Reel Pop

Everyone's in a tizzy about Ze Frank versus Rocketboom.

Ze Frank, if you're unaware, is a community-building experimentalist and videoblogger who produces "The Show." Rocketboom is a daily news show on the Web. Ze said no way Rocketboom could have more downloads then him. Rocketboom's creator Andrew Barron refuted him with data. That's the short, factual part of the discussion. And aside from my passing interest in "mine's bigger than yours" playground dust ups, I don't really care. I watch Ze Frank, I don't watch Rocketboom. The End.

But the non-factual, almost-entirely-circumspect-but-based-in-anecdotal-evidence part of the conversation involves a dynamic we can call "engagement versus ubiquity."

Engagement is a qualitative and often ephemeral metric (Scoble talks about it like it's new, it's not) that measures, basically, how loyal and interactive your audience is. In the context of Ze Frank vs. Rocketboom, most parties are saying Ze Frank's audience, while smaller at 30,000 viewers, is more engaged. That is, they're more likely to trust what he says, play him in chess, post in the forums and comments, etc.

Ubiquity, of course, means inescapable presence. Ze Frank controls the distribution of his show. He syndicates through Revver, but that's it. He asks people not to post his shows on YouTube or anywhere. When I met him over drinks a few months ago, he made it very clear that people need to be paid for their work. He believes that by controlling his distribution he controls the value of his community. And that's what he's trying to do: Build community.

Rocketboom, on the other hand, is out to build downloads and exercises very little control of its distribution. You can download Rocketboom via iTunes and Tivo, and they provide the show in as many formats as possible. You can find Rocketboom shows in a lot of places. Compared to Ze Frank, Rocketboom is everywhere. Andrew Barron believes that this ubiquity drives viewers. In this case, somewhere between 211,000 and 300,000 of them per day.

When I met with Rocketboom's original host, Amanda Congdon, she offered this pearl of wisdom: Ubiquity is the new exclusivity.

So, the way this academic discussion usually concludes is with the question whether the quality of viewers decline as their numbers increase. Or, whether engaged viewers are more valuable than passive viewers. Thus Scoble's call for an engagement metric.

But talking about an engagement metric is only one side of the coin. While it'd be nice to have a numerical value ("I give Ze a 6.2 on the Scoble-Borgian-Gallactica scale, but I can't dance to it"), what we're really talking about is changing the way advertisers make media buys. Even today, it takes a shift in thinking for a national advertiser to consider spending money on anything the gets less than millions of views per month. Provide all the metrics you want, it's still hard for a national advertiser to split their ad buy up into a bunch of little sites. (BTW, this is Google's argument -- they bought YouTube to increase their economies of scale for media companies looking to make ad buys.)

There needs to be financial incentive to change the ad buying process. Today, advertisers are still wooed by the huge numbers from television (most cable channels are viewed by 30-50M people a day).  So either the Internet needs to eclipse TV or ad agencies need to restructure, or both.