a single song. This presents
the argument that micropayments can be leveraged successfully
at higher price points when the payment justifies what Nick Szabo
refers to as mental transaction costs, the energy used to deliberate
whether to purchase a specific good.31 Shirky argues that the
primary issue, however, is that the pay-per-song model leveraged
by the iTunes Store is not the user’s preference.30 Rather, there
are no legal commercial alternatives and so the small payment
model continues to survive.
That commercial alternative could be found in the streaming

model, which has become increasingly popular with Spotify’s and
Netflix’s dominance of the marketplace. Users have become less
compelled to pay for a single piece of content when they have
access to an entire library for a small monthly fee that they often
have on autopay. Apple’s recent figures reflect this shift in user
preferences. According to 29 Apple analysts at Fortune Magazine,
iTunes’ growth rate halved from 2013 to 2014.32 This finding
reflects the growing trend of iTunes store customers shifting to
competing streaming providers such as Spotify and Pandora
rather than paying for specific pieces of content. As Shirky
contends, even the porn industry, the e-commerce geniuses,
haven’t been able to leverage micropayments successfully.30
Despite the micropayment model facing an uncertain future,
several companies have leveraged the model successfully due
to the following factors: achieving scale, perfecting the user
experience.
Candy Crush and Angry Birds have become such phenomenons

because they are addictive games that are very shareable. Another
example is Chinese gaming company 3X, which has incorporated
micropayments for additional features so at the point of greatest
engagement, the user is most compelled to purchase an additional

feature to enhance his or her experience. Additionally, with a
global user base, the mathematics present a compelling case for
micropayments when functioning at high scalability.
With new digital payment technologies entering the marketplace,

including the Akimbo card and Bitcoin, companies have a wider
range of options for types of payment plans to incorporate into
the overall micropayment model to reduce overall transaction
costs. The companies that can successfully incorporate those
technologies into their user experience will effectively monetize
through micropayments. However, they will still have to face the
growth of streaming services that have grown to dominate the
cultural and media landscape. In addition, the introduction of the
Apple Watch, combined with Apple Pay provides a completely
new app development environment in the microtransaction
landscape. We believe developments in this area will be critical to
the next stage.
Making SVOD Work: Affordability, Partnerships,

and Audience Engagement
Cord-cutting has become the status quo as consumers

continue dumping their cable companies in favor of the more
affordable and flexible media consumption that SVOD enables.
Consumers generally subscribe to several SVOD providers and
complementary devices, like Amazon Fire TV and Roku. Given
the content acquisition costs for building content libraries, the
cost of developing original content, and the low price point
needed to retain customers, there will be a limited number of
successful players in this space.
To determine the number of SVOD providers that could be

competitive, assume consumers subscribe to all major players—
Amazon Prime, Netflix and Hulu Plus—and new and impending
entrants HBO and ESPN. If a consumer were to subscribe to all
of those services, he or she would be paying an estimated $46.22
per month plus $40 for broadband. In contrast, the cost of the
average cable service is $80. Assuming a cable subscriber is also
a broadband subscriber, a consumer could subscribe to eight
SVOD channels before SVOD is less economically beneficial to
a consumer than cable TV.
In this environment, SVOD players have two options:
1. Form partnerships to strengthen their

competitive positions. Content producers
could partner to launch their own SVOD
service. Producers could also partner with
specific aggregators to release their content.
2. Strengthen their relationship with their

consumers. By communicating directly with
consumers especially through social media
channels, SVOD players can strengthen their
competitive position and increase the power of
their brand.
Ultimately, the quality of content, the strength of existing

partnerships, and brand equity will determine a player’s long-
term strategy in the SVOD market. Clearly as YouTube enters the
SVOD market with their “Red” offering, the competition among
well capitalized players will get more fierce. Considering the
market capitalization of Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook,
it’s rather clear that the traditional content players are outmatched
when it comes to the ability to invest in new delivery platforms
and content. Time will tell if FX’s Landgraf is right and this is a
fool’s game that everyone loses.13
Connecting the Right Content to the Right

Consumer
As consumers continue to be inundated with media options, they

face the challenge of discovering new content they would actually
enjoy. Before recommendation engines existed, most consumers
relied on suggestions from friends or serendipitous encounters
with content for discovery. Then came Netflix’s recommendation
system. Even with the flaws of many recommendation systems,
their popularity highlights that curating the right content to
the right consumer is crucial for monetizing audiences. For a
consumer, an ideal world would be one in which she arrives home
after an exhausting day at work, voice navigates to recommended
TV shows, and finds episodes of Saturday Night Live that have
already been curated to her preferences, interests, and the time
of the day.
We refer you to the work in the previous chapter on Leveraging

Engagement. Although this is a subject too large to handle here,
we believe that our work in that area will lead to new kinds of
content curation. The more precise a media company’s curation
system, the greater the benefit to the consumer and the higher
the switching costs. The key to implementing this strategy is to
leverage big data to understand the psychological and behavioral
attributes of fans and more accurately curate the right content for
the right audience.
The Future: A Consolidated Industry
It is impossible to discuss the future of the media business model

without discussing the five behemoths dominating distribution:
Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix. While each of
these players has a different business model, controls a different
segment of the value chain, and makes use of its resources in
other business units to bolster its content distribution service,
they are the gatekeepers through which content creators reach
their audiences. In such a fragmented industry with few powerful
players, the industry could evolve in three ways.
Scenario 1: Vertically-integrated oligopolies made up of

ISPs, aggregators and content creators.
If net neutrality is not enforced, ISPs will continue controlling
the supply and price of distributing content over-the-top, causing
further consolidation between ISPs, aggregators and content
creators. The powerful aggregators would not need to merge with
ISPs to continue distributing content. However, they would likely
integrate backwards by developing their own fiber network (as
Google has done) or integrate forwards by producing content (as
Netflix has).
Scenario 2: The five oligopolies strengthen their control of

distribution, weakening the power of content creators.
Assuming net neutrality is enforced, ISPs could not charge
preferential pricing and slow the flow of content. As a result,
the five existing powerhouses could continue to dominate the
industry and expand their control through strategic acquisitions
and partnerships. For the average content producer, this would
create an unfriendly environment that would force content
producers to consolidate in order to shift the balance of power.
Scenario 3: Content producers strengthen their relationship

with their fans.
Assuming government regulation firmly establishes net
neutrality, content producers could strengthen their direct-to-
consumer channels by deepening their relationship with their
fans. Developing a data mining and analytics strategy would help
media companies identify who their fans are, what platforms they
view, and how they interact with certain types of content.Through
understanding their behavior and communicating directly with
them on social media or through a website, content producers
can identify and monetize niche segments.
Conclusion
The digital revolution has given media companies the

unprecedented ability to scale content, connect with audience
segments, and monetize content. Content creators even have the
power to bypass traditional distribution channels by identifying
and establishing a strong, direct relationship with their audience.
However, the industry has also grown incredibly fragmented due
to the flood of new entrants ranging from creators to distributors.
In this chaotic environment, Apple, YouTube, Netflix, Facebook,
and Amazon strongly impact what content gets seen, who sees
it, and the price they pay to do so. As content creators become
more sophisticated in their data analysis, they can strengthen
the direct-to-consumer channel and upset the existing power
structure. But the role of the major Silicon Valley players is not
to be underestimated. Given that, as of December 31, 2015,
Alphabet’s (GOOG) Market Capitalization was $262 Billion
and Viacom’s was $14 Billion; that Apple’s market cap was $587
Billion and Time Warner’s was $52 Billion,33 it doesn’t take
a genius to understand where the market power lies. Thus the
future of the traditional Hollywood studio may be to rethink their
organizations into lean, nimble players, open to sell content to
anyone and able to move quicker than the Silicon Valley giants.
THE NEW SCREENS
Francesca Marie Smith
Francesca Marie Smith • 50
The digital revolution brought with it a wave of new technologies
(like the Internet) and practices (like over-the-top content and
Web 2.0 business models) that fundamentally changed the face of
the media and entertainment industry. One of the simplest ways
of conceptualizing these changes is by looking at the screens that
characterize our daily lives: audiences who once gathered around
a television set in the living room or kitchen and occasionally
treated themselves to an outing at the movie theater now find a
whole new assortment of screens awaiting them at every turn,
from their desktop computers and mobile displays to interactive
kiosks and dynamic billboards.
In more recent years, we’ve seen the influx of New Screens that
bring us even closer to the realm of science fiction, with virtual
reality headsets, wearable devices like Google Glass and the
Apple Watch, and a rapidly growing Internet of Things changing
the ways we play, learn, work, and live. What’s more, these ever-
present and ever-connected devices allow content creators
to both push content to and pull data from users with greater
frequency and finer granularity than ever before. As the media
landscape becomes populated with more and more screens, and
new streams of data are unlocked, we have at our fingertips quite
literally a whole world of possibilities for creating customized,
ubiquitous media experiences—but we also face a new set of
challenges to overcome as well.
As technology has changed, so too have audiences. They’ve

become increasingly distracted, discerning, and demanding: their
attention is frequently split as they move fluidly between various
devices, often managing multiple screens at the same time;34 they
have access to an unprecedented catalog of content, granting them
the luxury of choice and inviting them to develop finely tuned
tastes when it comes to their media consumption; and, although
there is still some friction in the media ecosystem, the realities
of on-demand viewership have stretched so far that audiences
can reasonably expect to access nearly any piece of content, on
The New Screens • 51
nearly any device, at nearly any time and at a relatively low cost.
Their expectations are high, and in a flooded media marketplace
that, while perhaps ultimately unsustainable,35 nonetheless offers
viewers an embarrassment of riches across myriad networks and
platforms,36 they can afford to be picky—and it’s understandable
that they would be frustrated when their expectations are not met.
Of course, this isn’t to say that modern audiences are purely

antagonistic or overly judgmental, nor that their allegiances are
always tenuous; even if they are likely to flit from screen to screen
and from one bit of content to another according to their whims,
they are just as likely to binge. The implication, then, is that in
some ways audiences can be more dismissive of media content
than they have in the past, yet once they choose to care about
something, they’ll dive in more fully (and want more ways to
engage) than they ever have before. In this reconfigured media
and entertainment industry, the risks for creative professionals
and executives may be daunting, but the potential rewards are
also promising.
How, then, can content creators navigate the brave new world of the
New Screens, crafting enriched media experiences while also fostering
sustainable profits?
Let’s start by identifying three core characteristics that help drive

media success (for entertainment programming, advertising, or
any other type of content) using more traditional technologies:
1. The spark of novelty

Although there’s something to be said for
timeless storytelling, and although there’s a fine
line between a hook and a gimmick, it’s also true
that—particularly in an age where audiences are
bombarded with media options—novelty is a simple
way to pique interest. Take, for example, the highly
successful marketing campaigns surrounding
HBO’s True Blood, beginning with a pre-launch
initiative delivering beautifully packaged samples of
“synthetic blood” and other mysterious artifacts to
influential horror bloggers.37, 38 Though it was likely
the show’s consistent high quality that made True
Blood a long-term success, creative marketing that
capitalized on novel strategies and unconventional
messages (and ultimately inspired 1.5 million
viewers to tune in for the series premiere)39
certainly helped.
2. An invitation to get involved

It’s important to remember that fans will always
find ways to engage (emotionally, if nothing
else) with their favorite show, team, or character,
regardless of what official avenues are provided for
them to do so. That said, shows like AMC’s The
Walking Dead have done an incredible job inviting
their fans to become part of their storyworld via
apps like “The Walking Dead: Dead Yourself” and
even a so-called Zombie School where people can
train to be extras on the show. Other shows might
ask audience members to decide how a story will
unfold (like the recent CBS reboot of Hawaii Five-
0 did, letting the Twitterverse determine whodunit
and thus select which season finale would be
aired).40 However the invitation is offered, audience
members will often be quick to come play—and
they’ll often build stronger, more meaningful
relationships with a property or creator as a result.
3. Serendipity, or the right content in the right

context
This characteristic requires perhaps the least
amount of explanation; it’s been one of the ultimate
goals guiding advertisers and broadcasters alike
since the dawn of the modern media age. That said,
the idea of serendipity may now be more crucial
than ever before. Amidst a rising cacophony of
media messages coming at us from nearly every
angle, the most successful content will be that which
is most meaningful for its audience: relevant, fitting,
and worthwhile, without feeling like an invasion.
Advertising has become adversarial, with consumers
consistently trying to find ways to avoid the relentless
pursuit of marketers by employing, for example,
ad-blockers (which then inspires the creation of
additional software designed to allow marketers
to bypass these ad-blockers and thus counter this
countermeasure).41 Other defensive strategies might
include the use of DVRs that allow viewers to skip
ads, or subscriptions to ad-free streaming services
like Netflix and Spotify Premium. Simply put,
the days of the captive audience are over, making
it more important than ever to build a respectful
relationship between creator and consumer that
offers mutual benefit.
Of course, the roads to success are many and varied; it’s certainly
possible to identify and imagine media success that eschews the
New Screens altogether (and, indeed, disregards the goals outlined
above). However, for the savvy creator looking to explore all the
opportunities afforded by the present media moment, the New
Screens offer a whole new world of possibilities that push these
three trajectories to a different level entirely. In addition, these
characteristics serve as useful standards to help us evaluate new
technologies as they appear.
To answer our initial question, then, the technological affordances

of the New Screens—including mobile and wearable devices,
immersive virtual reality headsets, and a whole world of smart and
connected objects—offer content creators unique opportunities to
serve the basic human desires for novelty, involvement, and serendipity.
The Potential of the New Screens
Novelty
By definition, the New Screens are nothing if not novel, and just
as every new device from the Kinetoscope forward has seemed
to shimmer with the promise of the future, today’s virtual reality
goggles and watches we can talk to continue to capture our sense
of wonder. As a result, creators who can make use of things like
Microsoft’s HoloLens, the Oculus Rift, and other shiny new
toys have an inherent advantage over those who rely on more
mundane technologies like the television screen.
The Future of StoryTelling (or FoST)—which is centered on

an annual summit but also features short films, ongoing talks,
a traveling museum exhibit, a competition for innovative
storytelling, and more—highlights examples of such novel
storytelling;42 consider, for example, the Google Virtual Cube
film that switches between narrative threads as you flip between
different faces of a physical cube, or Goldilocks and the Three
Bears: The Smelly Version, which includes puffs of scented air that
complement your reading of the classic tale. But the lesson to be
learned from the FoST showcases is more nuanced than it might
seem: while there is a certain amount of novelty to be gained
from porting content to an exciting new platform, the real spark
happens when we see new types of stories or experiences that are
only made possible by these new technologies.
The Lighthouse in the Woods, a prototype developed at the

Annenberg Innovation Lab, explored this concept on two levels.43
AIL’s Geoffrey Long used the Oculus Rift and Unity to create a
virtual reality ghost story, featuring dynamic portraits on the walls
of a study that fade to darkness as the characters they represent
meet a grim demise, yet become illuminated once more as each
character returns to haunt their family. On one level, the Lighthouse
prototype shows how a “smart home” featuring connected photo
frames or multiple screens hung on the wall could be used to
create a unique storytelling experience, changing the audience’s
environment in subtle (and novel) ways to augment or express
components of a narrative. On another level, Long used the
virtual reality environment to demonstrate how creators could
prototype these sorts of dynamic environments without needing
to actually build them in the real world. Both concepts highlight
the unique attributes of a medium—the ability to manipulate a
living space for narrative ends and the ability to virtually playtest
a narrative environment—in a way that goes beyond basic novelty,
instead cultivating an experience that is more or less unique to
the technology in question.
As we consider ways to design new media content for the New

Screens, then, we should ask ourselves at every turn what stories
we’re able to tell with this technology, and what new angles,
sensations, plot structures, or other narrative elements are now
available to us. Remember: the novelty of the New Screens lies not
only in the strangeness of the technology, but also in the new kinds of
experiences that are made possible.
Involvement
Many of the New Screens incorporate touch, voice control, and
other sensors that enable them to be inherently interactive. FoST,
for example, has highlighted experiences that use iPads, facial
recognition, and Microsoft Kinect sensors to let people control
the action. Often times, these experiences blur the boundaries
between stories and games, as the audience/players can actively
shape the unfolding of a story by performing certain tasks or
making certain choices.
While interactive interfaces provide one mechanism by which

audiences can get involved in a media experience, we can also
consider another type of involvement: how might a constellation
of new (and old) screens invite audiences to follow narrative
threads from medium to medium, putting together the pieces
of a synergistic storyworld? This is the basic precept behind
transmedia storytelling,44 a concept that is not necessarily new,
yet can certainly take on new life in the context of ubiquitous
media.
Lastly, the concept of participation—in the sense used by

Henry Jenkins45—suggests a third, more socially oriented layer
of involvement. As audiences consume, reflect on, react to,
and share media content, they may well rely on technological
resources (like those that allow for interactivity) and narrative
resources (like those provided in a transmedia storyworld), yet
they can also make use of cultural and communal ones via the act
of participation—in other words, although we often engage with
machines and stories, we also engage with one another. Especially
as we think about ways to encourage and support all the various
facets of engagement identified here in our chapter on New
Metrics and Measurement, a consideration of the technological,
narrative, and social layers of involvement may serve us well.
The Annenberg Innovation Lab’s prototype of tangible storytelling

using 3D printing and augmented reality, spearheaded by
Geoffrey Long in collaboration with BC “Heavy” Biermann and
20th Century Fox, illuminates the possibilities of involvement in
each of these three senses of the term.46 For this project, the team
imagined a storytelling experience in which fans of FOX’s Sleepy
Hollow series would, after watching the show, receive pieces of a
3D printed puzzle (or plans that would allow them to print the
puzzle pieces on their own) corresponding to a sigil that was part
of the show’s storyworld. The fans would need to successfully
assemble the puzzle, then capture the completed sigil using the
camera on their mobile phone or another imaging device; doing
so would unlock additional video content that would appear on
top of the completed sigil via augmented reality. Depending
on how such a project were deployed, it could tap into each of
the three types of involvement discussed above: downloading,
printing, assembling, and then capturing the sigil via some sort of
app to unlock content might represent interactivity; any new and
unique parts of the narrative world revealed during this process
might be indicative of transmedia storytelling; and, if the pieces
were all distributed to different fans who would then need to work
together to solve the puzzle, we might also see participation at
play.
The examples described here, however, are really just the tip
of the iceberg. In terms of interactivity, the New Screens offer
incredible opportunities with an increasing array of touchscreens
and sensors that allow users to influence their experience based
not only on their explicitly expressed preferences, but also on
things like their location, their activity, and even their physical
reactions (including galvanic skin response, brainwaves, and
facial or eye movements), calling on us to rethink what it means
for an audience to interact with media. Thoughtful transmedia
storytelling and socially oriented experience design can make
use of any and all of these technologies, as well, guided by keen
observance to the principles of novelty outlined above, while
also considering the last of our three key media characteristics:
serendipity, or the right content in the right context.
Serendipity
The element of serendipity represents what might be the greatest
challenge associated with the New Screens: with so many diverse
platforms available, how can creators make sure that their message
is appearing in the right place at the right time, and in a way
that resonates with people? Certainly, media producers have long
directed their messages towards carefully selected demographics,
deploying content and campaigns specific to a given medium
and targeting particular time slots or regions in hopes of reaching
their chosen audiences.Yet the contemporary media environment
allows for—and, indeed, calls for—a more refined approach, with
uniquely appealing content that can respond to the nuances of
a given situation and that fits neatly into a growing ecosystem
of devices. As media producers strive to get the right message
to the right person, they also need to be thinking about how to
identify the right moment, the right mood, the right location, and
the right screen.
A strategic approach to serendipity may well depend on newly

available sources of data along with sophisticated understandings
of audience behaviors and the specific features of a given context.
To begin with, the Annenberg Innovation Lab’s Leveraging
Engagement model (described in this book’s chapter on New
Metrics and Measurement) helps us understand audiences—
and data—in a way that moves beyond simple demographics
focused on things like age and gender, considering instead things
like motivations and contextual triggers. This sort of framework
can help jumpstart a discussion of the various factors that might
shape people’s behaviors and desires in different settings, as well
as the media and screens that are most helpfully employed in these
environments. The sensor technologies and interactive interfaces
discussed above are also useful when thinking about matching
content to context and helping people connect to the media that
fits them best in any given moment. Delivering content based
on people’s location, for example, is becoming an increasingly
viable (and potentially elegant) solution, thanks to platforms
like Motive47 and Mixby,48 along with Bluetooth Low Energy
technologies like iBeacon or Annenberg Innovation Lab research
supporter Estimote. Of course, while the data from, say, a GPS-
enabled mobile device can help make these matches by calculating
or predicting the most appropriate content for a particular
situation, a voice command or a few taps on a touchscreen can
provide more direct input about the media that someone truly
wants to access. In each of these cases, New Screens can work in
concert with various types of data to orchestrate a serendipitous
fit between media messages—whether stories, advertising, or
something else—and potential audiences.
It seems, then, that picking the right screen (or at least an appropriate
screen) in an increasingly diverse ecosystem of available displays
might entail a consideration of a user’s preferences, activity
patterns, and location or environment, but it also involves at least
a recognition of the unique media affordances of a given device
(as explained in our earlier discussion surrounding novelty). Take,
for example, the troubled history of Google Glass. Glass project
lead Thad Starner penned an eloquent manifesto outlining his
intentions for the Glass interface,49 suggesting that the device
wasn’t intended to impede users’ connection to the real world, but
could instead make it easier for us to stay in the moment by offering
us quick, limited access to essential information. His argument
was essentially that “wearing tech on our bodies actually helps it
get out of our way,” allowing us to stay connected to the updates
and resources that are important to us while removing the urge
to pull out a smartphone or laptop and get lost in the screen. For
this idea to work, devices like Glass would need to be designed
around what Starner called “microinteractions,” which “are the
social equivalent of checking time on a wristwatch: noticeable,
yet fast enough to be minimally disruptive.” Glass was built with
microinteractions in mind; thus, when users, designers, and the
general public expected or demanded that Glass be something
that it wasn’t designed to be, problems naturally arose.
All that said, one of the core principles of innovation involves using
technology and other resources in unexpected or unintended
ways—even though Edison envisioned the phonograph as a tool
used primarily for dictation in an office environment, its real
value ended up being something quite different. That’s why it
isn’t always a bad thing to consider the intended uses and media
affordances of a given technology, while also being willing to think
outside the box, exploring what else might be possible (perhaps
with some modifications). At the Annenberg Innovation Lab, we
undertook two projects using Google Glass that may not have fit
precisely into the “microinteraction” mold, yet they nonetheless
revealed new potential for personal ocular devices like Glass,
Microsoft’s HoloLens, or whatever else lies ahead.
Geoffrey Long, Aninoy Mahapatra, and I collaborated with the
Global Event and Media Accessibility Initiative (or GEMAI)
on two projects exploring the possibilities of the New Screens:
Augmented Storytelling50 and Augmenting Accessibility.51
Both prototypes were rooted in the idea of taking a social
experience—like watching a movie with friends or family on a
shared screen—and then adding custom layers of information on
each viewer’s personal screen that could be juxtaposed with or
even superimposed on top of the main screen’s content. In this
way, the experience would have the potential to be asymmetrical
(or different for each person) and hyperpersonal (conforming
to the specific wishes or needs of a viewer without influencing
or disrupting the experiences of those nearby), yet synchronous
(occurring in a shared window of time) and, ostensibly, social.
For the Augmented Storytelling prototype, we took the Warner
Bros. film Sherlock Holmes, played it on a standard television
screen, and made it possible to access synchronized clips of Guy
Ritchie’s director’s commentary via Google Glass, meaning that
a viewer who was familiar with the film (or just curious about
its production) could access these additional bits of information
in a way that wouldn’t impact other viewers. Augmenting
Accessibility took Cameron Covell’s short film Run With Me and
allowed people to experience the film on a desktop display, laptop
screen, or smartphone while also selecting one of three additional
content streams to be sent to their Glass device: English-
language captions, a descriptive audio track, or a proprietary
SliverWindowASL video stream (designed by GEMAI’s Marc
Bovee) featuring an American Sign Language interpretation of
the film.
With certain Glass hardware elements primed for

microinteractions rather than prolonged, layered experiences—
the potential we were trying to tap into—we understood that
these prototypes could only go so far; nonetheless, the projects
pointed to the potential value of these kinds of asymmetrical,
hyperpersonal, synchronous experiences. To begin with, the
accessibility implications are phenomenal, opening up the
possibility of social experiences incorporating diverse audiences
that might prefer or need different languages or sensory input. In
addition, these types of layered experiences might allow certain
audience members to receive, for example, a certain set of clues
in a mystery, or a certain character’s perspective, inviting them
to later compare notes with other audience members to piece
together a more complete version of the story.
These prototypes illustrate the value of serendipity: choosing

devices that offer unique advantages (like hyperpersonal visual or
audio streams that can be layered with other, shared screens) and
tailoring content to users’ particular desires, needs, or situations.
To some extent, increasingly rich streams of data (including those
provided by sensors and by interactive input) can help us achieve
these goals, but considerations of context, audience preferences,
and media affordances are also key.
The Ethics of the New Screens
As we think about these increased opportunities to foster carefully

tailored media experiences across a spectrum of devices, questions
of ethics loom large. Doc Searls has written about “a blindered
mania around Big Data,” in which media creators, drunk with
power and myopic in their quest for more finely targeted content
delivery, overlook the human element in all of this: is this data
being given freely, or do people feel manipulated, and are simply
“resigned” to their fate?52 Searls predicts “the coming collapse
of surveillance marketing” as users become equipped with more
powerful (and appropriate) mechanisms to protect themselves
from digital coercion. We might be tempted to assume that
people are willing to give up their privacy in exchange for more
efficient or customized experiences, but the numbers Searls
cites indicate that this is far from a foregone conclusion: 55%
of respondents in one study disagreed with the idea that “it’s
okay if a store where I shop uses information it has about me to
create a picture of me that improves the services they provide
for me.” That number jumps substantially when we consider
surreptitious data collection, with 91% of those who filled out
the survey indicating that it wouldn’t be right for a company to
gather information without their knowing about it—even if this
data collection resulted in a discount on their purchase. Perhaps
most tellingly, 58% expressed both a desire for control over data
collected about them online and a belief that, in actuality, they
“have little control over” this information.
So if there is value in using algorithms or other curatorial

mechanisms to help audiences find appropriate content and
avoid the problems associated with “the paradox of choice”53 in
a rapidly expanding media landscape, what do we do? Certainly,
many of the strategies at the heart of our contemporary media
ecosystem rely on legally-yet-surreptitiously collected data; what
would it look like for industry leaders to change the way they do
business, to get out of the surveillance marketing game before it
comes crashing down around them, and to use new technologies
to build respectful relationships with audiences—even symbiotic
ones—that allow users to make choices and express wishes, rather
than be unwilling sources of data and targets of marketing? It’s
a question of morality and social responsibility, but also one of
business strategy (because, as Searls points out, customers will
ultimately be empowered to reward those businesses that treat
them will “full respect” and penalize those that do not54), and it
has deep implications for how we think about and make use of
the New Screens.
The Next New Screen
One more paradoxical provocation merits our attention:

although it’s inspiring to consider the potential of smart watches,
augmented reality glasses, and virtual reality headsets, the next
New Screen might actually be no screen at all—an observation
I initially made at SXSW Interactive in 2015 but have since
seen supported by, for example, analysis from H. James Wilson
and Paul R. Daugherty in the Wall Street Journal.55 In an age of
ubiquitous media, with myriad linked screens all around us, our
experience often transcends any one device. Moreover, we seem
to be entering an era of worldblending: the screens, new and old,
are still there, but they’re becoming increasingly conversant with
and reactive to elements of the physical world. There’s media, but
there’s also more, meaning that in some ways we’re returning to
more timeless practices of communication and interaction, infused
with an element of subtle, digitally powered finesse. Partially, this
means that we’re connecting to our media and our ecosystem of
devices through invisible interfaces (consider Amazon’s Echo or
the automated responses described by Wilson and Daugherty), or
embracing the idea that “AI is the new UI.”56 Partially, this means
that we’re rediscovering the real world, as Google and Niantic
have helped millions of people do via their geo-mobile game
Ingress. Other developers are experimenting with different ways
of mixing tangible objects with digital content—smart toys that
can react and evolve thanks to computer processing power and
network connectivity, for example.57 Companies like Microsoft
are setting out to harness the power of “mixed reality,”58 which
has implications for entertainment as well as productivity, design,
and more.59 Magic Leap generated an astounding amount of
hype around the idea of mixed reality with only the most minimal
hint of their vision: a video snippet showing a tiny, ostensibly
digital elephant in a child’s cupped hands60 (although the hype
surrounding their technology was cranked up yet another notch
when word got out that the company had submitted an application
to patent “a contact lens built for augmented reality,” bringing us
that much closer to the world of science fiction61). Our colleagues
at USC’s World Building Media Lab are exploring similar ideas,
as are our associates at Disney Consumer Products (with their
suite of Playmation toys), Biba (with their mobile app linked to
playground equipment), and SAGA (with their ioTHEATRE
platform designed to connect dozens of different physical sensors
and smart objects in a digital storytelling platform).
At the Annenberg Innovation Lab, we’ve also been playing

with the link between the real world and the digital. The
aforementioned Sleepy Hollow prototype represented one way
of knitting together these two realms (by superimposing digital
video content on top of a physical object, and by using that object
as a key to unlock the digital layer), but a second project, called
“Tangible Storytelling + Play + Learning” and headed up by
Alisa Katz, took a different approach. Alisa and her team (which
included Erin Reilly, Geoffrey Long, Aninoy Mahapatra, Daniel
Burwen, Mitchel Thompson, and Shane Reilly) built a prototype
of a dynamic transmedia experience by connecting a set of
handcrafted wooden creatures called Winklebeans, which they’d
equipped with magnetic appendages and electronic insides, with
a digital story app that would change and progress based on how
one played with the Winklebeans.62 Both prototypes showed the
power of mixing the digital and the physical in compelling ways,
suggesting that creators thinking about the New Screens might
be well served to think about things that, in fact, aren’t really
screens at all.
Looking Forward
Moving into the future, we continue to face exciting prospects for

New Screens, new technologies, and new interactions that can
change the way we tell stories and access content. So what can we
look forward to?We can look forward to (or work towards building)
an increasing web of fibers connecting the New Screens with the
old, and with the world around us, as standards and interfaces
evolve to make our media experiences nearly seamless. As we do
so, we might recognize that some stories work best as singular or
encapsulated experiences in one particular context or medium,
while also playing with the possibilities of fluid or dynamic stories
that follow the user, capturing the unique affordances of different
moments and different devices. We can rethink media strategies
to invite involvement and strive for mutual benefit and respect
rather than relying on more adversarial models of audience
capture or intervention; we can use data, sensors, algorithms, and
user input to facilitate control and customization; and we can work
together to find a balancing point between audiences’ desires and
creators’ wishes. Perhaps most of all—even as we appreciate the
power of the old and new screens alike—we can look forward to
the next generation of New Screens, and the ones beyond that,
as each new technology offers new opportunities that can spark
our imaginations, recalibrate our understandings of novelty,
involvement, and serendipity, and inspire us to reevaluate what it
might mean to communicate.
Many of the ideas in this chapter were inspired by, developed for, and
refined during the Annenberg Innovation Lab’s Think & Do event
focused on “Re-Envisioning the Home TV Experience”;63 a panel
discussion at the 2nd Screen Society’s 2nd Screen Summit at CES
2015 featuring AIL’s Jonathan Taplin, Geoffrey Long, Erin Reilly,
and Francesca Marie Smith discussing “Innovations in Storytelling
and Media”;64 and a session at SXSW Interactive 2015 with Alisa
Katz, Francesca Marie Smith, and Geoffrey Long speaking about
“Storytelling with the New Screens.”65
THE NEW CREATORS + MAKERS
Geoffrey Long, Rachel Joy Victor, Lisa Crawford, Malika Lim, and Juvenal
Quiñones, with Ritesh Mehta and Anna Karina Samia
Geoffrey Long • 67
Introduction
Ask most people over 25 who PewDiePie is and you’ll get some
blank stares, but the biggest star on YouTube has more followers
than Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Rihanna, and his Q Score, an
amalgamate measurement of popularity and likeability, is higher
than any Hollywood star among 13- to 17-year-olds.66,67,68
PewDiePie’s videos—most of which feature the 26-year-old
playing and exaggeratedly reacting to video games—totaled
over 11 billion views as of February 2016, earned him $4 million
in 2015 and generated a net worth valued at upwards of $12
million.66, 67 PewDiePie’s stardom has been met with skepticism,
confusion, and hand-wringing concern by the “traditional”
media industry—Variety called him a “gibberish spouting
clown” —but he may represent what it means, and what it takes,
to succeed in entertainment today.
From 2013 through 2015, the Annenberg Innovation Lab

studied dozens of successful “New Creators + Makers” releasing
their own movies, TV shows, books, video games, comics and
more, and what we found can be used by both New Creators
and Makers and established companies and brands to succeed
in this new landscape. Common factors of success largely fell
into three categories—Creation + Community, Distribution +
Monetization, and Education + Collaboration—with a super-
trend towards a more continuous, intimate relationship between
creators and audiences, more authenticity in forging the creator-
fan relationship, transparency about how content is made and
what fans are paying for, and increased collaboration between
creators. The driving principles of the new creative revolution
are openness and sharing in an ecosystem no longer populated
by media royalty and adoring masses, but by members of your
community who have succeeded and want to bring you along
and help you succeed too.
The New Creators + Makers • 68
Creation + Community
New Creators and Makers not only create differently, they

maintain their audiences differently too. Their creations are
less polished, they create their works in public, they frequently
emerge as members of underserved communities, and they
begin by making friends, not just “fans,“ then continue to build
those friendships throughout their careers. This emphasis on
relationships may mean audiences are more likely to be more
deeply engaged in—and commercially and emotionally invested
in—the New Creators and Makers’ success over longer periods
of time.
Less Polished Creations
Since forming Pomplamoose in 2008, Jack Conte and Nataly

Dawn have embraced new forms of musical distribution, including
selling music exclusively online and emphasizing YouTube
“VideoSongs” over live performances. These VideoSongs, a mix
of playing to a webcam and handmade special effects, embody
Pomplamoose’s philosophy of authenticity and openness, as
evidenced by their stated rules: “1. What you see is what you
hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice). 2. If you hear
it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).”69 Their cover
of Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” for example, was a Gondry-
esque puppet show that ended with handmade puppets of
Conte and Dawn thanking their fans directly.70 Far from feeling
unprofessional, this deliberate DIY aesthetic makes the band feel
all the more authentic. In an interview with NPR, Dawn says that
labels may still have a role to play, but it’s becoming easier for
bands to succeed with a more DIY approach. “If, for example,
you’re somebody who writes songs, like Lady Gaga, and you
need everything that’s gonna make you Lady Gaga, YouTube’s
not gonna be able to do that.You need a big fat label. But if you’re
just a band, I don’t think we’re in an era anymore where you need
that sort of major backing... People think that all of these things
have to be done by geniuses behind huge desks or at the top of
skyscrapers, but you can just go online and do it yourself.”71
It’s working for Pomplamoose: the band’s 87 YouTube videos
have been viewed over 110 million times by their over 450,000
followers.72
Create in Public
No New Creator and Maker has likely benefited more from

“creating in public” than Palmer Luckey, the founder of the
virtual reality headset-maker Oculus. As a teenager Luckey
took classes at California State Long Beach and worked as a lab
assistant at the University of Southern California’s Mixed Reality
Lab in a group developing low-cost immersive viewers.73 At 18
Luckey used what he’d learned to create his first prototype in his
parents’ garage, posting regular updates on MTBS3D—a website
frequented by stereoscopic and virtual reality enthusiasts. This
work was noticed by John Carmack, co-creator of the games Doom,
Quake and Wolfenstein 3-D, and Carmack requested a prototype.74
Before long, it was announced that Doom 3 BFG Edition would
be compatible with head-mounted displays, and at the 2012
Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) a demo version of Doom
was running on a modified version of Luckey’s prototype with
Carmack’s software.75 On August 1, 2012, Oculus VR launched
their Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift— “the first truly
immersive virtual reality headset for video games”—with backers
who pledged at least $300 receiving a prototype headset. By the
end of the Kickstarter campaign, the Oculus Rift had over 10,000
backers and had raised over US$2.5 million.76 In March of 2014,
Oculus VR was sold to Facebook for US$2 billion, arguably
jump-starting the latest virtual reality craze.77 By sharing his early
prototypes on the MTBS3D forums, Luckey began building a
reputation for himself extremely quickly, attracting the attention
of precisely the people he needed to in order to build a robust
developer community. Keeping his prototypes public attracted
the mentorship of John Carmack, who eventually became Oculus’
CTO and without whom Luckey most likely never would have
succeeded at such astronomical levels.
Begin as Members of (Underserved) Communities
“Find an underserved community and satisfy its demands” is

a time-honored strategy, but many New Creators and Makers
are emerging from those communities themselves. Michelle Phan
is a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur who became famous in
2007 at age 20 by creating YouTube video makeup lessons for
other young women. “I didn’t relate to a lot of people at my
school, so I went online and found my community,” Phan told
Mochi magazine. “I built this amazing relationship with my
community and I felt like they were my friends.”78 When her
first video, a tutorial on natural-looking makeup, received over
40,000 views, Phan knew she was onto something. She continued
making videos, largely in response to requests posted by her
followers, and in 2008 she joined YouTube’s Partner Program.78
In 2009 and 2010, Buzzfeed features on several of Phan’s videos
put Phan’s followers over the 1MM mark, and in 2011, Phan
began to parlay her YouTube success into other ventures by co-
founding Ipsy, “the world’s largest and most passionate online
beauty community.”79 In 2012, Phan was offered $1MM by
Google to produce 20 hours of content, followed by an offer in
2013 from L’Oreal to launch her own makeup line, which bills
itself as “the first makeup line co-created by a community of
beauty lovers and a beauty expert.”78, 79 In October 2014, Phan
published her first book, Make Up: Your Life Guide to Beauty,
Style, and Success—Online and Off. In 2015, Phan partnered with
Endemol Beyond USA to launch ICON, a premium lifestyle
network and “online global destination for the empowerment of
viewers through inspirational premium content, conversation,
and community” serving “a multi-cultural demographic”; Ipsy
was valued at over $500MM with “over 1,000,000 subscribers in
the U.S. and Canada,” placing Phan on Forbes’ 2015 “30 Under
30” list; and Ipsy launched an Open Studio program, a not-for-
profit initiative offering studio space, networking opportunities,
hardware, software and coaching. “We want to give back to our
community because our company was built by the community,
so we want to maintain that relationship,” says Phan.79, 80, 81 As of
this writing, Phan’s YouTube account has over 8.3MM followers
and over 1.2B views.82
Another example is Carlos Portugal and Kathleen Bedoya’s

East Los High, a racy, all-Latino original Hulu series that mixes
telenovela-esque teen drama with socially-relevant content
targeted at the highly-coveted yet underserved Latino 18-24
demographic.83, 84, 85 During the writing process, screenwriter
Evangeline Ordaz invited over 200 young people from the target
Hispanic areas to review the scripts and act as background extras
in the series.86 While Hulu does not release viewership numbers,
sources indicate East Los High is popular with women 18-35, a
top show on Hulu for Latino viewers, and, one of the top 10
shows on Hulu during its premiere month, performing as well as
or better than such hits as Grey’s Anatomy and The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart.84, 87
Key Insights: Making Friends, not just “Fans”
The success of many top-earning New Creators and Makers like

PewDiePie isn’t due to production values (their early videos are
often shot on phone cameras), but a strong sense of authenticity
and community—a rapport between creator and audience that
feels more like making friends than making fans. This type of
relationship can be difficult to replicate for corporations; genuine
relationships forged on authenticity cannot simply be bought.
YouTube’s Original Channels Initiative sought to increase its

“quality content” via funded channels for well-known brands,
targeting public figures like Madonna, Shaquille O’Neal and
Deepak Chopra and traditional media companies like Lionsgate
and Reuters. With the channels set to release a combined total of
25 hours of new original content daily, YouTube hoped to create
good content for Google TV users, as opposed to the “lower
quality” user-generated videos on YouTube at the time. It didn’t
work because while high levels of polish may be appropriate for
platforms like Hulu or Netflix where original content needs to
go toe-to-toe with prime time television offerings, YouTube is not
television. Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers (one of YouTube’s
most successful creators who also received funding through the
Initiative) stated that while he was grateful for the funding, as
it enabled him to create some education-themed channels that
may not have been viable otherwise, most brands would never
be able to earn back the advance they invested. “Spending more
money to produce the same number of minutes of content does
not increase viewership,” Green wrote. “Online video isn’t about
how good it looks, it’s about how good it is. People who make
online video are much better at making online video than people
who make TV shows. This probably seems obvious to you (it
certainly is to me) but it apparently was not obvious to the people
originally distributing this money.”88
Successful YouTube stars like PewDiePie and Michelle Phan

have more authentic, organically-grown relationships with their
audiences which are deeper, more personal, and, eventually, are
what translate into direct action and impact. For many corporations
and brands, authentically creating friends and fans may come
down to being more personal, and more personable. “Creating
in public” is a practice more brands are embracing, ranging
from the behind-the-scenes design videos posted by companies
like MINI or the “inside the studio” Instagram accounts from
such artisan brands like Hard Graft or Thisisground,89, 90, 91 and
many brands grow up around the public faces of their founders,
like the ice cream empire of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield.
This can be extraordinarily difficult to balance with the demands
of big business, especially when a business is sold or otherwise
evolves. Just as with interpersonal relationships, such changes can
be perceived as betrayals by both fans and internal employees, as
seen in the widespread unease when Unilever bought Ben and
Jerry’s in 2000.92
Distribution + Monetization
New Creators and Makers rely on a mix of New Screens and

New Funding and Business Models (with many of them
developing hybrid models using both self-published platforms
and partnerships with traditional platforms), building their
businesses around these more personal relationships. Many of
the most successful ones go on to create new platforms to enable
others to succeed, as opposed to simply creating their own studios
or labels.
Alternative Funding and Distribution Channels
While Rob Thomas’ TV series Veronica Mars was cancelled in

2007, it was dearly beloved by a small but dedicated fanbase,
receiving praise from fans, critics, and creative luminaries such
as Joss Whedon.93, 94, 95 Rumors of a potential film to wrap up
Veronica’s story circulated for some time, finally culminating in
the launch of a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for the film
in 2013.93 The campaign, spearheaded by Thomas, managed by
audience engagement specialist Ivan Askwith, and promoted
heavily on social media by its eventual star Kristen Bell, sought
$2MM and netted an extraordinary $5.7MM from over 91,000
donors.96, 97 Presumably donors contributed because of their love
for Veronica Mars, but Thomas sweetened the deal by offering
funders everything from a small role in the film (for a single
specific bid) to a free digital download of the finished product.98
The project was not without criticism—some observed that
crowdfunding is more appropriate for fledgling creators who
have not yet had mainstream exposure, or that crowdfunding
shouldn’t be used by studios to save money on films they can
afford to finance.99, 100 Further, there were glitches in delivery
of some rewards: Warner Bros. furnished a refund to donors
when the promised digital download of the film failed to work.98
The outcome, though, was heartening for fans and creators of
beloved series that may warrant a comeback, demonstrating that
there are options beyond the traditional studio model.99 (See
AIL Chief Advisor & Senior Research Fellow Henry Jenkins’
blog for a detailed multi-part discussion of Veronica Mars’ wider
implications.101)
Be Hybrids
Many New Creators and Makers have found the best choice
between emerging self-publishing platforms and traditional
publishing options is a mix of the two. Author Hugh Howey
got his start when a traditional small publisher, Norlights Press,
released his young adult novel Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue
in 2009.101 “I enjoyed working with a small press and an editor,
but I wanted to move at a faster pace and figured I could do
the pagination and marketing on my own,” Howey says. “So I
struck out as a self-published writer with no real dream beyond
selling anything more than a few hundred copies and possibly
entertaining some friend”102 In 2011 Howey released a short
story using Amazon’s Kindle Direct program, which turned into
a series, which then turned into Howey’s first big hit. Soon Wool
was making Howey six figures a month.103, 104 “I started getting
calls from agents, publishers, film companies, and TV studios,”
Howey told Wired in March of 2012. “I finally caved and signed
with a literary agent, but my expectation is that nothing will
come of it... A traditional publisher would have to detail a plan
to really broaden my readership while allowing me to retain a lot
of the freedoms I’ve come to appreciate.”102 Three months later,
Howey signed an extraordinary mid-six-figure deal with Simon
& Schuster that licensed them only the print rights to Wool, after
having turned down some seven-figure offers.105, 106 “I had made
seven figures on my own, so it was easy to walk away,” Howey told
TheWall Street Journal. “I thought, ‘How are you guys going to sell
six times what I’m selling now?’”106 What changed his mind was
realizing what traditional publishing could do that he couldn’t.
Howey’s agent sold the series in 24 foreign countries, including a
high-six-figure deal as a result of a bidding war in England; 20th
Century FOX and Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner) obtained
the movie rights; and Imperative Entertainment (Heroes Reborn)
obtained the TV rights.106, 103, 107 According to Howey, “I still
consider myself a self-published author. Someone’s just printing
the physical copy of what I’ve already done in e-book form. And
with all the books I’ve released since then I’ve gone straight to self-
publishing. No part of me wants to query or wait for a publisher
to do anything. I’m just going straight to the reader.”104
Start Platforms, Not Studios
When entrepreneurially-minded artists succeed, they often

create their own studios or record labels. Some New Creators
and Makers, however, are opting to create platforms to help
others succeed. Jack Conte of Pomplamoose realized that while
Kickstarter was great for one-off projects it wasn’t a good
solution for artists seeking a more regular source of income, so
he co-founded the subscription-funding service Patreon. Like
Kickstarter, Patreon offers users different tiers of patronage, with
different rewards for different tiers and the option to limit the
number of people in each tier, but unlike Kickstarter Patreon
“patrons” can send any dollar amount they wish to their favorite
creators whenever a new piece of content is released or according
to a particular schedule. By February of 2014 Patreon had more
than 30,000 users, and by October of 2014 Patreon had over
125,000 users and was generating over $1MM a month for its
creators.108 By August of 2015, Conte’s personal Patreon had
1389 patrons for a total of $5,243 per video, his bandmate Nataly
Dawn’s personal Patreon had 574 patrons for a total of $1,807.83
per song or video, Pomplamoose’s Patreon had 2011 patrons for
a total of $6,730 per video, webcomics creator Kris Straub had
531 patrons for $1,923 per month, and webcomics creator Aaron
Diaz had 1260 patrons for $5,488 per month.109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114
Others are making even more: YouTube celebrity CGP Grey had
5024 patrons for $15,371 per video; a capella group Pentatonix
had 3,281 patrons for $21,314 per video; The Comedy Button
had 6454 patrons for $20,014 per month, which translates into
$240K+ a year; and musician/author Amanda Palmer had 5,610
patrons happy to give $34,985 for anything Palmer posts. If
Palmer were to produce one thing a week, she would make over
$1.8MM in a year.115, 116, 117, 118, 119
Key Insights: Monetizing Relationships
How might corporations and brands work with these New

Creators and Makers to help monetize their relationships? Despite
their indie success Pomplamoose’s Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn
admit New Creators and Makers still need to collaborate with
corporations and brands. “‘Hobby Artists’ (people who don’t
make a living from their art) have a very idyllic view about art and
money,” says Conte. “They think artists should never work with
brands, that money and art should be separate, that art should
live in purity inside a vacuum. That’s why they’re not professional
artists. Professional artists constantly live at the intersection of art
and money. Making money is half their job. Being a professional
artist is 50% making art, 50% building a machine whose input
is art and whose output is money. Half your job is to build that
machine.”120 Conte says that the very relationships between fans
and creators may be where corporations, brands and technologies
can help fill in the gap. “Community management is a baby. An
absolute baby,” he says. “It’s ridiculous: you don’t know anything
about cross sections of your fans: which like to communicate
with you more often, which just want to hear from you once a
month. You don’t know who wants to pay you, and you don’t
know why… The most you can get now is ‘engagement’—a like,
a comment—which is a very binary thing. That’s hardly social: it
doesn’t feel like real community. At the end of this next decade
of community management evolution, it’s going to feel way more
naturally connected and actually social.”121
One example of emerging services for New Creators and

Makers can be found in the rise of Multi-Channel Networks, or
MCNs. Originally developed for content creators on YouTube
but now used for Vine, Instagram, Facebook, and other social
media platforms as well, MCNs like Maker Studios, Fullscreen,
and Awesomeness TV function as a cross between gatekeepers
and studios. MCNs accept certain promising creators and help
them grow by enabling and facilitating cross-partnerships and
advertising sponsorships; in exchange for these services, the
MCNs get a cut of creator revenue. MCNs succeed when more
traditional corporate media structures fail by recognizing what
creators need in order to thrive, providing necessary tools while
letting creators continue to build their fan relationships as they
see best. Maker Studios’ acquisition by Disney for nearly $1B
in late 2014 suggests those gatekeepers are realizing a new set
of skills may be needed when dealing with New Creators and
Makers and their audiences.
Another example is the creation of YouTube Space facilities

across the globe (including LA, London, Sao Paolo, Berlin, Paris
and Mumbai), evidence of YouTube’s newfound commitment
to the smaller creators who drive the majority of its traffic
and make it the go-to video sharing site. Each YouTube Space
provides recording facilities, training, recording equipment and
a sense of community. Although YouTube Spaces are only open
to YouTubers with over 10,000 subscribers, the workshops and
networking opportunities are open to any creator who wants to
take advantage of YouTube’s expertise in expanding the reach
of their brand.
Collaboration + Education
New Creators and Makers do not see success as a zero-sum

game, instead finding greater success by collaborating with each
other and with their fans, and sharing knowledge—going so far
as to teach their audiences how they succeeded and how the fans
can do it too.
Collaborate with Other New Creators and Makers
In 2013, YouTube music stars Lindsey Stirling and The Piano

Guys, each rising celebrities in their own right, collaborated on
a cover of the Mission: Impossible theme song. The performance
netted both parties not only a bump in their followers but a
nomination for Response of the Year in the first-ever YouTube
Music Awards.122 Stirling went on to collaborate with other
YouTube music personalities including Pentatonix (their
version of Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive” won Response of
the Year in the 2013 YouTube Music Awards), Peter Hollins
(covering the theme from the video game Skyrim) and Tyler
Ward (covering Ryan Lewis and Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop”).
Other notable collaborations between YouTube stars include
The Piano Guys’ collaborating with Megan Nicole and Alex
Goot to cover Taylor Swift’s “Begin Again;” Peter Hollins and
Alex G covering a medley of Disney tunes; and Alex Goot
and Boyce Avenue covering Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand
Miles.”123 Such collaborations aren’t limited to just music—
Destin Sandlin from Smarter Every Day and Derek Muller
from Veritasium collaborated to demonstrate how water swirls
differently in the Southern hemisphere; Rhett and Link from
Good Mythical Morning produced a thoroughly meta video of
kids reacting to an episode of The Fine Bros’ Kids React; and
Epic Rap Battles of History cast Smosh’s Ian and Anthony as
Michelangelo and Raphael and the aforementioned Rhett
and Link as Leonardo and Donatello in a particularly epic
episode pitting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles against their
Renaissance artist namesakes.124
Collaborate with Your Fans
Collaboration can go beyond just working with other artists—

many New Creators and Makers are collaborating with their fans
as well. Returning to author Hugh Howey, he himself admits:
“The way I use social media is to make myself available to my
existing readers, not to win over new ones. I cherish every single
reader, and I think that shows. If they enjoy my works, they are the
best people to go out and spread the word.”125 While prioritizing
fans is part of the New Creator and Maker ethos, it’s also a
smart business move. Alexandra Alter in the Wall Street Journal
notes, “Mr. Howey comes across as a charming, self-deprecating
goofball (he posted a video of himself doing ballet on his lawn
on YouTube after he signed his publishing deal), but he’s proven
to be a savage negotiator and slick marketer. He sent free copies
of Wool to book bloggers and reviewers at Goodreads, a social-
media site for avid readers. Early raves prompted more people
to try the book, and the reviews snowballed. Wool now has more
than 12,500 ratings and around 2,200 reviews on Goodreads...
He conscripted 30 of his most ardent fans to be ‘beta’ readers
who edit early drafts of his books for free.”126
Beyond word-of-mouth marketing, Howey also invites his fans to

create fan art and fan fiction, even promoting fan fiction authors’
commercial offerings on his blog. “People want to know if this is
okay with me,” Howey posted. “It most certainly is! WJ asked me
for permission, and I readily granted it. His plan was to give the
work away, but I told him he was crazy… I suggested he post the
story on Amazon and charge for his hard work. One commenter
pointed out that technically this isn’t fanfic since it has a price,
and while I agree with the distinction, I like to think we can have
the best of both worlds. The writing in this story is top-notch, but
the spirit is one of fanfic rather than licensing. Besides, I’m not
making a cent off these works. Anyone can write them as far as I’m
concerned. All comers have my blessing as a fellow writer (and
as an appreciative reader).”127 In 2013, Howey announced that
Wool would be one of the first storyworlds in Amazon’s officially-
licensed fan fiction “Kindle Worlds” initiative. According to
Howey. a Wool-based story was “the first through the gates and
first accepted.”128
Share Your Data
Traditional corporate structures often withhold sales data from

creators. Some claim this is based on a belief that the creator
should be treated as an inaccessible artist, while others hold that
corporations believe that creators should be kept in the dark
in order to maintain control over them and prevent them from
having more informed positions in contract negotiations. Many
New Creators and Makers are turning this approach on its head,
sharing data to educate their fellow New Creators and Makers
about the realities of the media and entertainment business.
Indie “avant-cellist” Zoë Keating’s music frequently tops

contemporary classical charts, but she doesn’t enjoy “mainstream”
success. We know this because Keating chose to publicly share
her sales data across multiple sources, including iTunes, Spotify,
Amazon, Bandcamp, Pandora, the radio, and her affiliation as
an ASCAP member. As Keating wrote in a note accompanying
the first release of her data, “I thought it might be helpful for
interested parties to see what a DIY artist receives for plays of
their music on Spotify and elsewhere. But I admit I have grander
designs: if we are going to discuss the ideal structure of the new
music industry, we need to know how recording artists make a
living today or we’re just spouting hyperbole. So, in the interest
of evolving the discussion, I am making myself into a data point.
I encourage other artists, if they are able, to do the same.”129
According to Keating, between October of 2011 and February
of 2012 she made $84,385.86 before taxes. 56% of that revenue
was made off iTunes, 30% off Bandcamp, 10% off Amazon
(retail), 3% off Amazon (MP3s), and less than 1% off Spotify,
Pandora and NPR combined.130 Over the next few years, Keating
shared more “taboo” information about the nuts and bolts of a
musician’s career. In 2013, Keating provided a behind-the-scenes
description of her career to the Los Angeles Times, including the
importance of emerging platforms for both distributing her music
and connecting with her fans. “It sounds pathetic, but knowing
that 60,000 people liked my albums enough to buy them gave me
confidence I’d lacked and encouraged me to take my art seriously
and make more of it,” she wrote.131 On Feb. 24, 2014, Keating
updated her numbers for 2013: $81,722.72 in pre-tax revenues,
with 47% from iTunes, 31% from Bandcamp, 11% from Amazon
(physical), 4% from Amazon (digital), and 8% was made off of
streaming services: 4% from Pandora, 2% from Spotify, 1.5% from
YouTube, and less than .5% from Rhapsody and MediaNet.132
On May 26, 2015, Keating released her numbers a third time, but
only the numbers for her Spotify streams. Her music had been
streamed almost 1.5 million times, with a total payout of under
$1500.133 Keating tweeted, “Don’t worry about me, my stool has
many legs ;-)”, but it’s hard not to feel the pressure mounting for
Keating and other New Creators and Makers like her.134
Each of Keating’s releases contributed real, tangible evidence to

the debate over the danger streaming services pose to recording
artists. Since Keating shared her data, other musicians, including
Aloe Blacc, Taylor Swift and Prince have also risen up to decry
the unfair licensing deals of streaming services, pointing out how
they endanger musicians’ livelihoods. Most recently Keating has
supported a blockchain-powered payment system for music like
Bitcoin, participated in a House Judiciary Committee roundtable
discussion on U.S. copyright law, and was included in a NewYork
Times list of musicians standing up for artists’ rights against the
music industry alongside David Lowery, Blake Morgan and Bette
Midler, leading to her being heralded as “an artistic dynamo with
an activist bent” by The Press Democrat.135, 136, 137
Again, another example is found in author Hugh Howey, who
not only shared his own sales data but launched a new genre
e-book sales analysis venture, Author Earnings, “to gather and
share information so that writers can make informed decisions,”
leading to “better pay and fairer terms in all contracts.” The site
provides a mile-high view of self-publishing trends on Amazon,
interpreting sales-ranking data from over 50,000 bestselling
genre digital titles and releasing regular reports, including Excel
spreadsheets with base data and graphics. Howey is well aware
that, by sharing all of this data, he’s doing in publishing what
Keating did in music: leveling the playing field. When asked by
Writer’s Digest what advice he would give to other writers, Howey
noted that success is not a zero-sum game anymore: “Support
one another. Wherever you are in your career, there’s something
you can do to help someone else out. The unusual nature of our
industry is that we are not direct competitors to one another… We
will never have so many books that someone is not going to read
your book because they’re reading everyone else’s. We can all do
well, and the way we do that is by making reading as pleasurable
as possible and by turning more and more people on to it.”138
Pay It Forward, Teach Your Fans
Some New Creators and Makers explicitly outline how they

succeeded. Pomplamoose’s Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn
constantly and openly experiment with new technology and
business models.139 When their videos include special effects, the
band frequently shows their audiences how they did them. The
video for their 2014 mashup of Pharrell’s “Happy” and Daft
Punk’s “Get Lucky” featured spectacular projection mapping,
but it was all done in one take with foam board and a single
projector, facts called out in the notes on the video’s page and in
the video itself.140 The camera pans around the room as the video
progresses, hovering over the laptop controlling the projection
mapping to show how they’re doing what they’re doing—a music
video, inspiration and tutorial lesson all rolled into one.
Like Keating and Howey, Pomplamoose has also openly shared

revenue data. After a 2014 tour, Conte penned an article for
Digital Music News that revealed they sold “just under $100,000
in tickets”, put $24,000 in debt onto their credit cards to pay for
tour preparations, and paid another $8,794 a week for the band
and the crew for the duration of the tour. According to Conte,
“The tour ended up costing us $147,802 to produce and execute...
Add it up, and that’s $135,983 in total income for our tour. And
we had $147,802 in expenses. We lost $11,819.”141 Conte adds,
however, that they make money through other revenue streams.
“At the end of the day, Pomplamoose is just fine,” Conte wrote.
“We’re entering a new era in history: the space between ‘starving
artist’ and ‘rich and famous’ is beginning to collapse. YouTube
has signed up over a million partners (people who agree to run
ads over their videos to make money from their content). The
‘creative class’ is no longer emerging: it’s here, now. We, the
creative class, are finding ways to make a living making music,
drawing webcomics, writing articles, coding games, recording
podcasts. Most people don’t know our names or faces. We are
not on magazine covers at the grocery store. We are not rich, and
we are not famous… We have not ‘made it.’ We’re making it.”141
Key Insights: Succeed Together
Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the New Creators

and Makers is the overall sense of camaraderie and sharing.
Collaborations between fellow New Creators and Makers and
with fans, being open about financial realities and helping
others succeed through sharing traditionally taboo information
or by founding new platforms like Patreon—the overarching
philosophy is one of openness and authenticity, paired with the
belief that success is no longer a zero-sum game.
It might initially seem difficult to apply this to corporations

and brands, but many brands are already exploring similar
directions. Consider the recent “A x B” collaborations between
complementary brands, such as between Warby Parker and the
Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Ghostly International, 826
and Beck, or between the men’s fashion blog Uncrate and the
shaving company Harry’s.142, 143, 144, 145, 146 As long as the pairing
is complementary and authentic, such collaborations can be
beneficial for both brands and build audiences on both sides.
As for corporations and brands looking to collaborate with New

Creators and Makers, perhaps the most critical lesson is to
consider what New Creators and Makers may expect from such
collaborations. Many creators are unlikely to collaborate unless
such a partner can clearly bring something that they cannot get
on their own (as with Hugh Howey’s print-only deal with Simon
& Schuster). Many New Creators and Makers who are willing to
share their data are also unlikely to appreciate partners unwilling
to share data in close to real-time, the result of having built their
own brands using systems like Google Analytics.
Conclusion
So what is a New Creator and Maker? Watch a video from a

successful online creator, and it can all seem pretty easy. How
difficult is it, really, to sit in your bedroom and talk about the latest
social justice issue, or play the latest video game, or make a cute
piece of papercraft? Behind the actual product itself, however, is
so much more. Being a creator is a full-time job, one that requires
a strong work ethic and the willingness to be open and honest
with fans. PewDiePie may seem to have a simple job—play video
games and make snarky comments while doing so—but he has
also been consistent in creating content for his fans, uploading
new videos almost daily and building a body of work upwards of
2,500 videos, and he has broadened his scope beyond “Let’s Play”
videos as well, launching his RevelMode network in January of
2016. While he admits that he’s lucky to have reached his current
stage, he also states that there are cons as well, such as its all-
consuming nature. “It’s the hardest job I will ever have,” he says.
“I struggle to shut it off.”147 He is also keenly aware that public
favor could just as suddenly turn away, saying, “I’ve always kept
the approach that next month might not work out.”147
Therein lies both the problem and the opportunity: the same
Internet that created rampant piracy and artist-exploiting services
like Spotify is also opening new doorways for New Creators and
Makers to bring their work directly to their would-be audiences.
At the heart of their business model is the same challenge facing
every creator and maker: if their work is good enough, if they can
create enough of it, if they can find enough fans, and if they can
keep those fans coming back, then they stand a very real chance of
creating viable, sustainable businesses doing what they love. Just
how real that chance is, however, is a matter of some debate; even
YouTube creators who seem successful in terms of numbers can
be far from financially successful.
In late 2015, Gaby Dunn wrote an article for Fusion titled “Get
Rich or Die Vlogging: The Sad Economics of Internet Fame.”
Dunn, whose face is recognizable to most who have watched at
least a few Buzzfeed videos, describes the difficulties of being
a “mid-level” YouTube creator. Her channel has around a half-
million followers, far from enough to attract big sponsorships. At
the same time, with Internet fame comes public recognizability
and celebrity, but frequently little money. This fame without
fortune means New Creators and Makers like Dunn struggle with
working “real jobs” to pay their bills. While working as a waitress,
Dunn was recognized by countless patrons, embarrassing her and
making her job more difficult. Further, creators are frequently
vulnerable to criticism from fans who feel that they are owed
something, or that they have enough of a relationship to criticize
the creator. For example, New Creators and Makers with a large
fanbase will often showcase a sponsor’s brand, while also crediting
the brand before or after their videos. While these sponsorships
are often crucial to survival, fans often view these creators as
“sellouts.” On every sponsored video (that was paying Dunn’s
bills and helping her create more content), the top comments
were typically fan complaints about the fact that Dunn and Raskin
were trying to make money on their channel. Finding brands
complementary to New Creators and Makers’ own brands and
audiences is straightforward enough—see Michelle Phan’s deal
with L’Oreal to launch a line of cosmetics—but getting this wrong
may be even more hazardous for New Creators and Makers due
to the heightened importance of authenticity to their audiences,
and even getting it right may not be enough for cynical followers
like Dunn’s.148
Again, what is a New Creator and Maker? A New Creator and

Maker is someone who, even knowing (or living) stories like
Dunn’s, still plunges ahead, driven to use a mix of New Screens
and New Funding and Business Models not just to pursue dreams
of fame and fortune but to participate in the ongoing conversation
between these new stars who are more just like them than ever
before. The democratization of the media landscape thanks to
new technology has changed the ecosystem irreversibly—but
in many ways these New Screens are in addition to such “old
screens” as film and television, and they are most definitely not
the same. As such, the biggest lesson here for corporations and
brands may be simply to accept that working with these New
Creators and Makers will not be business as usual. What makes
a good YouTube star may not translate into a good TV star,
and a hit on YouTube is different from a hit on Hulu or Netflix.
Understanding the nuances of each platform and building content
strategies, collaboration strategies, and business strategies to
match is crucial to success.
That may be the main element that defines New Creators and
Makers: New Creators and Makers understand these differences
implicitly. It’s at the very core of not just their business models,
but in how they interact with technology, with content, and
with each other. It’s woven into their sense of authenticity, their
sense of openness, and their sense of collaboration—hallmarks
of a generation that grew up with the rampantly personal, open,
collaborative and participatory Internet. It’s no mystery that
most of the New Creators and Makers are digital natives—they
reflect the formative impact the Internet has had on the arts, on
the creative industries, on us as creators and on us as audiences.
What their long-lasting impact is on the future of the media and
entertainment industry remains to be seen.
CONCLUSION: IMAGINING POSSIBLE
FUTURES
Henry Jenkins
Henry Jenkins • 89
My 2008 book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New
Media Collide, captured a moment within what has turned
out to a prolonged and profound cycle of media in transition.
Convergence, I told readers, had less to do with the interfaces
between technologies and more to do with the interactions
between audiences, producers, texts, and technologies. The so-
called digital revolution would not mean the withering away of
mass media, as had sometimes been predicted; rather, we were
seeing an ever more complex media ecology where grassroots
communities produce and circulate media outside of established
institutions and their actions disrupt and reshape how media
operated within the society. However, these grassroots efforts
would exist alongside and increasingly intersect the operations of
big companies that would be dispersing their content across ever
more media platforms—for example, in the form of transmedia
storytelling practices. What is now clearer is that corporations
would own the platforms and thus set the terms under which
grassroots media circulates. I saw the changes that were coming
as being shaped both by decisions made in corporate boardrooms
and by decisions made in teenagers’ bedrooms.
Half a decade later, I worked with Sam Ford and Joshua Green,
both colleagues from MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium,
to revisit the state of the media industries, again considering how
participatory culture—now increasingly understood in relation
to social media—was colliding with the practices of established
media companies. The result was Spreadable Media: Creating
Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (2013). Keep in mind
that Convergence Culture came out at about the same time that
industry leaders in Silicon Valley started talking about Web 2.0,
so our first task was to reconsider that new paradigm from the
perspective of consumer-participants. Despite rhetoric implying
a smooth alignment of the interests of producers and consumers,
almost every major Web 2.0 company had found itself in the midst
of controversies over its terms of service: these companies often
did not really understand the participatory culture communities
Conclusion • 90
that they sought to court, capture, and commodify through their
tools and services. Our book explored the distinction between
distribution and circulation: distribution referred to established
industry practices where corporations decided top-down how,
where, and on what terms their content reached potential
markets; circulation referred to the still-emerging and hybrid
system where the public helped to shape the spread of media
content through what they shared within their social networks.
We argued that these new systems of circulation had the potential
to generate visibility and revenue for content that the companies
themselves had not yet recognized. We also explored new ways
that independent and transnational producers might partner
with their fans and followers in order to get new kinds of content
produced and distributed. For example, the book anticipated the
growing importance of crowdfunding tools as mechanisms for
supporting independent artists working outside or on the fringes
of dominant creative industries.
The Edison Project, with its focus on New Metrics and

Measurements, New Funding and Business Models, New
Screens, and New Creators and Makers, offers a rich opportunity
to revisit some of the core questions that animated these earlier
books, another set of soundings into this long-term process of
media transition and transformation. Reading through this
report, it is clear that we are collectively working out how the
media ecosystem will operate in the face of some of the disruptive
factors we’ve been mapping over the past decade and more.
There are some contradictory signs here, more than one possible
direction that future developments will take. If this report does
not (and can not) provide all of the answers, it has certainly done
much to sharpen the questions. The most important question to
ask is, what kind of future media ecosystem do we want? What
choices will lead us towards models of audience engagement,
technological configurations, business practices, and creative
paths that will be most valuable and meaningful to the culture at
large as well as to the individual players seeking to make sense of
and make profit from these changes?
Let’s consider a best-case scenario which might be defined by

some of the following conditions:
• Media producers will be more responsive
and more accountable to their audiences
because they have a deeper understanding of
how content fits into the lives of the people
consuming it. Audience engagement is not
simply one thing that can be easily measured.
Fans adopt many different relationships to
content meaningful to them; they embrace
different postures towards different kinds of
content; and their own choices are shaped by
the larger social and cultural contexts within
which they operate. So, content will need
to be designed to reflect and respect those
preferences, especially at a moment when
audience engagement has become one of the
core currencies within the imagination economy.
To accommodate those diverse interests, fans
want the content they want when and where
they want it and they will take it places illegally
if the content is not legally available to them
on their desired terms. The New Metrics
and Measurement report describes emerging
approaches through which producers and
networks might identify what motivates fan
engagement and to better understand when,
where, and with whom hardcore followers
want to be able to access content. These new
approaches move us beyond established
models which tend to rely almost exclusively on
demographic data and one-size-fits-all models
of engagement. The affordances of New Screens
offer many different ways to access, experience,
Conclusion • 92
and share meaningful content with others. New
Funding and Business Models suggest alternative
ways for audiences to pay for this content,
on terms that reflect the particulars of their
relationships. The New Creators and Makers will
be those who know their audiences best, because
they will have developed a more sustained and
intimate partnership with their followers, now
“friends” as much as “fans.” These new media
producers will need to be nimble, dynamic, and
iterative—putting out content at lower costs
and quicker turnaround to test and refine their
relationships with the market.
• The public will exercise greater control over

the data companies gather about them.
Audiences expect content that’s tailored to their
unique and diverse interests—and are willing
to relinquish a certain degree of personal data
to accomplish this—yet they also feel that such
customization shouldn’t come at the cost of
their privacy. While not everyone understands
the risks and consequences of current data-
mining practices, many audience members are
progressively more savvy about the terms with
which they interact with media companies,
using social media to educate each other about
choices they are making. While youth may make
different decisions about what should or should
not be private than their parents’ generations
did, they often want to exert greater control
over what data is extracted from their lives,
who has access to that information, and on
what terms. Industry decisions therefore need
to become more transparent in helping their
consumers understand what kinds of data are
being collected, for what purposes, and under
what conditions. And other groups need to
continue to educate those who are less informed
about the risks that current practices pose to our
collective rights to control what uses get made of
our information. In our ideal model, companies
will provide the public with the tools they need to
manage their personal information, selling it off
to companies when consumers have no objection
to doing so, masking it from view when it matters
to them, but able to control at each stage what
uses of their unique data they have authorized.
• There will be multiple layers of creative

production. Some will be aimed at mass
audiences with hit-based strategies and others
will assume more intimate, more authentic
connections between fans and producers
of more niche content. The report on New
Funding and Business Models argues that the
“Long Tail” is a “total myth,” at least where
the music industry is concerned, stressing the
ways that the industry still depends on massive
hits from a small number of producers for the
overwhelming majority of its revenue. The
report on New Creators and Makers, however,
describes ways that artists working independently
from the major labels, courting their audiences
through encounters on a range of different
media platforms, and requesting their emotional
and economic investments are redefining what
success looks like. These two findings may seem
contradictory, but they reflect a splintering
of the media industry and a fragmentation of
audience taste. Imagine a world where there
are certain texts—pop songs, television series,
Conclusion • 94
blockbuster movies—that every person needs
to know in order to be “in the know.” Imagine
that each of these fans also has a more engaged,
more intimate relationship with some form of
niche content that is especially meaningful to
them but may not be widely known. The results
would look somewhat like what the current data
is showing us: there would be massive hits that
command the largest share of the revenue and
there would be a much more diverse set of artists
whose work enjoys some degree of commercial
success and who are able to sustain their careers
over time. The best way to make massive revenue
in such a system would be to produce a hit,
but this is also the best way to lose massive
revenue since producing hits is hard and costly.
However, there will be other options, such as the
ones outlined in the New Creators and Makers
report. The Long Tail model fails us if it leads
us to anticipate a world where there will be no
more hits, only niche successes, but its critics
are missing the boat if they imagine a world
which operates the same way that concentrated
media has always operated and fail to recognize
the expanded access to a more diverse set of
entertainment options. In some media sectors,
hits exert stronger influences than in others, but
in all, we should expect the interplay of different
levels of cultural production. We will say more
about the implications of ever more options
later in this conclusion. Right now, we are
seeing bleeding-edge experiments in what those
alternative paths to market look like, experiments
that may well rely on the kinds of New Funding
and Business Models this report has outlined,
including projects that depend on crowdfunding
and crowdsourcing mechanisms or which rely
on various kinds of subscription, micropayment,
and patronage systems.
• The new imagination economy will take

advantage of the affordances of diverse
kinds of screens and interfaces to introduce
new ways of interacting with media
content and new ways of participating
within entertainment experiences. Right
now, the industry tends to respond first to the
introduction of New Screens by developing new
forms of interactivity, which are preprogrammed
and allow fans to make personalized choices,
skimming along the surface or drilling down
deep, depending on their degrees of engagement.
Yet, many fans want more than this—they
want a chance to express themselves, they
want to use your content as a resource for their
social interactions with others, and they want
to be able to share, discuss, and remix media
content to make it a better vehicle for their
engagements. In short, they want the right to
participate. In a dynamic and audience-centric
media ecosystem, these forms of participation
are valuable to commercial media producers,
allowing opportunities for grassroots promotion,
for new insights into consumer tastes, and
for the recruitment of new talent. All of this
points back to the importance of developing
New Metrics and Measurements so that
producers can anticipate and respond nimbly
to the particular demands of the audiences that
are drawn together around media properties.
New forms of interactivity certainly create
opportunities for creative experimentation and
Conclusion • 96
expression, which we want to embrace, but
interactivity works best when it responds to
what we know about the desires and interests
of the consumers most apt to engage with that
content. It is precisely because there will be no
one-size-fits-all relationship with content in this
emerging media ecosystem that a more open and
more participatory space is essential to support
multiple interests and engagements.
• Advertising will become a resource content

audiences actively seek out because it
responds to their needs. Brands are creating
new relationships with the New Creators
and Makers, becoming collaborators with
and sponsors of entertainment experiences
(such as concert tours, music festivals and
other live events) and thus benefiting from
these more intimate relationships with fans.
Product placements are making brands more
integral to media content, as has occurred
across a range of different reality programming
formats, and brands may enable fans to access
expanded options that extend their experiences
of a popular entertainment franchise, as is
suggested by various transmedia branding
strategies. What the industry likes to call “viral
advertising” really describes branded content
viewers find compelling enough that they want
to pass it along to their friends, often because
it serves as a shared resource within ongoing
conversations within their community. In some
cases, for some kinds of products and services,
the development of strong brand communities
creates mechanisms for their messages to travel
by word of mouth, passed along by passionate
grassroots advocates who bear much greater
credibility than any commercial might. Each of
these represent alternative strategies for making
brand messages a meaningful part of the content,
something consumers seek out and share, rather
than something they dread and block. Such
approaches work best when the people calling
the shots for these brands have developed
cultural expertise and have insights that emerge
from people deeply embedded within those
communities. These strategies reflect the ways
that Madison Avenue, no less than Hollywood
or Nashville, might become more responsive
to diverse models of audience engagement and
might build the intimate partnership with their
dedicated followers that the New Creators and
Makers are fostering with their fans.
• Shared public spaces will gain new vitality

because of the desire for shared media
experiences. All of the sections of this report
stress the social dimensions of the public’s
relationship with media content and its creators.
Today’s media needs to support diverse kinds
of engagements, interactions, participations,
and transactions. Understanding media as
social explains why hits remain key drivers, why
patrons choose to support particular performers
and creators, and why audiences seek to develop
expertise and mastery by drilling deeper into
particular texts. It may also explain why they
may choose to continue to engage with media in
public, despite the fact that they can increasingly
consume any desired content on-demand
within the privacy of their own home. The old
Hollywood system was based on the idea that
Conclusion • 98
much of the country would routinely go to the
movies; New Hollywood imagined this would
be true for teens and young adults if it was no
longer true for everyone. Now, entertainment
experiences in public will be special events, and
thus they need to be distinctive and remarkable
experiences. The success of hackerspaces and
makerspaces suggest ways that sociality can
inspire the process of making and sharing media
together within a common space. Contemporary
trends find movie theaters being used more and
more for live events such as the simulcast of
operas, concerts, and theatrical experiences or
events such as Sing-A-Longs or Secret Cinema
excursions translating prefabricated screen
properties into unique local experiences that
build upon the public’s desire to share good
times together. Throughout the 20s and 30s,
American cinema houses offered “an evening’s
entertainment,” combining live performances
with canned experiences, offering other
services and features such as daycare facilities,
barbershops, bowling alleys, and dance halls,
all of which became their own attractions quite
beyond what films happened to be screening
that week. Given the range of media options
confronting the contemporary audience, media
producers need to accent location specificity,
liveness, and sociality as core features of their
offerings, giving people reasons to leave their
homes and return to the town square for what we
hope will be an evening’s entertainment.
The above represents the best potential of an imagination

economy: a melding of the capacities of professional media
makers and the social engagement of a more participatory
culture. Each of these predictions suggest ways that New Metrics
and Measurements, New Funding and Business Models, New
Screens, and New Creators and Makers might work together to
create a more diverse, more creative, more responsive, and more
meaningful set of options for audiences and producers alike.
Now, let us consider the more negative undercurrent that also

runs through the report. These scenarios suggest greater friction,
more tension, between the interests of media consumers and
producers.
• Every personal transaction will be monitored

and commodified. Imagine the logic of Big
Data carried to its logical extreme. Across the
Web 2.0 era, there has been a shift from an
emphasis on “user-generated content” as the
driver of profit for those who own the core
platforms and networks towards an economy
based on gathering and selling personal data
involuntarily shed during our social interactions.
Media companies have greater information
about their consumers than ever before, but the
extraction of that data has become more and
more intrusive. The public will have become
more aggressive at masking their identities
and blocking access to their information, but
the companies will have also become more
aggressive and more cunning about extracting
it. Our most intimate, more significant social
interactions occur in spaces that are not under
our control and that may be turned to the profit
of others. Our social connections remain difficult
to port from one social media platform to
another, making it hard for the market to exert
any counter-pressure on these trends.
Conclusion • 100
• A growing concentration of media ownership
will limit options for both producers and
consumers. The New Funding and Business
Models section of this report outlined a series
of scenarios about what would happen next
given the unstable business context for media
industries. Two of the three scenarios involved
some degree of greater concentration of media
ownership, with the five new media oligopolies
(Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix)
playing decisive roles in shaping what kinds of
media content has access to the marketplace and
on what terms. Both of those scenarios describe
ways that today’s fragmented media environment
might give ground to a much more concentrated
future, and this trend should concern many of
those who are reading this report, especially since
it works against the new kinds of relationships
between producers and consumers that are
outlined above. In the absence of net neutrality,
the priority given to companies who can pay
the most to access broadband pipelines will be a
further factor towards concentration, since the
public will have more limited access to alternative
channels, independent creators, or grassroots
networks. In the presence of net neutrality,
these companies could still maintain dominance
through strategic acquisitions and partnerships.
Even as we are seeing trends that point towards
the disaggregation of media content and thus
the opening up of more options, a concentrated
media ownership is apt to result in new forms of
bundling, especially in terms of how we pay for
access to especially desired content.
• Unwanted media intrudes into more and

more spaces of consumers’ lives. Brands and
content producers will demand the attention
of consumers who are increasingly trying to
screen out their messages and as a consequence,
media will override real world experiences. The
more effective the public becomes at blocking
ads in their personal spaces, the more crafty
the industry is apt to become at introducing
such content through other channels. Consider
the example of Times Square: old photographs
of Times Square at the dawn of the 20th
century show a mediascape where every inch
of real estate is dominated by signs, billboards,
and advertisements, all sending competing
messages to the public. Today’s Times Square
is remarkably the same: the signs have become
electronic, with more and more of the real estate
occupied by video projections. We have added
another layer of media we carry around with
us on our bodies and that can now hail us with
mobile messages. What happens when every
town square in every neighborhood starts to
look more and more like Times Square? We get
a glimpse of such a future in Minority Report,
either the film or the television show, where
commercials are more personalized, triggered
by the presence of specific consumers, and
demand their attention as they seek to push
past them along the crowded streets. This vision
combines the pervasiveness of advertising with
the invasiveness of personal data extraction,
resulting in a world where there is no privacy
and little refuge from commercialization. This is
the opposite of the scenario we described above
where advertising is seen as a resource in support
of consumer’s own desires for meaningful
Conclusion • 102
connection with each other. In this scenario, the
New Screens simply offer new platforms from
which branded content can intrude into our
lives, responsive to the consumer only insofar as
doing so gives an advantage in commanding their
attention.
• Relations between producers and consumers

will become increasingly strained as we
see embattled stances around copyright
and fair use. Piracy will destroy revenue for
creative artists and overly aggressive copyright
enforcement will limit options for the public
to express their desires in response to media
content. Whenever there is a disruption of an
economic system, there is also a disruption
of the moral economy that grows up around
it: all parties seek to gain ground and make
competing and contradictory bids to legitimate
these new practices. The New Funding and
Business Models report suggests that piracy,
far from being an underground illicit activity,
benefits enormously from choices made by
media platforms and advertisers, which make
file-sharing profitable. The public’s desire for free
content exists alongside the advertiser’s desires to
reach dispersed consumers, resulting in negative
consequences for the creative industries. At the
same time, the industry’s response has been
enormously destructive, largely because they
have directed their ire and legal might against
consumers seeking access to their content,
not towards these other economic players.
Understanding all forms of grassroots circulation
as piracy and all forms of remixing and
transformative works as infringement threatens
the new participatory culture and likely damages
the kinds of relations to consumers that makers
old and new need to cultivate if they are going
to survive and thrive in this new environment.
The erosion of copyright and fair use exist side
by side at the present moment, each pushing
all parties towards more extreme positions, and
each damaging the integrity of the imagination
economy. Any path forward will need to address
both, since shifting one without addressing the
other will lack the moral authority and credibility
necessary to get all parties to buy into such a
solution.
The above represents the worst sides of the old information/

mass media economy. Some interests will no doubt profit
from this scenario, especially those who exert a control over
this more concentrated media economy. But many more will
be disadvantaged—producers who will lack a clear pathway to
the market, artists who enjoy fewer creative opportunities, and
consumers who feel violated at all sides. These scenarios result
in more friction, more tension, as the gaps between conflicting
interests widen, and we are locked into winner-takes-all battles
for dominance. These scenarios threaten privacy and especially
threaten the diversity, freedom, and participation that were the
promises most widely embraced during the first phases of the
digital revolution. Just as some have argued that it is hard to get
the public to pay for content they once received for free, it may
also be extremely difficult to get them to accept controls and
constraints over choices that were much more freely made.
So what is to be done? There is nothing inevitable about these

outcomes—they are not determined by the technological
environment but rather shaped by choices made at all levels
of the media ecosystem. As a consequence, reality is apt to fall
somewhere in between these two models, so that creative artists
Conclusion • 104
and consumers both need to adopt an attitude of hope for the best,
prepare for the worst. They need to recognize that paradigm shifts
are shaped by many localized decisions and they need to make
choices with an understanding of both their short-term return
and their long-range impact on the media ecology. To achieve the
more desirable model is going to require active choices, creative
innovations, and visionary leaders, who see the value in the kind
of system we’ve described. There are a great many factors that
can block one or another of these developments and some of
them require long-term rather than short-term decision-making,
something that is hard to achieve given the current economic
imperatives impacting media companies.
• More forms of engagement. The Edison

Project’s audience engagement research
shows us why it has been difficult for the
industry to develop reliable measurements
of audience engagement: engagement is not
simply one thing. Fans embrace properties
for many different reasons, and the models
we use to map these behaviors need to be
robust and nuanced enough to account for
those different motivators. Diverse fans want
different things, and they increasingly expect
media producers to anticipate and respond
to those desires, especially in a context where
every other media option is expanding at the
same moment.
• More forms of attention. Sometimes we

snack, sometimes we surf, sometimes we
binge. Sometimes media competes for our
attention with a range of other activities,
and sometimes we give it our full attention.
Sometimes we turn off the show before it
is over and sometimes we stay after for late
night panel discussions, podcasts, fan fiction,
transmedia extensions, and a range of other
forms of extra content.
• More forms of participation and

interactivity. As media producers respond
to these diverse forms of engagement
and attention, we are seeing a dramatic
proliferation of features, each of which
makes their own assumptions about what
people want to do with media content. The
more grounded these features are in what
research shows us about patterns of audience
engagement, the more successful they will
be at providing consumers with meaningful
experiences. However, we should not expect
technological innovation and experimentation
to slow anytime soon.
• More media platforms. We are a long way

away from the seamless convergence of media
technologies that some had anticipated.
Rather, we are seeing a proliferation of
media platforms, each offering consumers
different ways of accessing and engaging
with content, each allowing for different
ways of scheduling or locating viewing, and
each offering different ways of accessing and
paying for content. For example, the On
Demand system at the temporary apartment
where I am currently living allows me access
to a broad and deep video library, making it
possible to get on top of new series well after
they have aired, but it has no capacity for me
to record content I might miss if I need to
work late and thus requires me to wait 24-48
Conclusion • 106
hours to be able to access it if I do not make it
home again. Further, it has disabled both my
capacity to fast forward through commercials
and to pause action while watching a “live”
broadcast. So, in some ways, it has the
features of a fully streaming world, where the
consumer chooses a program not a channel,
and where people can access what they
want when they want it, but in other ways,
the On Demand system pushes us back to
appointment-based models of viewing, at
least in the short run, especially in relation to
special events such as presidential debates or
series finales that are apt to be the center of
social interactions the following day. Each of
these platforms, then, has implications of how
content gets consumed and even what kinds
of content matters.
• More business models. Some content will

be bundled, and some will be sold separately
to the consumer on a unit-by-unit basis. We
are apt to see the unbundling of traditional
cable packages over the coming years, a
trend we predicted at the start of the Edison
Project, and one that has been unfolding
rapidly ever since. However, subscription
based models are apt to result in new kinds
of bundling—if not of channels, then of
content producers, who will want to work
together to get a share of the revenue. Some
content will be purchased in advance, as a
result of new crowdfunding or patronage
models, and others will be printed on
demand, as has happened increasingly in the
publishing world. Since the other factors that
are contributing to the proliferation of such
models are not apt to be resolved in the short
term, producers are going to need to navigate
across different platforms and business
models, making different deals for different
kinds of access to their content, and hedging
their bets.
• More layers of production and

circulation. As we suggested above, many
sectors of the entertainment industry will
remain hits and blockbuster-driven in the
short term. Despite an expanding range
of media options, some choices gain an
overwhelming share of audience attention
and revenue. There will remain a sector well
situated to fund, produce, and promote such
content, which requires special kinds of
infrastructure and resources. However, there
will also be other ways for media producers
to reach audiences, and there will be many
other layers of media production, often less
dependent on large revenue to sustain their
operations. This report has stressed the
opportunities for New Creators and Makers
to chart new paths to the market and forge
new relationships with their consumers.
However, we should also note that there
are more paths leading from amateur to
semi-professional and professional in this
new ecology and more ways for nonprofit,
governmental, educational, religious, activist,
and other groups to get their materials into
circulation, sometimes reaching a large public
audience, without necessarily making this
content the primary basis for their income.
Conclusion • 108
We will therefore likely see producers
with radically different motives using the
same platforms to get their content out to
the world, and, in the process, we will see
new relationships emerging between these
different forms of media production.
• More relationships between fans and

producers. As hits persist as a key profit
generator and driver of the mainstream media
industries, we have seen a growth in celebrity
culture—certain larger than life personalities
command the spotlight, and people want
more and more information about more
and more different aspects of their lives.
This desire for glimpses behind the curtain
persist precisely because on other levels, these
performers retain a high degree of distance
from their fans, on the main stage looking
down across the footlights, not mingling
on the dance floor after the performance.
Because of their enormous reach, such
celebrities can drive other consumer
decisions, such as endorsing brands and
products, and can shape civic decisions, such
as putting their names behind particular
causes and charities. At the same time, other
media-makers have sought to build more
intimate relationships with their particular
niches, inviting fans inside as “friends”,
encouraging them to actively contribute to
and support the creative process, as potential
funders and patrons on the one hand and
circulators and publicists on the other. As
creators seek to identify which niche they
need to occupy in the more diverse systems
of production and circulation, they will also
be making decisions about what kinds of
relationships they want to cultivate with their
fans.
So, our prognosis in the short term is more, MORE, MORE!!!

This is at least part of what a robust imagination economy, one
more limited by poverty of the imagination than scarcity of
resources, might look like. Therefore, we need to adjust to a realm
of plentitude rather than scarcity, and that will require particular
kinds of skills, tools, and services in the short run. We face a
media landscape that is rapidly expanding, opening up new and
varied terrain stretching in every direction. We’ve only touched
on some, not all, of the factors influencing this escalation of media
change—we’ve said little to nothing here about the flow of media
content and formats across national borders, for example, about
the kinds of pop cosmopolitanism that are increasing awareness
and interest in content from elsewhere pretty much without
regard to which national media economy we are describing. This
expansion of options accounts for why all involved feel like things
are spinning beyond their control. To survive in this ecosystem,
we’ll need tools to help us navigate and traverse this terrain: social
and algorithmic mechanisms for curation as well as platforms to
help us seamlessly access and consume content.
We can anticipate that many artists will struggle to make sense

of this new system, especially insofar as it requires them to
negotiate with a broader range of investors and gate-keepers than
in the past and it requires them to move across different media
systems in order to find their audiences. Not all of them will
possess the kinds of social skills needed to forge new relationships
with audiences. Not all of them will have the entrepreneurial
skills needed to navigate this more complex marketplace, and
not all of them will have the technical skills to rapidly produce
and distribute low-cost bursts of content. Many of these artists
Conclusion • 110
will find that they need to work together to create the kinds of
media packages that might attract subscriptions and patronage—
cooperatives of independents that might operate alongside the
larger media conglomerates driving a more hits-and-blockbuster-
centered industry. A key challenge represented by these new
business models is that of sustainability—a problem all creative
artists confront under the conditions of precarious labor that have
become the new normal after the collapse of older contractual
structures, such as those filmmakers had under the studio system
or musicians had with their labels. We may see the emergence
of new production hubs in places like Chattanooga, TN which
enjoy high speed access but lower cost of living, tapping into the
possibility for content to enter the network from any geographic
point.
We would also imagine then that those hoping to follow these

paths would be seeking new kinds of advisors, mentors, and
advocates, new kinds of agents and managers, who have the
flexibility to put together different deals bringing artists, publics,
and promoters together on a project by project basis. Something
similar emerged when the Hollywood production system moved
from self-contained studios where most of the artists were under
contract to a more independent production systems where
teams get packaged on a film by film basis, and more recently, as
franchise content has moved into other media sectors, requiring
more fluid collaborations between producers of all kinds.
We would also anticipate that the public will need more help in
navigating and traversing the new media landscape. At a time
of diversifying, expanding, and fragmenting media options, they
need more help than ever before in finding media content that is
meaningful to them. One reason that the Long Tail predictions did
not turn out as anticipated is that the mechanisms for publicizing
mass culture content are well established and continue to function
to assure widespread awareness of every top 40 record, every
blockbuster media franchise, and so forth. Even if people are not
consuming this content, most of us know what’s out there and a
whole industry helps to drive attention to these pop phenomena.
On the other hand, the Long Tail model assumed not only lower
cost access to niche media content—an expanded media library—
but also lower-cost mechanisms for helping people to find the
content they want, and those mechanisms have been slower to
emerge.
Further, while transmedia production strategies make sense

insofar as they allow fans to drill down on content that has gained
their attention, this approach assumes they know that these media
extensions exist in the first place and again and again, producers
discover that this knowledge is not necessarily as widespread as
they might imagine. While transmedia was initially understood
as a promotional mechanism driving traffic to the “mother ship”
entertainment properties, the reality is that these transmedia
options themselves need to be publicized: they might better
be understood as mechanisms for sustaining and deepening
engagement rather than as means of producing awareness in the
first place.
The public may also need help in locating communities of other

people who share their interests and want to engage with each
other around entertainment content: the mechanisms which
leads engaged viewers into participation within larger fandoms. A
public eager to forge new kinds of relationships with performers
and producers may still need help sorting through all of the
various bids and offers for crowd-funding and patronage.
To some degree, these mechanisms for navigating and traversing

the mediascape are emerging informally, through various
grassroots efforts at curating and recommending content. To
another degree, these mechanisms are emerging algorithmically,
through new recommendation engines and services. However,
as of this moment there’s a widespread perception that we do
not yet have the tools and practices we need to drive the public
Conclusion • 112
further down the Long Tail and encourage them to engage with
more diverse kinds of media content. It has been said that the
people who profit the most during gold rushes are those who
produce and sell the picks, shovels, and pans needed to process
the gold, and the same will be true in this economy of MORE for
those who provide the tools and services needed to navigate and
traverse this expansive media landscape.
The Edison Project • 113
NOTES
1 John Seely Brown, “What Is the Imagination Economy?”

in DTLA Imagination Corridor World Building Project: Phase I
Briefing Book, by Nicholas Busalacchi, Sonia Jawaid Shaikh,
François Bar, and Ann Pendleton-Jullian (USC Annenberg
Innovation Lab and The Reef, 2015), 7.
2 http://cmsw.mit.edu/television-2-0-tv-as-an-
engagement-medium/
3 http://www.annenberglab.com/projects/politics-
sentiment
4 “Television: Huntley-Brinkley’s Chunk of Crinkly,”

Time, April 2, 1965.
5 http://fortune.com/2015/08/20/tv-business-is-broken/
6 http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/04/facebook-now-
makes-78-percent-of-its-ad-revenue-on-mobile/; https://www.
youtube.com/yt/press/en-GB/statistics.html (accessed March 9,
2016)
7 Chris Anderson, The Long Tail:Why the Future of

Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006).
8 Anita Elberse, Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and

the Big Business of Entertainment (New York: Henry Holt, 2013).
9 http://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-
market-share-of-search-engines/ (accessed March 9, 2016)
10 http://www.androidauthority.com/android-ios-hold-98-
percent-marketshare-656624
Notes • 114
11 http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/27/facebook-dominates-
social-logins/
12 Robert B. Reich, “Big Tech Has Become Way Too

Powerful,” New York Times, September 18, 2015.
13 Cynthia Littleton, “FX Networks Chief John Landgraf:

‘There Is Simply Too Much Television,’” Variety, August 7,
2015.
14 http://www.reelseo.com/hours-minute-uploaded-
youtube/
15 http://marketingland.com/google-youtube-has-been-the-
cause-of-declining-cpcs-this-whole-time-131323
16 http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-click-fraud/
17 http://deadline.com/2013/09/edison-project-usc-
research-entertainment-study-598655/
18 Craig Moffett and Amelia Wong, The “Dumb Pipe”

Paradox (Part I), (Bernstein Research: Feb. 27, 2006).
19 http://digiday.com/agencies/appnexus-filters-65-percent-
impressions-fraudulent/
20 http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/17/9338963/welcome-
to-hell-apple-vs-google-vs-facebook-and-the-slow-death-of-the-
web
21 http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/02/6-1b-smartphone-
users-globally-by-2020-overtaking-basic-fixed-phone-
subscriptions/
22 https://torrentfreak.com/popcorn-time-installed-1-4-
million-devices-u-s-140901/
23 http://ir.netflix.com/common/download/download.cfm?
companyid=NFLX&fileid=804108&filekey=043A3015-36EC-
49B9-907C-27960F1A7E57&filename=Q4_14_Letter_to_
shareholders.pdf
24 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-real-fight-was-
between-live-streaming-and-pay-per-view-2015-05-04
25 https://torrentfreak.com/game-of-thrones-most-pirated-
tv-show-of-2015/
26 http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/05/12/
game-of-thrones-again-sets-piracy-world-record-and-hbo-is-to-
blame
27 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Ghosts_I%E2%80%93IV#Sales_and_chart_performance
(accessed March 9, 2016)
28 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micropayment#PayPal
29 https://www.paypal.com/ca/webapps/mpp/merchant-
fees
30 http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/32566.html
31 http://szabo.best.vwh.net/micropayments.html
32 http://fortune.com/2014/04/20/how-much-revenue-did-
itunes-generate-for-apple-last-quarter-2/
33 http://siblisresearch.com/data/market-caps-sp-100-us/
Notes • 116
34 https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/research-studies/the-
new-multi-screen-world-study.html; http://www.etcentric.org/
internet-trends-report-overall-growth-slows-mobile-on-rise/
35 http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/08/10/fx-networks-
president-said-america-is-nearing-peak-tv/
36 http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/
archive/2015/08/have-we-reached-peak-tv/401009/
37 http://adage.com/article/behind-the-work/campfire-
sinks-creative-teeth-true-blood/130134/; http://yokedesign.com.
au/blog/online-marketing-done-right-the-case-of-hbo-true-
blood/
38 Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable

Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New
York: New York University Press, 2013), 144.
39 http://yokedesign.com.au/blog/online-marketing-done-
right-the-case-of-hbo-true-blood/
40 http://mashable.com/2013/01/14/twitter-tv-mystery-
hawaii-5-0/
41 http://www.etcentric.org/advertisers-face-an-increase-in-
ad-blocking-search-for-fixes/
42 http://futureofstorytelling.org/
43 http://www.annenberglab.com/projects/edison-project-
360-degree-storytelling
44 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture:Where Old and New Media

Collide (NewYork: NewYork University Press, 2006), 93–130; http://
henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html
45 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture:Where Old and New

Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006),
132–3; see also glossary definitions on pages 287 and 290
tangible-storytelling
47 http://www.motive.io
48 http://artifacttech.com
49 http://www.wired.com/2013/12/the-paradox-of-
wearables-close-to-your-body-but-keeping-tech-far-away/
augmented-storytelling
augmenting-accessibility
52 http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/2015/08/03/the-coming-
collapse-of-surveillance-marketing/
53 http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_
paradox_of_choice
54 http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/2015/08/03/the-coming-
collapse-of-surveillance-marketing/
55 http://www.wsj.com/articles/say-goodbye-to-the-
screen-1444734983
56 http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047199/apple-finally-
learns-ai-is-the-new-ui
Notes • 118
57 http://www.psfk.com/2015/03/connected-toys-future-
of-play-furby-boom-ubooly-smart-toys.html; http://techcrunch.
com/2015/02/16/elemental-path-debuts-the-first-toys-powered-
by-ibm-watson/
58 http://www.etcentric.org/microsoft-mixed-reality-is-
future-of-immersive-entertainment/
59 https://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us/
experience
60 http://www.nytimes.com/video/
science/100000002993986/a-virtual-elephant.html
61 http://www.psfk.com/2015/09/magic-leap-patents-
augmented-reality-contacts.html
62 http://www.annenberglab.com/projects/tangible-
storytelling-play-learning
63 http://www.annenberglab.com/news/2014/03/think-do-
re-envisioning-tv
64 http://www.2ndscreensociety.com/ces2015/program/
65 http://schedule.sxsw.com/2015/events/event_IAP43320;
https://soundcloud.com/officialsxsw/storytelling-with-the-new-
screens-sxsw-interactive-2015
66 http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/if-pewdiepie-is-
youtubes-top-talent-were-all-doomed-1200607196/
67 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-
lHJZR3Gqxm24_Vd_AJ5Yw
68 http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/13013936/pewdiepie-
how-became-king-youtube
69 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCCoggBkcdM
70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p0wFDmiJsE
71 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.
php?storyId=125783271
72 http://vidstatsx.com/PomplamooseMusic/videos-most-
viewed (accessed August 15, 2015)
73 MxR. “Featured.” USC Institute for Creative

Technologies, 2015.
74 http://www.mtbs3d.com/articles/news/13128-john-
carmack-talks-vr-at-quakecon-2012
75 http://www.ign.com/videos/2012/06/06/ign-reacts-john-
carmack-makes-virtual-reality-actually-cool-with-new-head-
tracking-device-e3-2012
76 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/
oculus-rift-step-into-the-game
77 http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/22/
facebook-oculus-rift-acquisition-virtual-reality
78 http://www.mochimag.com/article/michelle-phan-
makeup-line-em-beauty-guru-how-to-videos-youtube
79 http://michellephan.com/about-me/ (accessed February

8, 2016)
80 http://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2015/10/05/
how-michelle-phan-built-a-500-million-company
81 http://fashionista.com/2015/10/michelle-phan-ipsy
Notes • 120
82 https://www.youtube.com/user/MichellePhan/about
(accessed February 8, 2016)
83 http://www.ew.com/article/2014/07/09/east-los-high-
builds-on-hulus-success-among-hispanic-audiences
84 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/east-los-high-
how-hulu-590957
85 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/east-los-
high-hulu_n_3395762.html
86 http://www.examiner.com/article/east-los-high-finally-a-
latino-themed-show-we-can-be-proud-of
87 http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/
entertainment/2015/07/21/east-los-high-teen-drama-brings-
latino-discrimination-to-table/
88 http://edwardspoonhands.com/post/46305605617/
lessons-learned-from-youtubes-300m-hole
89 http://www.motoringfile.com/2016/01/19/44573/
90 https://www.instagram.com/hardgraft/
91 https://www.instagram.com/thisisground/
92 http://www.slate.com/articles/business/
moneybox/2000/04/the_scoop_on_ben_jerrys_sellout.html
93 http://deadline.com/2014/03/paleyfest-veronica-mars-
kristen-bell-699014/
94 http://www.ew.com/article/2014/03/16/is-kickstarter-
movie-financings-future
95 http://whedonesque.com/comments/7502
96 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-
veronica-mars-movie-project
97 http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/veronica-
mars-creator-rob-thomas-talks-from-the-movie-set
98 http://www.thewrap.com/warner-bros-refund-angry-
veronica-mars-contributors/
99 http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/03/15/
veronica_mars_movie_project_kickstarter_campaign_did_it_
ruin_crowd_funding.html
100 http://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/why-crowd-
funding-movies-on-kickstarter-can-be-a-mess/
101 http://henryjenkins.org/2013/03/kickstarting-veronica-
mars-a-conversation-about-the-future-of-television-part-one.
html
102 http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-
news/publisher-news/article/51416-self-made-bestseller-weighs-
traditional-deals.html
103 http://www.wired.com/2012/03/hugh-howey-interview-
part-one-science-fiction-indie-writing-and-success/
104 http://www.tampabay.com/features/books/wool-
author-hugh-howey-chimes-in-on-print-digital-self-
publishing/2118165
105 http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/19/hugh-howey-author-
of-the-silo-saga-talks-about-making-it-big-in-self-publishing/
Notes • 122
106 http://www.wired.com/2013/04/geeks-guide-hugh-
howey/
107 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324678
604578340752088305668
108 http://www.tubefilter.com/2014/11/18/creators-million-
dollars-month-patreon/ November 18, 2014.
109 https://www.patreon.com/jackconte?ty=h (accessed

August 19, 2015)
110 https://www.patreon.com/natalydawn?ty=h (accessed

August 19, 2015)
111 https://www.patreon.com/pomplamoose?ty=h (accessed

August 19, 2015)
112 https://www.patreon.com/comicsbeat?ty=h (accessed

August 19, 2015)
113 https://www.patreon.com/chainsawsuit?ty=c (accessed

August 19, 2015)
114 https://www.patreon.com/dresdencodak?ty=c (accessed

August 19, 2015)
115 https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey?ty=h (accessed

August 19, 2015)
116 https://www.patreon.com/pentatonix?ty=h (accessed

August 19, 2015)
117 https://www.patreon.com/comedybutton?ty=h (accessed

August 19, 2015)
118 https://www.patreon.com/amandapalmer?ty=h (accessed
August 19, 2015)
119 http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/23/patreon-raises-15-
million-series-a-revamps-site-to-showcase-artist-content/.
120 http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/28/a-chat-with-jack-
conte-musician-and-entrepreneur/
121 http://musically.com/2015/03/03/amanda-palmer-joins-
patreon/
122 http://www.classicfm.com/artists/lindsey-
stirling/news/piano-guys-lindsey-stirling-youtube-
award/#1rHI3fh7p3b242fU.97
123 http://www.buzzfeed.com/raunaql/20-amazing-youtube-
cover-collabs-you-need-to-hear-h0dw#.uw4W05dYE
124 https://medium.com/lab-work/9-times-collaboration-
made-youtube-that-much-more-awesome-cf9b5c3f32ab#.
cagb58y0s
125 http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/19/hugh-howey-author-
of-the-silo-saga-talks-about-making-it-big-in-self-publishing/
126 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324678
604578340752088305668
127 http://www.hughhowey.com/a-new-wool-book-and-it-
isnt-mine/
128 http://www.hughhowey.com/amazons-kindle-worlds-
program-is-live/
129 http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/16086277627/my-
Notes • 124
treaming-data
130 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IZ3j67aNI4XB
GKYLvgR6db5fIaB4sqrchVcim2XhBIo/edit#gid=3
131 http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0901-
keating-labor-pains-music-20130901-story.html
132 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dv74s4RL8Fgg
nkyRlkVdF8eolDzxzDTUHvAkHLooYbE/edit#gid=0
133 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pfCAW_
oAxscHJR99CpmaQiVzBB3BDRjd46LDfBMPzGo/
edit#gid=1598412477
134 https://twitter.com/zoecello/status/601503720694747141
135 http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgehoward/2015/06/05/
bitcoin-and-the-arts-and-interview-with-artist-and-composer-
zoe-keating/
136 http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/132672969594/i-
want-to-hear-your-opinions-about-copyright
137 http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/4929570-181/
sonoma-county-cellist-zoë-keating?artslide=0
138 http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/how-hugh-
howey-turned-his-self-published-story-wool-into-a-success-a-
book-deal
139 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCCoggBkcdM
Accessed August 15, 2015.
140 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7X8ZnmLfM0
Accessed August 15, 2015.
141 http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2014/11/25/band-just-
finished-28-day-tour-made-much/
142 https://www.warbyparker.com/cooper-hewitt
143 https://www.warbyparker.com/ghostly
144 https://blog.warbyparker.com/826-collaboration/
145 http://blog.warbyparker.com/introducing-collaboration-
beck/
146 https://www.harrys.com/products/uncrate-shave-set
147 http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/id/13013936/pewdiepie-
how-became-king-youtube
148 http://fusion.net/story/244545/famous-and-broke-on-
youtube-instagram-social-media/
Photo credits:
Frederic Josue
Thomas Jorion
Julien Rath
Notes • 126

Edison Project Book

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Edison Project Book

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Edison Project Book

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE EDISON

18 Havas is the global The Annenberg Innovation

THE NEW METRICS + MEASUREMENT: 8

THE NEW FUNDING + BUSINESS MODELS: 33

THE NEW SCREENS 51

THE NEW CREATORS + MAKERS 69

CONCLUSION: IMAGINING POSSIBLE FUTURES 92

Thomas Edison invented both the phonograph and the

Thus The Edison Project.

As part of the Edison Project, the Lab:

• Facilitated Think + Do Workshops, to deliver

Through the Edison Project, the Lab posits a transition from an

This shift from an information economy to an imagination

1. the rise of ubiquitous, natural, and affordable

These are all converging to reshape the media and entertainment

What Is an Imagination Economy?

John Seely Brown, the former director of Xerox’s Palo Alto

We are in an era of networks, sensors, smart

This new era is one of creating contexts and

an important question is, “What is the purpose

We have entered into a world of what-if and why-

Welcome to the imagination age—where everything

Simply put, if an information economy is powered primarily by

The media and entertainment business is in turmoil. Revenues

Mapping the Future: The Edison Project Trends

What follows is a summary of the work we’ve conducted over

monetization. The third chapter shifts the conversation towards

Sponsors: 20th Century Fox, Cisco Systems, Inc., DirecTV, EPB,

Board of Advisors: Sarah Banet-Weiser, Willow Bay, John Seely

Lead Researchers: Geoffrey Long, Erin Reilly, Francesca Marie

Research Council: Sasha Anawalt, François Bar, Elizabeth Currid-

Supporting Researchers & Practitioners: Tushar Aggarwal, Andrea

And a special, double thanks to Ernest J. Wilson III, John Seely

Assuming that my smartphone and other devices were collecting

My experience is, of course, not unique: each of us increasingly

desires, and selves into a pool of knowledge that every company

In fact, marketers, creatives, and nearly everyone else in the

But that’s where marketers and creatives are wrong. In fact,

Throughout the first season the show has rewarded

This type of information and understanding of a particular

There are ways to effectively use data to offer insights about

A better approach is to understand that we all have the potential to

We all start out as audience members, but sometimes, when the

The key to leveraging engagement is not just knowing

At USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, I’ve been leading a research

WHY Is a Fan Motivated?

At the core of the Leveraging Engagement model are certain

In sports, some fans engage through Identification,

which we define as strongly associating oneself with a

In unscripted entertainment where fans engage

In music, the majority of music festival fans engage

In superhero story universes, the logic of Mastery

Motivators act as lenses through which fans’ behaviors and desires

For example, in looking at music fans in America, one of the fan

In contrast, fans operating with the Mixologist mindset listen to

MOTIVATORS an agile and inexhaustible list of what drives

SOCIAL CONNECTION integrating oneself in a fandom in order to

MASTERY consistently learning and understanding

IDENTIFICATION strongly associating oneself with a passion and