A Look Back at 2011: Begun the Turf War Has

[Editor’s Note: The following guest post was written by Wilson Cleveland, Founder and Executive Producer of CJP Digital Media, and creator/executive producer/co-star of the brand-sponsored original series Leap Year, Suite 7, The Temp Life and The Webventures of Justin & Alden. You can follow him on Twitter @wilsoncleveland.]

Make no mistake my friends, 2011 will be remembered as the year sh*t got real in online video. This year the bastions of web video, no longer satisfied with “digital dollars,” made some of their boldest grabs yet at television’s multi-billion dollar advertising business by emulating the look, feel and business of…television. Welcome to progress.

Let’s review:

• YouTube, the birthplace of the web series, the king-maker of online celebrity, the petrie dish of viral video, spent $100 million on re-positioning itself as the second coming of cable television with 100 new channels of advertiser-friendly, day-parted original programming.

• Netflix paid $100 million to exclusively distribute two seasons of the Kevin Spacey/David Fincher drama House of Cards; then dropped another tidy sum to revive and distribute new episodes of the Emmy-winning Fox comedy Arrested Development. Wanna bet Netflix leads a lobby with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences to get streaming originals on the Emmy ballot?

• Yahoo, which already boasts nearly 50 million monthly video streams, ramped-up its slate of online originals and is now building a 5,000 square-ft. studio in New York’s Times Square where it will co-produce content with ABC News; and My Damn Channel, which is also building a new studio to produce My Damn Channel Live, began financing pilots for its network.

• Hulu premiered its own original series A Day in the Life and invested in the promotion and distribution of more off-network shows like Leap Year, Misfits, The Booth at the End and Goodnight Burbank. In fact, after five seasons and multiple distributors, Goodnight Burbank was picked-up for television this year by HDNet; while Mercury Men, Riese, Suite 7, Lenox Ave, Odessa, Asylum and What’s Trending – original shows produced for the web – were at some point distributed online by TV networks like Syfy, Lifetime, BET and CBS respectively, indicating lines can blur from both directions.

I know, I know, the web is its own unique entertainment platform separate from television and why can’t we just be proud of that?  We have and we should, but years of touting the unique benefits of online vs. television will

never be enough to compel advertisers to make a measure-able shift in spending. It doesn’t matter if there are arguably better-quality shows with even bigger viewing audiences online. The issue is scarcity which, by design, the web will never have and network television always will.

On television there are only so many available ad slots, so many networks and so many programmable hours in a 24-hour day. Compare that to the 48-hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube alone.  I’m not entirely sold on the long-term viability of YouTube’s “100 channels” strategy.  You can’t create scarcity on a free, open platform anyone can upload content to by increasing the volume of content, ‘advertiser friendly’ or not. I suspect by adopting this TV-like approach to advertisers, and since it’s unlikely it will eliminate user-submitted videos, YouTube will begin downplaying those Partners outside “the new 100” who had previously dominated the world’s third-largest website. I hope I’m wrong about that, but I fear it’s inevitable.

This was a game-changing year for the online video industry but not everybody is down with the way the game has changed. Some consider likening the web to television as an opportunity for progress, others consider it digital heresy.

Regardless of your personal stance, we are in for a polarizing year ahead. Game on.

Wilson Cleveland is an award-winning producer/actor and the founder of CJP Digital Media, the multiplatform studio under marketing/PR firm CJP Communications. Since creating The Temp Life, the web’s first brand-sponsored series for Spherion in 2006, Wilson has worked with companies including Hiscox, IKEA and Trident to produce, distribute or market original series like Leap Year, Easy to Assemble (season 2), The Webventures of Justin & Alden, Bestsellers and the Lifetime online anthology series Suite 7, which he executive produced and co-wrote for series sponsor The Better Sleep Council and co-starred with Shannen Doherty, Milo Ventimiglia, Brian Austin Green, Illeana Douglas, Eddie McClintock, Jaime Murray and Craig Bierko. Prior to launching CJP Digital, Wilson created award-winning digital marketing and social media campaigns for GE Capital, BMW North America, Fuji, MINI USA and NBC Universal.