Occam’s RazR

This is one of the many ideas that has been rattling around in my head.  Actually, it is three of them, each worthy of individual attention, yet together revealing a larger truth.  And it starts with something Horrible.

Sing-a-long Smorgasbord

Writer/director/producer Joss Whedon had some time to kill during the recent writers’ strike, so he gathered his brothers and a few close friends with legit acting resumes and put together a little show.  (Like the kids in the neighborhood hanging up curtains for a homemade talent show, but with a bigger budget and better gear.)  The result was an experiment in internet distribution called “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.”  The action-adventure comedy-musical was split into three parts, each segment being released on the web for free during premiere week in July.  All you needed was internet access and you could watch it for free.

Whedon’s catch?  The videos would be pulled at the end of that week, and available for paid download at iTunes for just two bucks each, or four bucks for the set of three.  In doing so, he made the show a must-see event for the millions of his most discriminating fans.  He created scarcity, and made tens of millions of dollars doing it.  The videos are still available for free viewing on Hulu — with limited commercial interruption.

Upshot?  During a disruption of the regular distribution system, Whedon found a way to bypass future disruptions, and has proven that a talent with sufficient audience and savvy can go over the top of the traditional gatekeepers (even if he stuck to a traditional format, 44 minutes or so for the whole thing sure would fit nicely in a one-hour commercial television slot…)

Fast Finale

I’ve written before about an amazing series, Avatar: the Last Airbender.  Forget Spongebob, Avatar is responsible for the highest ratings in Nickelodeon’s long history.  It’s a totally kid-friendly show with epic scope, great writing and characterization, and enough plot twists and smarts to keep the adults engaged.  (We just hope that M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t botch the live-action adaptation.)

Avatar was meant to run three seasons, and the last one just concluded a couple of weeks ago.  The first ten episodes ended at a half-season cliffhanger, and the remaining 11 half-hours came in an unprecedented barrage.  Instead of milking its rightest-rated series ever, the entire second half of the season rolled out in a single week.  The finale was a two-hour event on a Saturday night, of all things.

None of the news release materials in advance explained the strategy.  Maybe there was a “leak” of the series overseas, where it was scheduled to air and piracy might become an issue.  Not sure I’ll ever figure it out, but it sure generated a lot of buzz for the release of the DVDs coming in September.  After all, in the land of the Avatar, “bending” is the art of shaping elements to your will.

Dead Trees Still Live

In both of the previous examples, you might be tempted to take away the lesson that new media is tossing old media out on its keister.  And you’d be wrong.

“M” and “L” are both friends of mine.  I’ve known L for close to 10 years now, a brother of mine in Kung Fu.  M is his significant other, and like many smart and engaging couples in their late 20s it was time for them to move.  M is a grad student at UAB, L works in an office just a few blocks away, yet they rent an apartment 20 miles to the south through the second-worst commute metro Birmingham has to offer.  They were looking for someplace much closer, and they had been tracking a number of perfect situations on Craigslist.  Yet they always seemed to find themselves WAY down on the list.

A friend suggested they go another route:  classified ads.  That’s right.  Pick up a newspaper and scan the real estate listings.  Believe it or not, they do still exist.  Columnist Bob Cringely recently wrote about his wife’s education on becoming a licensed agent, and how she was learning about a big shift coming:

The local paper seems chock-full of real estate ads. But according to her teachers down at the MLS university, those listings are simply vestigial, like little toes we all have but probably don’t need for balance or, indeed, for anything at all. Real estate brokers put ads in local newspapers because their customers expect them to do so, not because they actually help sell houses.

I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule, but if 80 percent of all houses for sale in the U.S. are eventually sold NOT because of any newspaper listing, tradition or professional pride aside, at some point we can expect real estate newspaper advertising to eventually disappear. Chock up more bad karma for the newspaper industry, where this fact has to have been long known, and which is apparently in even worse trouble than we thought.

Is Craigslist more afforable?  Yes.

Is Craigslist more convenient?  Yes.

Is Craigslist more environmentally friendly?  Yes.

Is there still a significant population that has no idea who Craig is, and why he leaves his list around all those tubes on the internets?  Absolutely.

Imbalance is your friend

M and L have already moved closed to town and to a great place, and the landlords were mighty grateful to even show it.  Such was the assumption that Dead Tree Ads would yield nothing but inkstains and fishwrap.  So many people had piled onto the Craiglist and MLS bandwagon, there was a huge imbalance in the marketplace.  Those with places to rent were following through with what they know.  The Digital Revolution will eventually claim us all, churning information so quickly and freely that we’ll be very close to knowing the real value of things.  Free markets tend to point us in that direction.

Yet there will still be imbalances in information.  Insider trading is a form of imbalance which is illegal because it allows those with special knowledge to abuse it.  What M and L did was not only legal but smart.  No matter how pervasive and predictably smooth a market appears to be on the surface, there will always be those bubbles of information that don’t fit within the known model.  Those who stand the best chance of striking it rich are the ones who can parse the patterns and see where the market opportunities are — even if that means looking back instead of stubbornly pressing forward.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, Dr. Horrible, Avatar, real estate, newspapers, publishing, journalism, economics[/tags]