Contentinople - Ryan Lawler - Contentonomics Roundup

Written by Ryan Lawler

Thursday, October 9. 2008 at 01:00 PM EDT Post a comment

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The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell about 10 percent earlier this week, but attendees at our Contentonomics conference in L.A. remained surprisingly chipper. In fact, several digital media execs privately confessed that they were happy to be in an industry that -- at least for now -- continues to grow.

Despite the fact that most online video publishers have yet to figure out how to make money off their content, there was an undeniable sense of optimism that somehow, someway they're going to get there. With that in mind, here are some of the news and notes from the show.

Contentinople enters the video age
Our little site is finally putting its money where its mouth is, with video. That's right -- Contentinople has finally entered the online video space with exclusive interviews from our event. We'll be adding more videos in time, but for now feel free to check out these:

Quotes of the week
Just a smidgen of the keen insights we picked up on during the show:

"The Internet wasn't designed for video. It's great for delivering small files, but videos are large files and they're mostly national."
– John Dillon, chief marketing officer of Velocix
"Our view of the world is that you can write software to mask some problems on the Internet, but ultimately you can't solve the infrastructure problems. We decided that we needed to improve things at the core level."
– BitGravity Inc. CEO Perry Wu
"Good content drives a lot of decisions, and we believe the friction point of a poor video experience is much greater than that of an installation. The perception is that it's a barrier, but we haven't seen it."
– Move Networks Inc. vice president of marketing David Rice, on whether plugins are a barrier to HD video adoption
"I don't know how he does it, but somehow he finds a way to spend $500 million every month."
– thePlatform Inc. vice president of marketing Marty Roberts, on the monthly budget of Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) CTO Tony Werner
"We need to give up on copyright."
– Charlie Rose Inc. Web strategist Matt Rutherford
"Right now the eyeballs at places like MySpace and YouTube Inc. , and the CPMs there aren't exactly connected. It's frustrating to see that amount of traffic and those numbers, and then you see the dollars you get from those numbers."
– Patrick Mahoney, senior vice president of digital media at Entertainment Studios
"If there's someone in your company that says, 'This is the way we've always done this,' fire that person. Or if that's your boss, quit."
– Stephen Banfield, digital media entrepreneur
"If people are spending a lot of time on your site, you might say that's because it's sticky. But it's probably because they just can't find sh*t."
– Romi Mahajan, chief marketing officer of Ascentium, on the problem of analytics

Other Contentonomics coverage
VideoNuze's Will Richmond was on hand, and offered up his thoughts on the Syndicated Video Economy panel discussion he moderated. Our TechWeb sister site InformationWeek was also there, with coverage of higher-level panel discussions at the event: