Events conspired this week to throw into high relief the core question for those who would commercialize social media: can a balanced be reached between user control and corporate control or will commercial social media always exist on a cliff's edge over which either party can push it at any time?
In the Digg/HD-DVD fiasco, it was users who pushed the corporation over the edge-forcing the company to ignore a legal takedown request in order to keep it's community alive. As Fred Wilson wrote:
I've been around web communities since we invested in Geocities in 1996 and one thing I've learned is the community thinks they own the community. And if you are the one who actually owns it, you'd better act like the community owns it or you'll lose it....
Forget about what's right and wrong in this case, the important point is Digg showed that they control the community and will police it.
That's a big deal. They might get away with that on issues like hate, porn, terror, but not on hacking.
When you get in the way of geeks sharing hacks with each other in a geek community, you've done something big.
Meanwhile over at MySpace, it was presidential hopeful Barack Obama who was feeling the wrath of the crowd. The Obama campaign had jumped all over a MySpace page started way back in November 2004 when a paralegal named Joe Anthony became a fan of the then-newly elected senator.
Since Obama announced his presidential bid, his campaign had been working with Anthony and the profile had pulled 160,000 friends and garnered Obama a lot of press buzz. But, after an open dispute with Anthony over control of the site, the Obama camp this week had MySpace hand over the "BarackObama" name, refusing to compensate Anthony who reportedly offered to hand over control for a fee of $39,000, a number reflecting the 5 hours a day Anthony claims to have devoted to the site.
Today the "official" Barack Obama MySpace profile has 33,500 friends and the candidate has lost not only a high profile volunteer but also a voter. As Anthony himself explained to Micah Sifry in an open letter:
The campaign got involved in February and although at first it was very exciting, it quickly became clear that they just had no interest in me or my involvement. They only wanted to take control of the profile and get on with it. I bit the bullet for a while and kept working for the good of the campaign, but they quickly went from passive aggressive, to aggressive, and then eventually just rotten and dishonest.
For the past few weeks, the campaign decided it would be better if they just took control of the profile and we decided to try to come to some agreement. By this time, I didn't have quite as much respect for the campaign guys, and frankly felt like I was just being used. They knew about this profile the entire time, and really just waited until it got enough media coverage and friends request so they could step in and bully me out of it....
This was not about money and I don't believe that one person who has interacted with me via the Obama profile over the past couple of years would be able to say that my efforts were anything but sincere. This was about holding a campaign to their message, about acknowledging my work, and taking this community seriously.
Apparently the message here is, as an individual, if you have too big of an impact, you're just a liability.
This is how Obama lost my vote, and one of his strongest supporters.
TechPresident has offered excellent extended coverage of the dispute, Anthony's explanation, Obama's response, and even an analysis of what Anthony's profile might really have been worth (as much as $90K according to Sifray). Most interesting is the response from someone in the Dean campaign who had faced similar problems to the ones faced by Obama:
We called people like Joe Anthony "centers of gravity"- people who had built up their own Dean communities. We wanted centers of gravity as close to campaign as possible without imploding.
At first, new centers of gravity were exciting, but very perplexing, and our tiny team debated options. We quickly ran into an odd clarifier-the law. Because of legal concerns about campaign coordination, we were told early on by our lawyers that we had two choices: to have a manager/agent relationship with grassroots supporters, or to not direct grassroots supporters actions at all....
We simply couldn't have a manager/agent relationship and still have all this flowering of intelligent political energy: we chose to be hands off, talking with people but not telling them what to do.
Finally today we have word that YouTube is finally going to begin to bring its user-creators into the corporate side flow by doing something Obama didn't want to do for Anthony-offer money.
YouTube announced on it's corporate blog that it was adding half a dozen or so high profile posters to its partnership program-the same program to which CBS, the NBA, and other big media producers belong.
YouTube didn't announce specific criteria for choosing the initial members who got a bump in status other than to say that "they have built and sustained large, persistent audiences through the creation of engaging videos, their content has become attractive for advertisers...."
At NewTeeVee Om Malik had an interview with Jamie Byrne, vice president of marketing at YouTube in which Byrne 20 to 40 producers would be included in the initial roll out, with more potentially added in the future.
At Techcrunch Duncan Riley wonders what the revenue split is worth:
...the new Partners Program only goes as far as monetizing the actual YouTube page destination with Adsense units. Whilst not without merit, the new program is limited given the way YouTube content is consumed. The great strength of YouTube from its earliest days has been the use of embedded video on external sites: a large number, if not a majority of viewers will never see the advertising, viewing it only on blogs and forums which if they are running Google Adsense units, do so in a way that does not benefit the content creator.
But nearly everyone expects YouTube to begin inserting pre-roll video advertising at some point in the not to distant future. It will be interesting to watch what happens with the YouTube program-will it spark competition to be chosen for partnership? will it spark resentment that some but not all members are chosen to participate? will it generate enough money for chosen members to matter at all?
Link Love:
BlogCatalog Gets Socially Networked
NBA Taps Into Second Life
If Markets Are Conversations Then Twitter Is Money
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