Many people in the motoring and lifestyle magazine publishing industry are looking at online versions of their publications with mixed feelings right now, especially with regard to the video content..
Journalists and editors are just thinking, “It’s for the IT department, nothing to do with me, I’ll just get lumbered with extra work…. And as for doing a ‘piece to camera’, you can forget it with my accent and crooked teeth…”
Publishers are thinking, “We know it’s coming, we know we need content, but right now, the advertising revenue from online sources just doesn’t justify investing in creating bespoke content. We’ll just keep embedding those grainy YouTube clips and take the free stuff the readers send in….”
Some photographers are thinking, “Jeez, this looks like a load of work, I’m outside my comfort zone and I guess they won’t pay any more money either, so lets keep quite about it, I can’t afford a Sony Z1 / EX1 / XL1 / JVC this year…And as for editing in Final Cut, that looks horrible. Time to look at weddings…”
However, I’m thinking, “What a great oportunity – there’s never been a better time to get your reader’s attention and hold onto it…. For the first time ever, if you do it right, you have as good a chance as any broadcaster of getting an audience for your content”
But with one or two notable exceptions, everyone’s missing a great oportunity here.
I’ve been looking at some of the video clips on car magazine’s own websites this month and I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t work for me, until suddenly the fog cleared….
So where do I think they’re going wrong?
If I’m looking at any of the car magazine videos online, I DO NOT want to hear the presenter just read back to me pretty much what the printed version says – I can read that in the feature. And another thing…, it’s not fair to expect motoring writers with no experience of presenting to be a Tiff Needel or Jason Plato, or worse, Jeremy Clarkson. Those people are paid a lot more that us to do just one thing – present and entertain. You can’t compete, so stop trying to.
So what do you shoot?
I want to hear the car charging through the gears, see the bodywork curves in the right light, feel the lateral G force in the turns and watch a video that puts me right there, smelling the leather seats and feeling the grip of the wheel. It doen’t need to be long, two minutes max. It doen’t need to have funky Guns N Roses backing music. But it needs to be shot well, with good sound, a sharp driver and an even sharper edit with some really quick camera work.
But that costs money.
So right now, we’re in a transitional period. Ultimately, there will be some casualties. But if you don’t think it’s going to affect your publication, look around you. People use YouTube almost as much as Google, iPhones are everywhere and the sheer number of devices capable of displaying motion content is multiplying by the week. It’s here now and if you’ve only just begun to think it over you’re running late.
The solution? Don’t try that Bourne Identity car chase with the Mini, that will go badly wrong and the litigation will be endless. But look at your favourite car chase movie and think about the angles, the edit cuts. Sure they cost millions. But if you pay a little for the right content, photographed well, people will remember it and come back. But how do we pay for it?
One of the problems that the traditional publishing companies have with the internet is the cost of distribution. It’s free. You can’t charge for it like you do the print version, but at the same time, it needs content to be commissioned for it to work.
“But if we can’t charge for it, the advertisers won’t pay more than the printed magazine version and everyone needs to do extra work and freelance staff need to be paid, so how will it work?”
Consider this. One of the most profitable companies of our times is Google. You use it every day, but you don’t pay for it. This article in Wired is an excellent discussion on how $0.00 is the new price point. It’s a long feature and you may well not agree with it (some parts of it I don’t) , so you may want to look at it later and keep reading here.
However, the key paragraph is this one:
“…..newspaper and magazine publishers don’t charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They’re not selling papers and magazines to readers, they’re selling readers to advertisers. It’s a three-way market….”
Nothing new there, we all know that, but that’s what we need to remind ourselves of. A good feature car video has every bit as much appeal as a well photographed and written, printed magazine feature, but it remains online and is instantly distributed globally….. An advertisers dream.
Sure it will take time, but eventually, the audience will be checking you out because you make the best videos. They’ll be linking to you in the forums and generating traffic. Don’t believe it will work? The stats graph below show what happened to my own website when the Ice Driver movie went online. There’s the initial surge, but more importantly, the traffic remained high for almost a month afterwards and my site now has a permanent increase in traffic and readers.
Another example – If one more person sends me a link to that Ken Block Subaru video, I guarantee I’ll shoot them….. Everyone from from Subaru owners, to editors, even a few traffic cops I know, have all been talking about it. Get that kind of take up and that kind of viral marketing, then the advertisers will come and want to be part of the party. Of course it costs and that’s the next thing. This watershed of still photography and video imaging convergence couldn’t have come at a worse time, financially.
From my point of view, it’s yet more investment in equipment with a finite and short life and fast depreciation, more software to purchase licences for and learn how to use and of course, more time spent on location and a whole load more time editing – all this needs to be accounted for somewhere, right at a time when no-one feels like spending on “Capital Expenditure”, as my bean counter likes to call the receipts I give him.
Publishers who are savvy know it’s a chicken and egg thing – they need good, well shot content for the website to generate page views and stats to fire at advertisers for income, but they need to pay in advance for it and the good sites are spending and it shows. But what if it doen’t work? It must work. It will. We can’t afford to blink on this one, no looking back, this is where it’s going.
Sorry it this is a long post, it’s just that I really needed to say it…. Your opinions are very welcome, so fire away, be brutal and speak your mind.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
all valid points, video does take time though to be done right. i shot two minutes for honda once and it took 3 days! that is in the extreme but I think you do need a good day or a lot of forward planning, but yes, Kens video is an example of the potential.
The time is the big thing that people under estimate. It need not take three days
but it’s not unusual. The Ice Driver video took 1.5 days, but could have been done in less, as the camera was new to me and testing it was part of the objective. Editing also takes time.
One thing that you can’t do is shoot both stills and motion at the same time – you need to do them sequentially or have a second shooter.
As always Neill, interesting, well written and well thought out. I am the reader you refer to. I subscribed to Car Magazine from the age of 18, grew up as Setright grew old, and maintained that subscription until a couple of years ago. I also bought Autocar and whatever else took my fancy, on a regular basis. So why did I stop?
Because I was getting more immediate information, and more of it, from the net. And through social media, I was being directed to more and more of it, and it was tailored to my interests.
I think the thrust of your post is that video on websites will sell more magazines, and it will. But for me the new business model for car magazines should be:
1/ Tons of great free content online.
2/ A “Premium” membership site for people like me, giving extra content, extra detail, longer videos and so on.
3/ I want to access all this on my PC and via my Kindle.
By leveraging the power of the internet and getting big numbers of subscribers, the cost should be low (substantially lower than a subscription to the magazine). Advertisers could be offered a choice of one off charges or pay per click.
What do you think? Too radical?
On video: Don’t get too hung up on production quality, sound quality and editing. Remember that 95% of people will watch the video in the original You Tube small window, with headphones on! Television values don’t apply! What I’m looking for are some decent overall shots of the car, plenty of interior stuff, and exactly as you say, I want to hear the car charging through the gears and get a feel for what it’s like to sit in that seat. Keep it raw and unscripted – deliver it from the heart with some emotion. I don’t care about cock ups, or slips of the tongue, let me have it in one take.