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.