The actual trends in content consumption
This is a second article in the series of posts based on the book “The digital future of the culture: measurements and forecasts” (Russian edition is available). Previously, I discussed the access to the Soviet heritage and now consider the balance between the money and the public recognition.
At the end of the first article I claimed the copyright terms reduction in the Internet. Once again I stress that only the legal protection in the Internet is in question — not the copyright itself. The underlying intuition is rather simple. Consider the box-office distribution over time.
The size of the circle on the picture corresponds to the box-office share in the total cinema revenue. The diagram illustrates the idea of decreasing box-office over time for every single movie. One can see a relatively short period of time when a movie brings a noticeable revue to the cinema. And the reason is quite obvious: new films are pushing, and producers as well as the cinemas make their efforts to promote upcoming content to compete on the entertainment market. A group of researchers from the Tottori University (Japan) demonstrated a correlation between the advertising budget, revenue and a number of blog posts during the movie release. Box-office grow as long as you can support media buzz. The advertising efforts are reasonable as long as the movie didn’t cover the entire audience — therefore, the competition is weak enough. The competition is tough and entertainment market routes the promotion effort to the upcoming content. One can easily observe explosive dynamics of interests with Google Trends. As Google argues, keyword statistics is a good approach to the box-office value, consider example of Russian movies.
The picture illustrates dynamics for “Stalingrad” (blue), “Yolki”(red), “Legend №17”(yellow), “Gorko!” (green), “The Three Bogatyrs” (purple). Time period covers 2011 to 2016. “Yolki”, “Gorko!” and “The Three Bogatyrs” are all sequels, and we observe several peaks for them. Compared to the copyright terms (the author’s life and 70 years after in the most countries) this picture seems rather confusing: Internet users satisfy their interest during several months. And the reason is rather clear: people are provided with a variety of content. It is the personal attention that becomes a scarce resource in the digital age. Entertainment industry strives to direct the attention to the particular movie for a short period. Then the movie itself (in general, of course — exceptions are rare) brings revenue only offline — TV, souvenirs, etc. One can see the same story also for the most books and music. The only difference is the time period of high attention. For movies in Russia right holders extract the full potential revenue within 5 years, including TV, DVD-sales and online. Pollock argues, that 30 years are reasonable for copyright on books.
By the inertia in their minds producers and authors restrict an access to the content in the Internet according to the copyright. It seems reasonable during the commercial release. Right holders, however, pursue a phantom revenue by restricting an access in the Internet years after the release. Open access, in turn, supports the society and culture. When the Internet is flooded with a content, users have no problem to choose something to watch, to listen or to read. Instead, authors are facing the problem to find a consumer. Freely available content helps to spread the ideas and to prepare the audience for the new books, movies and music. The more people of some taste meet your previous works the higher demand you should expect for the future content. Contrariwise, if you lock your work too long the audience could switch to the competitors and you face higher expenses to get the attention of the content consumers. The question of open access rises a problem of balance between the revenue and the power over the minds.
If you create or fund some content think about the open access — this is a good way to the long term benefit and the public recognition!
“The digital future of the culture: measurements and forecasts” series:
- Copyright and the digital world.
- The actual trends in content consumption.
