Week In Review: PewDiePie Gets a Review; Microsoft, Facebook and the Giant Cable Under The Sea
- PewDiePie Gets A Review
The story itself is no big deal: industry trade bible Variety wrote of review of the new YouTube Red show "Scare PewDiePie", starring Swedish YouTube sensation PewDiePie (aka Felix Kjellberg), the man with 45 million subscribers.They hated it. Thought it was boring. But that’s not the point. The point is that two years ago, the notion of Variety reviewing anything that PewDiePie or Smosh or Jenna Marbles or Aaron DeBoer did would have been laughable. Yet here we are and no one is batting an eye. Why It MattersCreators are getting real. For a while now, we’ve been talking about the notion of how they’ll form a farm team of sorts for mainstream entertainment, building audiences and laying the groundwork so that when they get snapped up to do more professional (or at least more high production quality) shows, they’ll already have an audience in place, both domestically and internationally. (That latter point is huge: one distinct advantage to YouTube stars like PewDiePie is that they have fans all over the world, which makes selling overseas rights much easier and far more lucrative for U.S. based production companies.)Do most YouTube stars translate to longer form, more tightly scripted programming? No. But as a wise MCN executive once told us “all I need is one or two a year. If I can get one or two kids to break out, I’ve got a franchise I can bank on for years.” Or to put it another way, Zac Efron and the Neighbors movies are a direct result of a Disney Channel experiment called “High School Musical” that “broke out” too. What You Need To Do About ItStop looking at Creators as goofy kids to throw some experimental budget at. Start looking at them as tomorrow’s stars. We get that you’ve been burned by Mommy Bloggers and Influencers and the like, but Creators are different. Their fame is real.If you’re a brand, you should be looking to find someone before they break, get them on your team, get them to make branded #CreatedWith content for you. The thing about Creators is they’re usually thrilled at the chance to make money and will gladly collaborate with you. Just resist the urge to make the branded content look like an ad. (In practical terms, that means hire an actual production company to help you and don’t let your creative agency anywhere near the process.)
- Microsoft, Facebook and the Giant Cable Under The Sea
Microsoft and Facebook, two unlikely allies, are teaming up to lay a giant fiber optic able under the Atlantic.It seems pretty clear why they’re doing that: they’re frustrated by the fact that no matter what they do, someone else owns the pipes that deliver the internet and that someone else doesn’t always play nice. In fact, there’s a four-letter word that describes the very people who own those pipes and don’t play well with others: MVPDs. Why It MattersIt’s no secret that Facebook, Microsoft and other tech companies want to break into the television industry and that the MVPDs have used their monopoly status on broadband access to stymie them. This new cable-laying project is evidence that (a) the internet giants are fighting back and (b) they are willing to cooperate with each other to do so. What You Need To Do About ItIf you’re an MVPD, stop being so smug. Winter is coming and the Wall can only hold off the Hoodie Wearers for so long.If you’re a brand or a network, figure out how to play nice(r) with your new media overlords and realize that while they’re years away from taking control, change comes slowly and then all at once.
