Shyzer.com

I have ideas. Lots of ‘em. I’ve got a notebook right here full of ideas for products, websites, journeys, books, Mariners lineups, etc.

One such idea that I’ve had recently has centered abound the whole consumer created media wave that’s been sweeping the Internet for the past few years now. I’m of course talking about podcasts, vlogs (video blogs, where instead of typing out a post like this, the author records himself speaking it into a camcorder and just uploads the movie) It’s finally reached the point where the “fad” label can be taken off and instead we can look at this section of the Internet market as something that is here to stay, whether we know and understand it or not. (in fact, here’s a good article about it with some great sites at the bottom.)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you know about sites like YouTube. Based on traffic (20+ million visitors monthly) and downloads (100 million videos daily), YouTube has been pegged as somewhere between the 15th and 25th most trafficked site on the net and it only takes a few minutes or surfing around on their site to realize why. It’s a virtual landmine of entertainment and enjoyment. Want to watch a video of a kid hitting another kid in the crotch? No problem. How about a funny SNL or Daily Show clip? They’ve got ya covered. And if watching Chinese adolescents lip-synch to Backstreet Boys, you’re in luck. And it’s all for free, watchable in a matter of seconds and easily shared amongst friends, blogs, and other websites.

Now, business model aside for a moment (How in the hell is YouTube making money and covering the cost of streaming 30+ million videos monthly?! Simply from ads? I don’t buy that for one second. So far, they seem to have relied on investments, the latest being $15 million dollars this month. But once they use that to blow through bandwidth over the course of a few months, they’re right back where they started. I don’t see where they are getting their profit from.), legal questions soon pop up. Who owns these videos? Surely NBC and Comedy Central do not profit from the SNL and Daily Show clips on YouTube, so what’s in it for them? Not a thing and as such, YouTube says they honor such requests to delete copyrighted material. But to put it plainly, they don’t. Try it out for yourself, do a search for Daily Show or Family Guy or any other funny show out there. THOUSANDS of videos will pop up in the results from those respective shows. But these are large, multi-billion dollar companies, they can absorb the blow until the legal questions can be settled.

But what about you and me?

The reason vlogs, podcasts, and random consumer created media in general is so popular is because anybody can do it. There’s no reason for Seth McFarland to make a funny vlog when he can instead he can be paid millions to make a funny episode of The Family Guy. The same goes for Jon Stewart making a satirical podcast when instead he is paid to do so on cable TV. But you and I don’t have the luxury of being paid for our funny and unique ideas, so in the old days, that meant tough shit for us. But now, we can simply go ahead and create whatever videos, songs, or other media our little heart’s desire, upload it to the Internet, and viola!

But how are we supposed to get people to see our media? That’s where YouTube and other services step in, offering us to upload it to their websites. The catch is that almost every website that offers such a service has a little clause in their TOS stating that they own any uploaded material. So that means that YouTube can simply sit around, let all of its content be created by the users, and then profit from it without sharing.

Fair? Hardly.

Sure, I might be happy at first simply with getting more eyeballs on my content. If I made a vlog here and only got 10 people to see it versus uploading it to YouTube and getting 10,000, then it’s a no-brainer. But after I’ve built my fan base, then what? Shouldn’t I get at least some of the pie for doing all the work? And if I somehow find a way to get people to pay for my content, what if others go and upload it anyways to YouTube, thus allowing freeloaders to skirt around the issue. And you think YouTube actually gives a care who uploaded the video? Think again.

What the Internet needs is for some sort of universal payment method that will allow users to conveniently pay only a few cents for things like video views and podcasts. Creators could sign up for the service and host their videos, podcasts, etc only through them. The service would then in turn allow users to pay a small, small fee to access the media. That’s the type of service that needs to be created and yet for some reason, nobody has done so yet.

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend such a service was started tomorrow named Shyzicorp. If I have 20,000 people viewing my vlog (which might sound like a lot, but I could sit here and rattle off a twenty page list of people who have such followings, many of which get double, triple, or more in viewership, myself being a huge fan of one or two in particular) and I get them to spend a mere penny a pop, that’s a $200 right there. If Shyzicorp splits the profits with me 50/50, I’m making $100 per episode.

Most of these are created and updated daily or semi-daily, so let’s pretend I make a new video three times a week. That’s $15,600 a year and while it might not sound like much, remember this is a side project (ie, disposable extra income on top of your normal job) and that many, many people are already doing for free. If content creators were to have 100,000 daily viewers and they created a new clip every weekday, they’d be pulling in $2500 per week, after Shyzicorp’s equal cut, and thus would be making $130,000 a year. With that type of income, who needs a day job?

Some might ask if users would actually pay for content, but think about that for a second. As a user, I’d be paying a penny per episode and thus over the course of a year, I’d be paying $1.56. For half the price of a coffee at Starbucks, I could support my favorite vlogger or podcaster for an entire year. If people will pay a buck a song on iTunes, I promise you Shyzicorp could get people to pay a few bucks a year for their favorite sites and content.

You could even make content like “Ask A Ninja” and other exceptional material three or five cents since it’s only updated weekly or so. I’d pay a nickel for Ask A Ninja. Heck, I’d pay a dime to listen to TWiT. With the numbers they claim to have, at a dime a download, that’d be over 31 grand an episode, per week.

Just make it easy to pay a few cents and “viral” becomes “Viable.”

The payment method could even be simplified to the point where a user pays $5.00 and gets 500 viewable credits so that they don’t have to through the payment method every time they wanted to watch something. You could operate under the method where once a user pays for something, they can watch it however many times they wanted. Or you could even license the content so that once it’s paid for, it’s viewable for, say, a week. After that, they have to drop yet another penny to watch it again, thus making the archives of the content continue to generate money.

You could embed short, 15-second advertisements at the start or end of each video. Viewers could either watch / listen to them or maybe pay $5-10 per year to have access to ad-free content. There are countless other options here as well.

What I’m getting at is that companies like YouTube and Myspace currently are blowing through bandwidth, making little to no profit, and sharing none whatsoever of what they actually make with the content creators. There are a few sites, like Revver, that simply stick ads at the end of videos and pay the content creator a few cents each time the ad is clicked, but that’s just a single rung on the ladder up from YouTube and the such.

I can promise you this. If Shyzicorp burst onto the scene tomorrow with an easy, quick, and cheap website/program and offered vlogers and podcasters half the cut of whatever was earned on a pay-per-view license, 90% of the market would shift to them.

And at a base rate of a penny a pop, you’d have absolutely no trouble getting the users to follow.

There’s nothing quite like having the house all to yourself, even if just for a day or two. I’d write more, but I’m too busy doing nothing.

I just realized I never posted about my free laptop that I got recently. I could rehash over what’s already been said, but I’ll just link to the post I made on HIF about it instead (yet another reason for you people to read HIF daily!) and leave it at this: I freaking love it. I can sit outside and surf the web, I can hold 10 trilion gigs worth of files (okay, maybe not that much, but it seems like it), and I can unplug myself from the wall outlet and not be afraid that the battery will die within 18 seconds. All in all, I can’t complain and getting it in the mail might possible be the highlight of my summer so far.

Right around the time where started losing all inspiration to update Shyzer, I remember seeing a short video of a mystery man catching Heather from Dooce and in a hotel lobby and staging an impromptu interview. Apparently I saved said video, which should come as no shock to anybody since I am Lord Packrat, King of Saving Random Videos, Funny Pictures, and Other Useless Shit. As I went through My Video folder the other day, I stumbled across the clip and watched it yet again. In it, Heather shares the following two tips:

My secret is trying to find a story in the most mundane of events and it’s a challenge but it’s also an extremely fulfilling type of artistry, I think.

Truer words have never been spoken.

I think that’s why I’ve enjoyed working on Hey, It’s Free so much since I opened it in March. Initially, I had planned on making the site a farm from which I could get referrals to my accounts such as FreeIpods.com and the such. But once I realized that was going to be un-Godly boring and bland, I just started posting links to free items every few hours.

Before I knew it, I started trying to find something funny in each item, either in making fun of myself for wanting the freebie, making fun of others for wanting it, or making fun of the freebie itself. It grew to be a challenge; trying to come up with two or three liners multiple times a day on random items. I personally still think I suck at it, but not only has the traffic grown almost each week, but the response has been amazing. I get almost daily comments and e-mails from people who think I’m hilarious and it both baffles and humbles me.

Every time I get one, I want to say, “Me? Funny? Na, I’m not funny, you’re got it all wrong. These people are funny, check out this or this or this blog…I’m just a guy trying to show you where you can get free dog pooper scoopers and coupons for small diet cokes.”

Shyzer never was the pinnacle of blogs. It was a blast for a while, but somewhere along the way it became a chore. I started to loath the thought of trying to pluck a story out of my daily events and it showed, both in terms of the quality and frequency of my updating here. This is nothing new, as it’s happened before to me with Shyzer. But what Hey, It’s Free has done is remind me how enjoyable running a website can be.

Just as I’ve discovered I enjoy trying to find the funny in promotional crap companies give away, finding a story in my everyday life has become fun again. And that, my friends, feels wonderful.

I think what’s scariest about the situation in the Middle East is that I agree with President Bush. By now, everybody’s heard President Bush speak candidly about his thoughts on the whole situation and while most of the media attention has been focused upon his usage of the word “shit,” little has been said about the message President Bush was trying to convey. Which I completely don’t understand. Here is a grown man, talking in what he thought was a private conversation to a trusted friend and ally, and we’re shocked he used an expletive in regard to a situation that, in reality, is shitty? There are times I feel this country is far too prude and childish - watching people gasp and scream bloody murder over a four letter word is such a time. But I digress.

You can count the number of times I’ve agreed with President Bush on your right hand. In fact, my grandfather, who lost a few fingers in an old mill accident, can still count the times on his hand. And yet, for all those out there keeping count, it’s time to extend a finger. It’s no secret that President Bush’s approach to foreign policy is “kick ass and take names later.” And while that doesn’t work in most cases, it’s certainly a better approach than “kick ass against the wrong people and take names later,” which is exactly what Israel is doing. They’re causing a scene for no reason (I’m looking at the bigger picture here, not at the 2 kidnapped Israeli soldiers) and which in turn will only hurt their cause.

Lebanon is a pawn. It has been for decades now and any low-level State Department diplomat can tell you that. This is no secret. And yet the entire world seems to turn a blind eye and accept Israel turning Lebanon into a scapegoat and in exchange the world gets to sleep easier at night while Israel ignores Syria. Sure, it’s true that Hezbollah was formed and currently resides in Lebanon, but its true backing comes from Syria. Weapons, money, soldiers, you name it, Syria hooks them up with it. One could even argue the Lebanese government has little power over Hezbollah due to Hezbollah’s increasing political force, as well as their high level of local support since it was Hezbollah and not the government who was building schools, hospitals, and roads. All thanks to Syrian support and money. Although, it might be safe to bet that some of that support will erode in the near future since all those schools, hospitals, and roads are in flames now, but that’s beside the point.

The point is, as Israel bombs the hell out of Lebanon, they are only hurting themselves and the Lebanese people. Sure, they might slam a few Hezbollah buildings and headquarters, but this is just like fighting the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. You can’t eradicate them with long range missiles. Hell, we’ve been in Afghanistan for almost five years now and we still don’t have anywhere near complete control over the country.

You can’t wipe out a terror cell with bombs and missiles. You can’t even do it through unilateral occupation (hi there, Iraq!) You attack the center of the problem, Syria, and to make sure it doesn’t succumb to the same fate as Iraq, you get the rest of the world behind you and show the Syrian government that they are so outnumbered, they haven’t a chance.

If we take diplomacy off the table (which with President Bush is almost a given, at least with the old and true President Bush, the one we heard on the microphone talking to Blair), then the only way to do it is to get a global backing and wipe out the source.

And that’s what President Bush and Tony Blair suggested here. Blair takes the diplomatic route in saying that if the entire world united, they could pressure Israel to stop in a matter of minutes. And President Bush takes this conclusion a step further in the form of, if Israel truly meant to rid themselves of Hezbollah, they then use this global pressure and flip it into support for attacking the true root of the problem and hit Syria. Israel wins in destroying an enemy, Lebanon wins in no longer being bombed, and the world wins by removing one of the most dangerous nations from the oh-so-fun equation of “Oh God, Oh God, what crazy nation might kill us all?”

Israel has done a fantastic job of playing the Holier-than-thou maiden in distress role over the past 40 years, but that’s for another post. What’s clear now, though, is that A) Israel is helping nothing in the current situation and has other alternatives that if taken would produce a much better result, B) Syria is playing a wonderful game of poker, C) The rest of the world seems okay with the fact that Israel is beating Lebanon senselessly, and D) President Bush and I are in the same frame of mind.

I think I need a drink.

I’ll be honest; this laptop I got for free has been a Godsend. The built-in wireless Internet in addition to the neighbor’s unsecured channel (and now, our own channel, cleverly titled Shyzer) has equaled me being able to sit outside in the sun and type/chat/surf until my little heart’s content.

Of course, that was before the record breaking 429 F heat wave swept through the area, causing pavements to sizzle, plant life to shrivel, and my own body to boil and burst after a mere 12 seconds of direct sunlight. I like to say I’m in the wrong era and should have been born 400 years in either direction, but damn if my ancestors didn’t get screwed over by not having AC.

As for my predecessors in the future…well, I’m sure that by 2406, we’ll have invented some sort of ray gun that zaps those cute little umbrellas in tropical drinks and enlarges them into global heat shields. I figure the inspiration for such a device will come from either American’s lazy desire not to have to put on sunscreen anymore because it’s too much of a hassle or because the o-zone will have become only a brief paragraph in their history books, like the dodo bird, Democrats, or Lebanon.

Whichever comes first.

I’m playing around with a few new ideas for websites (I know, shocker, me starting yet another project I’ll only half ass complete!) and also trying to figure out how well this YouTube integration actually works. When I went to upload a random video, I remembered I had promised Fellner that I’d send him this clip from the Colbert Report where Stephen interviewed the Congresswoman from Colorado’s first district. If that wasn’t already enough reason to watch it, the fact that he tries to get her to join the Mile High club should push you over the edge. Anyways, here it is.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of extraordinary commercials. That’s right, those little 30 and 60 second blurbs that most people hate and skip straight through are at times small drops of Heaven for me. I say “at times” because truly it often feels as if I’m searching for the proverbial diamond in the rough. I can’t count how many local car dealership ads and childish soft drink commercials I’ve sat through with the hopes that maybe, just maybe, the next commercial to air will be one that I’ll fall in love with and race to the computer to download. It’s not often enough that I find a great commercial, mainly due to the fact that I don’t really watch that much television in the first place. But trust me, when I do, it brings immense joy into my life.

If a company spends money on an ad campaign, one would assume that their main goal is for as many people to see the ad, correct? We can take that assumption a step further and find that there are certain advertising agencies that are known for producing better commercials than your garden variety, run of the mill ads. These advertising agencies might have a vast portfolio of memorable ad campaigns that were not only wildly successful, but in turn massively profitable. Therefore, I’m guessing that these advertising agencies would charge a higher fee for developing and producing a series of ads and such, if a company hired them, they would expect a high quality ad in exchange for the high price tag.

Which leads me to a question that I’ve yet to find a reasonable, or even competent, answer to. Why is it that almost every company out there fails to make their ads readily available and easily accessible for their consumers on the Internet?

How much more dense can these companies get? They’ve shelled out high dollar for an ad campaign, they’ve managed to land a series of ads that don’t make people want to immediately flip to the next channel, and they now have a base of consumers who are actively seeking out these ads just so they can watch them repeatedly and share them with others. So why is it that whenever I see one of these types of commercials, I’m forced to search countless forums and Google result pages in an effort to find a video copy?

Whether it’s by myself or someone else, the ad will inevitably be found either buried on the companies website on some remote server or directly ripped from a TiVO feed and posted to the web. To make matters worse, half of the time when the commercial is actually found, it’s usually encoded in such a manner that it can’t readily spread. Most of the time this means that the video is encoded in flash format and embedded in the webpage, which means a nerd like myself is going to have to figure out a why to rip it off the page and encode it into something more easily transferred. Hell, half of the time I give up and shell out a few bucks for a month subscription to Ad-Rag and then rip it straight from their server…

And don’t even get me started if all I wanted in the first place was the musical score!

What is the point of this? Why spend time and money on an ad campaign and then execute it so poorly that your consumers who enjoyed it are prevented from viewing it again! I’ll admit there are some companies, such as Apple, who at least make it easy to find and view their latest commercials. But even then, you can’t download the commercial or soundtrack unless you view the source, find the code, load only it, and then save page as. And frankly, I think it’d be a lot easier to simply hit a “download” button instead.

So listen here all you Fortune 500 companies out there. First, stop making shitty commercials. Make them funny. Make them memorable. And then make them available for download.

Is it really that hard of a concept to grasp in this day and age?