Content

Lesson Details

Subject: Business

Title: Content

Description:

What kind of content are you going to put on your channel?

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Transcript
 

OK, let's talk about content.

Because unless you can create content quickly, easily, and most importantly cheaply, none of this is going to work. 

When we began this I said there were two aspects to this revolution. 

One was: the Internet. Which puts your signal into 3 billion homes for free. That in itself is remarkable. 

The second aspect of this is: creating content. The same revolution, the digital revolution, that brought you into people's homes. Also has created a whole new generation of cameras or iPhones and their edit systems which allow you to create content quickly, efficiently, and most importantly inexpensively. 

A great deal of what you'll find on TheVJ.com is in fact dedicated to these production methodologies. 

You have to create content that is fast, inexpensive, and easy to turn around so that the revenue that is created by your streams of revenue -- and we still have two more to deal with -- is going to be greater than your cost of production. And, of course, when people contribute stuff you're going to have to start paying them something, even minuscule, but again, you have to keep the cost of production extremely low.

The content has to really relate to your affinity group. And once you open the door to people contributing content or begin to make it yourself, there's this tendency to drift. And you don't want to make this "all things to all people" because then you are going to lose focus. So like any good magazine editor, your job is to find contributors or to edit your magazine every month, so you'll be sure it maintains the parameters of your interest group. 

To go back to the magazine model again, because I think it's a fantastic model if you open any successful niche magazine, and almost every magazine is niche, from Brides to almost anything else that you can find, and you look at the title page, or the main page, you'll see that in the masthead, it lists the employees of the magazine. And if you look on the editorial side, you'll see that there are very, very few people that actually work for the magazine, and work as writers. Almost all magazine content is generated by freelancers. If the magazine had to employ everyone who made the content for the magazine they would go broke. 

Television obviously doesn't work that way. Television owns all the content and creates all the content itself.

But in this new world of iPhone generation of content, of cutting on Final Cut or cutting on iPhones, a whole new generation of people is rising up that can make content for you. Part of your job here is to connect with those people, and, of course, you can find a lot of them here on TheVJ.com and we're happy to make that connection, but part of your job is connecting with that new generation of content creators and basically work with them to create content that will be of interest to both your affinity group and to your advertisers, and that's critically important.