We all know content and platforms have a love-hate relationship and the zeitgeist swings back and forth favoring one or the other.

When platforms face no competition, they crowdsource and try to attract as much content as possible… but, once other platforms come into the space, each one requires exclusive content to differentiate themselves.

Thus you have Netflix grabbing every indie and tv show within reach during the early days until it realized Hulu and Amazon have the exact same content, driving Netflix to instead pursue exclusive Disney deals and produce original content. YouTube is on a similar trajectory, they all are. There’s nothing new about this, Netflix is doing exactly what movie channels like HBO or AMC did to differentiate themselves.

Depending on a content creator’s choices, she can either benefit from platforms’ changing strategies or be locked in limbo by those changing strategies.

When content is platform agnostic, it can take advantage of changes in the platform business without falling victim to them. If you make a feature film at the height of the DVD boom, you can take advantage of that… and because your film isn’t exclusively locked in to DVD you can port it over to iTunes or Netflix Streaming once DVD falls off.

The trick for content is to remain as platform agnostic as possible.

With comics, it’s new that these things are perhaps not locked into the dead-trees format. The past ten years has seen tumultuous change in the historically very static format of comics, first with collected books launching through the stratosphere and more recently with web comics, digital comics, motion comics, etc. All of a sudden comics creators have to be aware of how versatilely their work is being designed. Two-page spread? Maybe not such a great idea if a large number of people are going to be reading it on a tablet.

People ask me why I’m not excited about Comixology or MadeFire. To me, and I don’t have a problem with these platforms on a personal level they’re both fine, but they demand too much exclusivity for what they offer in return. First of all, both are expecting your content for free (MadeFire does some work-for-hire, but they are moving more toward crowdsourcing). If a platform is getting your content for free, they deserve zero exclusivity. You post a video on YouTube, you can also post it wherever else you want. But Comixology and MadeFire use their toolkits to repurpose your work into their native format which can’t be exported elsewhere. So your panel-view digital comic is really only available in Comixology or your motion comic is only available in MadeFire. This proprietary formatting with zero money up front exists nowhere else. Even in a 100% returnable business like DVD or CD, the retailer still has to pay upfront for the right to stock your product. And when Time Warner Cable or iTunes takes your movie, it’s not in an exclusive proprietary format. The business models of Comixology and MadeFire are unique in this way.

I’m not a Luddite about this. Godkiller was ahead of MadeFire in that space and the projects we’re working on next are further iterations forward, but I see no incentive to bringing any of my future projects to a company like MadeFire where the content will be locked into their platform. We built Godkiller platform agnostic. We expected to only sell it on short DVDs at horror cons… but it became popular enough that we were able to open it theatrically in 20 cities… and then we were able to expand it and sell DVDs at indie record shops and comic shops and Best Buy and Hot Topic and dozens of other stores… then cable-VOD became big and it got into 80 million households on Time Warner Cable and Comcast and Dish… then it went digital on Xbox and iTunes and Playstation and Netflix and Hulu and Redbox Instant. Any single one of those outlets is larger than Comixology or MadeFire, but, had we started on either platform, we would not have been able to take advantage of the opportunities that became available. We were only able to take advantage of them because we retained a versatility of content.

Content and platforms will always have a difficult time managing their relationship, but, if you create content, it is always in your best interest to keep your options open… and that means keeping your content platform-agnostic.

The past ten+ years we’ve seen a dramatic increase in super-longform storytelling… mainly season-long TV series that maintain a story arc over a dozen or so hourlong episodes.

It’s easy to think that’s just a shift in artistic sensibility, but it’s actually driven by technology. The super-longform storytelling boom was enabled by the expansion of cable TV channels, DVRs, DVDs, streaming services, and the opportunities created by the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

It’s not that nobody wanted to tell expansive, world-building epics on TV before, there simply wasn’t the technology to support getting it to the audience in a massmarket and convenient way.

The next technological shift will be toward multiplatform storytelling. Multiple screens & speakers & controllers tied together by format-agnostic/converged-platform home theater units (Xbox is almost there).

The rise of this new home entertainment technology won’t necessarily inspire new storytelling styles so much as it will enable the innovative stories that artists already want to tell but can’t.

The next generation of auteurs will be more like conductors leading an orchestra-style arrangement of artforms, all working in tandem to tell the story.

So CISPA is happening, and the CISPA blackout of website’s shutting down in protest is simply a mouse squeak when compared to the lion’s roar that was the SOPA blackout.

When SOPA controversy was raging, every major tech giant jumped into the fray, demanding internet freedom.

And anyone who pointed out that Google & Apple both rely on piracy for their business models was publicly assailed for being anti the internet and anti free speech. After all, Google & Apple were protecting the internet for us.

And so CISPA is a really important bill not so much because of what it will do (a series of anti-privacy actions that will suck but are kinda what we always assumed would be the case anyway: that the tech giants would hand our data over to whomever), but rather it’s important because it demonstrates the hypocrisy of the tech giants and how net freedom advocates and activists all got played in the SOPA debate.

Even if Obama vetoes CISPA, the point is made.

Sadly, I’m not sure it will register… but at least it’s on the public record.

News was made today that a tech company that provides a platform for homegrown motion comics is partnering with a popular arts-based social network. The result of the partnership is that the platform’s toolkits will be embedded into the network’s UI.

It seems like a great democratization of resources, but that’s just because tech companies are really good at making their exploitations sound like democratization.

The fact is, all crowdsourcing of content that’s monetized by a platform is exploitive, but in most cases it’s a symbiotic relationship… we get free access to email by allowing Google to datamine our emails, we get free access to our friends by allowing Facebook to sell us to advertisers. The exchange might not quite be equitable, but at least there’s an exchange.

However, what I found unique about today’s announcement is that not only does this platform gain control of a creator’s content without paying for it, but that content is actually hardwired into the proprietary ecosystem of the tech platform. Meaning you can’t output your motion comic and also place it on YouTube or Tumblr or Netflix or a DVD. The content you create unpaid is locked exclusively into a tech platform that is profiting from it.

This is a next level for the walled gardens who’ve risen to dominate our media landscape. The very least we’ve been able to expect from tech platforms who don’t compensate creativity is that at least they don’t get exclusive rights to our works.

Beware this trend and be careful whose tools you borrow to build your worlds.

There was a lot of chatter at the time that the Veronica Mars Kickstarter would reshape the Hollywood business model, and I don’t think any of it was exaggerated. Every established content creator with an audience has been eyeing Kickstarter enviously for years, wanting to give it a shot but worried about devaluing their content by passing a hat around for money. Creators retain their cache based on being in-demand, so admitting they can’t get Hollywood to foot the bill is a dangerous admission. Hollywood executives have likewise been frustrated by the machinery behind funding, and they’ve been salivating at the idea of getting fans to greenlight projects instead of their bosses… but the kind of high profile stars that executives would need to launch a campaign would never join a Kickstarter-based project, which they’ve always perceived as charity for amateurs. That’s all over. Warner Brothers’ move here is fascinating because studios have mostly served as banks to IP for the past decade, so crowdfunding makes them barely relevant except for the IP they already own… though WB is sitting on a lot of IP so maybe that’s why they were the studio to let this happen. One thing is a pretty sure bet, creators and audiences who’ve been clamoring for an end to franchises and sequels (and who’ve blamed Hollywood for an excessive reliance on them) will see Kickstarter overrun with franchises and sequels. “Crowdfunding” isn’t the type of thing that’s going to get these big projects rolling, it will be “Fanfunding” and that is a whole different thing…

Recently in The Guardian, Thom Yorke mentioned that “Apple and Google have made music worthless.” This is a cliched, throwaway comment these days, but the fact that it’s coming from the frontman of Radiohead (who were pioneers of pay-what-you-want and direct to fan) is indicative of the fact that not just Luddites are sensing a real disturbance in the force… even the innovative creators who embraced technology are now questioning the Faustian bargain. It’s notable that Yorke pointed out Apple and Google rather than PirateBay or MegaUploads. As I’ve said, it’s not the piracy market but the privateering market that’s doing the most damage to the perceived value of the arts—after all, anything can be stolen, theft doesn’t diminish a thing’s the value the way deep discount low-prices can. I’m sensing a shift back towards a new re-valuing of music, but I wonder if that’s even possible so long as Apple and Google still dominate the distribution/consumption platforms. And, with film and comics still early in their adjustment to digital, are they doomed to follow the same path as music has taken the past decade?

Demographics are a weird thing for a content creator.

You don’t want to generalize and dismiss your audience as a simple division of age, sex, race, and geographic location… but you also want to know if you’re speaking predominantly to a single group or if your work is spreading more broadly.

We just launched the new comics company I co-founded, and one of the goals of the company is to spread these stories out to more diverse audiences than the 25-44 year old white men who dominate comics readerships.

Last year, DC Comics famously launched the New 52 with a mega media campaign to reach new audiences… and then they hired a market research firm to bug shoppers at comic book stores about their demographic attributes. The end result? DC spent a ton of money and resources to not reach new audiences, then paid a market research firm to annoy DC’s fans and confirm that the initiative had, in fact, not reached new audiences.

Ouch. But you gotta respect the transparency.

Anyhow, we launched our company just a few days ago and it doesn’t even have a fraction of the fanfare of New 52, but there’s been some small buzz on the Facebook page and Facebook enables you to check the demographics of people buzzing about your page.

In fact, it will start generating demographic reports when as few as 30 people are chattering about your page on Facebook. 

Currently 106 people are talking about our page, so, without having to hire a market research firm, annoy our fans, or even reach a particularly wide audience with a mega marketing campaign, I can get a first peek at our audience demographics.

How are we doing? Well… not much better than DC.

According to Facebook, the demographics of our chattering class are:
- 33% male 25-34
- 32% male 35-44
- 12% male 18-24
- 9% female 25-34
- 3% male 65+
- 2% female 35-44
- 2% female 18-24
- 2% male 13-17
- 2% male 45-54
- 1% female 45-54
- 1% male 55-64
- 0% female 13-17
- 0% female 55-64
- 0% female 65+

That’s right… we’re doing slightly better with Men Over 65 than with Women 18-24 or Women 35-44.

Now the pressure’s not very high here, because who the fuck knows what it means. This probably has as much to do with the blogs covering the announcement as anything else, but it’s interesting mostly because it fits the narrative that comics are mainly read by men in their late 20s through mid 40s, with an emerging readership of young women.

It’s weird that with only 106 people talking about an announcement made just four days ago, Facebook can pretty much nail the exact demographic people anecdotally associate with comics.

What I find particularly interesting, though, is that I also get Facebook demographic data on my comic book & illustrated film series Godkiller, which has always bucked the comics demographic trend by skewing younger (usually with strong showings in the M/F 18-24 range and even in the M/F 13-17 range… although they shouldn’t be watching it, parents!) and often leans toward a female majority.

What do I think is different about Godkiller? Well, it didn’t find it’s largest audience in the comic book form… it was the “illustrated film” version that picked up the largest audience, on DVD in stores like Hot Topic and indie record shops but especially in digital form on platforms like Hulu and Netflix. The illustrated film is sequential art just like in the comic (similar to the motion comics despised by comic enthusiasts), so the content is exactly the same, it’s just the media format that changes.

This brings me once again to my core assumption, demographics are directly linked to media formats. Certain people want to consume their stories as paper comics and others want video they can stream on their iPads, some want to read paper novels and some want to listen to audiobooks and some want to read digital comics.

I love comics and I’m as dedicated as the next (25-44 year old) guy to increasing readership, but I also recognize that there are tremendous audiences who may very well love and enjoy a set of characters and stories but simply don’t want to read about them in the format of a comic book.

The key to increasing the audiences of storyworlds is for good stories well told to be articulated to audiences in a range of media formats, so each person can hear your story through their preferred content format.

And if you’re a die-hard comics-or-nothing stalwart, I have another interesting anecdote for you: the growth of Godkiller’s audience on Hulu and Netflix and elsewhere increased our graphic novel sales tremendously, with many younger and predominantly female readers buying the graphic novel while saying it’s the first graphic novel they’ve ever bought.

It’s about outreach. Want to force audience members to receive your content in the format you impose? The record industry tried that with CDs. MP3s won.

Our media landscape is definitely in a wild state of flux, and for the most part we’re still looking to the auteurs of a generation past for the compelling new experiments and ideas.

I think the reason for this is that each generation has had a new forum where bold visionaries could cajole their way in and shake things up.

This generation, however, finds itself in a very unstable environment where media platforms are still adjusting to digital and a lot of individual success has to do with social network popularity… yet that nexus of digital media and social networking has seen very few people find sustainable footing—after all, digital media has less money up front for more work than we’ve seen in past media platforms, and social networking requires a tremendous amount of maintenance that rarely translates into actual sales. So young creators are facing a very hazardous landscape.

Digital music stores have finally surpassed brick & mortar, but that was more than ten years coming after a long period of huge losses. Film and comics are farther behind in their own transitions to digital. There’s a need for new visionaries to step in because there’s a lot of history yet to be made in the future of media.

A lot of the heavy lifting so far in the transition to digital media is being made by non-creative tech companies who skew their business models in favor of massmarket content. These are volume businesses after all, but that’s really creating an impasse for bold visionaries.

It’s funny… I haven’t seen David Cronenberg’s CRASH since it first came out, but it’s been coming up in conversation a lot lately so I figured I’d revisit. Netflix Streaming? No. Hulu? No. iTunes? No? Amazon Instant? No.

Now, it’s a niche title sure and it’s not like Ballard is appearing in Oprah’s Book Club, but the aggravating part of that search was that every single platform where I tried to find Cronenberg’s CRASH instead attempted to switch me onto that dreadful Sandra Bullock CRASH from a few years back… or its TV series spinoff. Talk about adding insult to injury!

The transition to digital for film has not be an as egalitarian as it was for music, mainly because indie labels were willing to take a chance on digital before major labels were… whereas movie studios and TV networks took the plunge right away. It’s been challenging for esoteric and transgressive films these days to make much of an impact on digital, because the gatekeepers are actually quite conservative. Netflix, for example, was always very conservative about what DVDs they’d carry and they’re even moreso when it comes to streaming… sure, there’s lots of great indie films and smart documentaries on Netflix, but not as many boundary-breaking experiments.

Comics, who are limping into digital, have always been a cool place to discover new ideas and voices, but there are a lot of issues in that space holding back true experimentation… probably the largest drawback being the tiny readership of comics overall and indie comics in particular (especially if they’re not legacy characters and/or have no movie/TV tie-in) which prevents the best & brightest of new creators from wading in those waters. Digital could help solve that problem, but, as far as direct-market traditional comic books and graphic novels go, publishers are doing everything they can to re-invent the digital space as a replica of the tiny, incestuous market they currently have at physical retail.

Then there’s TV, whose quality level was a joke 20 years ago, but the past ten years has seen a huge upswing in quality of television programming, particularly Cable TV. That has a lot to do with changes brought about by the much maligned (and rightly so) Telecommunications Act of 1996, but when it comes to great television really we’re talking about maybe 1 or 2 new shows per year mostly coming from established creators. Ask my agent or manager and they’ll tell you it’s a lot tougher to break into Cable TV than even Network TV (with less money for your trouble), so roll your own dice on that one. In any case, the advantages brought about by the Telecom Act have slowly been draining away, and it does seem like TV is about to be eclipsed by emerging digital networks.

However, whether its YouTube pro channels or Hulu & Netflix originals, not much has really broken ground there and in many ways the content on those platforms is more conservative and more crudely wrought than what’s being done elsewhere. With YouTube’s gigantic reach & userbase you’d think more experimenting would be done there—especially with the simple-to-implement, if underwhelming, YouTube monetization… but so far it’s been pretty dim to behold.

Somewhere, someone is tooling around with an idea that will shake up everyone, change our paradigms of what is possible in media storytelling, slap us all upside the head with a bold new idea… and in the process lay the groundwork for a new platform to become the sandbox where the best & brightest creatives will build their next great sandcastles.

I wonder where it’ll be…

I made this point on a recent podcast but I think it bears repeating.

Creator Control and Creator Ownership has been a polarizing issue for decades. It’s an important issue, even though it’s often abused on both sides… after a debate is done, sometimes we realize rockstar creators who argued for “creator’s rights” really only cared about their own rights—which does not a movement make.

It’s also a weird gray area. Disney was essentially a creator owned company during Walt’s lifetime. Kirkman is now hiring work-for-hire writers on his creator-owned books. What the hell does creator ownership really mean?

Well, my point of view is this is all a moot subject. Smart creators moving forward will be less IP-obsessed and more interested in seeding worlds that grow on their own. Because the scale of content worlds is now growing beyond what a single person can own or control, and to obsessively horde your IP just encumbers the growth of your world.

I’ll give you an example. I have a modestly successful multimedia world I “created” (with a lot of creative collaborators who also did plenty of creating, just not as that term is currently understood) called Godkiller. Through various companies and licenses, I actually own and control a much larger share of this world than most creators. However, what I find really exciting… and what really grows the world out beyond what I’m capable of doing on my own… is what the audience does with the Godkiller world and characters.

If an IP-obsessed conglomerate owned Godkiller, it could consider cosplay to be unauthorized, tattoos to be unauthorized, homespun role-playing games to be unauthorized, “fan-art” and “fan-fiction” (I use quotes because if a creative person adds to the Godkiller world I consider them more than “fans) to be unauthorized.

Considering audience participation, creatives who want to build in your world, “unauthorized” is the thinking of a bygone era when media was a command and control economy. When marketing was done dollar by dollar, not retweet by retweet.

Other creative industries are recognizing this. Machinima started as Halo fans illegally appropriating content from the game and turning it into short form comedic content on YouTube. Did Xbox sue? No, they advertised there. Now Machinima produces authorized content like Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn as well as unauthorized content. 50 Shades of Grey started off as Twilight fan fiction. And, really, at the end of the day, anyone writing Spider-Man or Batman comics is really writing fan fiction… and I’m not saying that as an insult, it’s important—it’s what keeps the story worlds alive and relevant. That’s why we should get away from the term “fan” in fan-fiction. It’s missing the point. Frank Miller was a fan of Batman before he wrote The Dark Knight Returns… that doesn’t make it less awesome, but it does make it fan-fiction. He got paid to write his fan -fiction because it was really good fan-fiction. Just like Machinima now gets paid to make Halo videos even though the only thing that’s changed between now and 5 years ago is the budgets.

I understand the desire for creator control and creator ownership, after all I’ve been an advocate and champion of those rights for a long time. But while creators and companies continue to obsess over IP rights (with some even threatening to sue artists selling sketches in comic con Artist Alleys), the world is changing. Collaboration has always been critical for the arts, but now more than ever you’re collaborating with your audience.

If you’re a creator, the success of your world is based solely on who wants to live in it and who wants to build in it.

It’s no secret that the media landscape is disintegrating beneath our feet and slowly, strangely reintegrating itself into a new frontier for storytelling and culture building. However, this new world is still in a sort of non-corporeal phase… it’s a lot of swirling ideas and the concrete forms haven’t been fully forged yet. The forging is being done by disruptors, and the actions they’re taking now to civilize this raging, shifting space will determine what comes next for film, TV, music, comics, art, webisodes, and all the other vessels we use for story and art and culture. Right now, the disruptors are mainly entrepreneurs, and they are cultivating these new raw materials in ways that make sense for business rather than creativity. In order to chart the right course, we need both. There is already ample opportunity to incentivize the entrepreneurs, but we need storytellers also seizing these emerging opportunities and wrestling out new solutions. There are a lot of complaints among creatives about how “the old ways” favored business at the expense of artists, and that sensibility seems to be coupled with an assumption that “the new ways” are not favoring business over art—but that’s just hype. The business of business is business, and if business is doing the building you can bet those blueprints are designed to suit their interests. The fact is, emerging new media business models are extracting value from artists at a level previously undreamt of… all with the dangling carrot of you “retaining control” by taking all the risk. There’s nothing wrong with business innovation or paying for access to tools, but I do believe storytellers are relying too much on these tools and are allowing too many non-creative businesses to develop this new landscape. It’s important that the creativity used in designing imaginary worlds is also put to use designing this very real, very new world.