‘So why can’t all iPhone apps be free? Well, quite simply, because people are still willing to pay for them. Apple currently generates most of its revenue from up-front sales — whether it’s for MacBooks, iTunes or iPhones. And the pay approach for mobile games, ringtones and videos has long been used by other tech purveyors like Verizon and Research In Motion, and even third-party app stores like Handango. “It is a historical business model,” notes Kevin Burden of ABI Research. Buyers are willing to pony up, though, because of the cachet of the Apple brand.’

Google Android will no doubt be free, ad supported, whilst Apple would have to totally rethink their business in order to make Apps ad supported, because if they were, surely Apple would seek to control that business as Goolge does rather than let 3rd party ad sellers wade in and reap the rewards.

In all this talk of freemium and ‘falling to zero’ and no doubt Chris Anderson’s forthcoming opus Free, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of people actually wanting to pay for something and not be served ads.

I pay for anything by 37Signals; basecamp, backpack etc… I also espouse their Getting Real philosophy so I’m a total convert.

The thought of ad supported iPhone Apps is plain wrong. Small screen, intense interactivity, invasive ad which no matter how targted etc etc will still stink. The user will be left feeling lightly manipulated.

The key is ease of transaction and appropriate costing. Well with iTunes, it’s one click payment, simple and a system we are already used to. The value of apps remains to be seen, market forces will dictate that, as competing apps seek to undercut each other. I imagine this will be particularly fierce on the gaming front.

But as a pure play content delivery business model it’s perfect. Current target market of 6million users, Apple addicts, predominantly young men with cash. If you create a ‘must have’ app and charge $1, you’re making $0.70 on every sale and let’s say 1 million people buy it. Let’s call it the ‘Guaranteed to make you a better lover’ App, sort of like a Wii game on a mobile, I’ll let your imagination do the rest and bypass the Apple T&C’s.

6 months later you bring out a new and improved version, market it through your existing App, your 1 million users upgrade.

I’ve paid $2 in 12 months for something I find invaluable in my other life as a male gigolo. I could have been bombarded with ads for lotions, rubs, rubbers and toys… but thankfully and thanks to Apple I haven’t.

When did we come to expect everything for free? Music, sure, the industry messed that up, opportunity gone. But applications, mobile applications, if we really think about it are we ready for ad supported mobile apps? Who wants them, hands up please? When you’re business plan is predicated on your consumers being misers, its time to tear it up and start again.

My fear for her development and the effect she may have on any pre-approved babysitter and the fact my wife is 8 months gone with Untitled 2 means our Saturday nights are spent watching a film and eating sustainably sourced pizza’s from South Africa, or something like that.

Wife, who knows her way around a Google but thinks RSS is a whispered insult has taken it upon herself to subscribe to Love Film. People at the daytime social gatherings we attend also subscribe to Love Film.

3 weeks in and dismayed with Wife’s selection, I have decided to take control and duly logged in as her. Frankly if you’ve sat through The Family Stone you will know why I did this.

I’m vociferous about the opportunities for film makers and studios to offer their product online, on demand at the same time it’s in the cinema, arguing that the ‘at home’ and ‘at the cinema’ are two totally different social experiences and not mutually exclusive.

Take me for example, I’d point at myself and say ‘neo geek file sharer with a patchy beard’, but I’m not, I’m fearful of corrupted files eating away at my much loved hard drive and worming their way into my poorly organised files. I don’t give a rat’s ass that it’s illegal, I just want quality and the knowledge that I can get the film from an approved source at the time I want. I even want to pay for it. Sky Movies is half way there, if they ramped up their inventory to offer more than a handful of popular titles, they’d have a captive market.

But antipodean behemoth’s are slow to change, as are the studios and increasingly it looks like Google and Apple, or Goopple, will control this market.

So an old fashioned dvd through the post, cheaper than my local dvd shop and with seemingly larger inventory makes sense.

But the site, good grief, it’s awful, the interface total crap, tiny thumbnails of blurred dvd covers, the risible Miss Potter starring McGregor and Zellweger as hand drawn bunny lovers the top title in the Documentary section (!).

It’s just lazy, a lazy site. Whist ebay and Amazon do plain and functional, Love Film does irritating and ugly, the Recommendations baffling; Jackass The Movie : Number Two?

Designers are paid a lot to make movie posters engaging, the whole judge a book by it’s cover thing, it works, I know, I love judging, it saves on actual thinking. So why not give the site a more visual interface, give the movie posters prominence? link out to reviews across the web, shove those recommendations in my face, not bury them behind multiple tabs. Also the banner ads, I pay for this service, sure, not a lot, but I pay, I don’t want them, they irritate, I don’t want to drink cheap mass produced wine and watch universally panned Narnia 2, Princely Caspian Sea.

What about a Facebook app, that allows my friends to share their Love Film account with me? so I can see what they rated, not what a lot of people I don’t know like. Wife likes rom-coms, I like gross out and subtitles but never combined.

Love Film sucks and it’ll suck even more when dvd’s are just used as coasters, but it doesn’t have to and that really irritates me.

‘The questions over how successful it will be are many of course, but Google and MacFarlane are starting out with sharp assumptions: animation is popular on the web, Family Guy itself is one of the most popular TV shows that people watch online, and MacFarlane himself is a geek’s geek, idolized by the men and young people most likely to watch shows online. The Times goes on to report: “In an interview, he described the installments as ‘animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.’”

If the answer to that question is anywhere close to a yes, then we’re seeing a huge shift right now, right here, in how content will be thought about, produced, and distributed from here on out. ‘

AdSense has the network, but this new area is wide open for further innovation, for example a widget which you embed in your site (which is what AdSense is in effect), you feed the widget some data, say movie’s you like, so when people visit your site they see movie trailers reflective of your preferences together with additional short form content. Who doesn’t like a movie trailer?

note: we are unable to re-produce photos of Ms Cyrus for fear Annie will sue us.

The ‘how is You Tube going to make money?’ question is perhaps a little premature and I’d argue irrelevant.

It’s never going to make money, deal with it. UGC just ain’t compelling to advertisers and it’s increasingly becomming uncompelling to the viewers and frankly we the denizens of the web are better than that, so let’s push the UGC to one side and focus on creating some compelling entertainment.

‘But you can’t get a narrative across in 2 minutes which is as long as anyone will watch anything for’ so says the voice in my head that is not the voice I speak with, but often visits me at night to talk to my… er… other voice.

The iPlayer rather poops on that myth. Joost tried but failed to poop at all because it’s content mostly featured The Worlds Strongest Woman, but Joost is trying again and will unveil an iPlayer like web browser in September.

So on the one hand we have some Romanian kids jumping from a roof top in some sort of leg shattering peasant parkour stunt:

Romania-Zalau Backflip from 5.5m - Watch more free videos

It’s UGC, it’s short, it’s not funny but it’s a bit freaky, which is the new funny as funny has been done to death with all the funny sites out there competing for our piece of funny. As animal cruelty is severly frowned upon, human cruelty masquerading as fun will have to suffice.

On the other hand, in my case, my left hand we have Shane Meadow’s new film Somer’s Town, the brainchild of branded entertainment think tank Mother Vision, a revisionary division of uber ad agency Mother.

‘Somers Town has been screened at film festivals in New York, and will be shown next month in Sydney. Also, the film’s leading actors, Thomas Turgoose and Piotr Jagiello, won the joint best actor award at the Tribeca Film Festival.

The idea originated during the Eurostar pitch in 2006 that Mother eventually lost to Fallon. The pitch brief was to develop a campaign in preparation for Eurostar’s transfer from Waterloo to the new St Pancras. Despite eliminating Mother from the pitch, Nugent loved its proposal to create a series of short films around the regeneration of the area. And when Robert Saville, Mother’s creative partner, came back to him with a “more creative and potent idea”, he was sold.’ (brandrepublic)

Quality entertainment, wholly original business model, but same old distribution model. I can’t find out much more about the planned distribution of this film, but it seems to be following the traditional: festival, select cinema release, dvd pattern.

What if Somer’s Town was released in the cinemas, on dvd and on the iPlayer (or similar) at the same time? Innovation, adulation and total re-invention of the tired movie release formula. The studios are too big to change over night, too fixed to existing business model that though being eroded are still just about making money for them.

Innovators like Mother Vision are demonstrating with Somer’s Town their increasing importance in the evolution of entertainment.

‘Mother believes that brands are in a position - like never before - to connect or build relationships in more interesting ways. If we can tell genuinely entertaining stories that are authentic to the brand’s core values then its good news for everyone - brands find an audience, and that audience is entertained.’ (Contagious)

How entertainment is funded and found is radically changing. It had to.

(via Wooster)

‘News of a Google-powered Seth MacFarlane content-syndication play hit the The New York Times today. It describes how Google will turn its AdSense display ad units into mini film units that will run MacFarlane-created videos, bringing advertisers that sponsor the content along for the ride.

Syndicating content across the Google Content Network is not news. Media Rights Capital and others have been experimenting with the idea for more than a year. We ran a similar program with Motorola and the Burg across our network more than a year ago. Crackle has been pushing content paired with ads through social nets like Hi5 for a while. What makes this different is “Seth power” and the presumably large ad deals that will bring the ad units-cum-content players to far more sites and to far more viewers across the Google network. The move reflects some significant changes that are being played out in the online ad world and are worth a closer look.

Advertisers and content owners will look to turn standard 300 by 250 ad units into expandable video experiences. Old ad real estate becomes a window into a new rich-media world. Environments (sites, games, apps, etc.) that can deliver consumers into these experiences efficiently will be worth more (see my previous post). Page-based inventory is going to find new demand as a starting point for short media and video experiences — and with it, brand advertising.

We can learn a lot about content’s role in ad effectiveness through these innovations. Think about this deal in particular. Rather than using the Google network as display inventory to deliver the ad experience, Seth’s short two-minute content is used as a carrier for advertising. This probably makes sense to some brands, particularly if Seth is going to make the ad or integrate the brand into his content. But with a lot of mouths at the trough — the publisher, Google, MRC and Seth — impressions will be way, way more expensive. Remember, at best one user in 20 will click to watch the content, which turns that inventory into ad inventory. The math gets challenging.

Google already maintains massive real estate positions across with net with AdSense and widgets and display inventory will fortify the network. This is an important experiment. A robust content distribution layer would make AdSense even more formidable and it will get harder to out-monetize Google in an effort to access distribution.’

It’s all about the content.

God bless yee UGC and all the videos who sailed in you, but like Jeremy Beadle your time has sadly passed.

Is having sex with an ultra realistic robot hooker cheating? Truly it’s a modern conundrum and Asylum has the details and a bonus question:

What if a robot hooker looks like a celebrity?

These are deep digital philosophical questions and perhaps something Qajack might be able to help with, I’ll add it to my list of beta questions.

I had intended to write a post about cloud computing but became distracted by my winking and trusty RSS reader, Newsfire, also it’s hot today and I have to go to a strangers house this evening and massage my wife in front of other men massaging their similarly heavily pregnant wives. It may also involve yoga which concerns me.

‘However, while the deal may be groundbreaking, it’s not necessarily going to set a larger model for original online video. MacFarlane’s content is the best indicator that this project will be successful, combining the success of animation online, the bite-size format that does so well with web audiences, the preponderance and attractiveness of MacFarlane’s young male demo, and especially the known track record of Family Guy clips online.

The resulting deal is a revenue split between four separate parties: MacFarlane, Media Rights, Google, and the web site where someone clicks on one of the syndicated videos. What the article doesn’t say is whether or not there will be a central web site that archives the episodes.’

(Liz Gannes - newteevee)

‘I wonder if the bigger point of this is that Google’s not afraid to experiment with the AdSense network. That represents a GIANT cross-section of the fixed and mobile Web, and those few lines of embedded JavaScript give Google the technical ability to put just about anything you can imagine on their publishers’ sites. How far it will go is open to debate and market forces, but this has the potential to open up entirely new monetization and distribution models for not just content providers but also folks out there building web apps and web services that can be shrunken, encapsulated into Gadgets or possibly some derivative framework, and embedded into the AdSense box.

Color me exuberant but this is pretty damn disruptive stuff if they can get it right.’

(Eric Austin Litman commenting on Howard Lindzon)

‘…there should be little doubt that this is only scratching the surface of Google’s ambitions to leverage the prime real estate they already control on an overwhelming number of Internet properties (and don’t forget mobile fits in there, too). Think someone at Google isn’t wondering how some derivative of Gadgets - Google’s framework for encapsulating pretty much anything you can imagine - might be published and monetized in this same way? What does the Web start to look like when what we think of today as ad units deliver more value to end users than the site where they’re displayed does?

Give it time, but the implications of this have the potential to significantly change the economics of the Web and create a new class of opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors. I’ll be watching it closely, and you probably should, too.’

(Eric Austin Litman)

Whilst there has been experimentation in this area before notably Google/MTV, it’s the quality of the content that will ultimately determine the success of the venture and with credits like Family Guy, it’s clear MacFarlane could make this work.

So far, so crowded comedy market… BUT and it’s a big Family Guy sized butt, the cartoons ‘…will play in the space reserved for Google AdSense ads on a multitude of sites that Google deems the perfect fit for the content.’ (via VentureBeat)

‘MacFarlane will receive a percentage of all ad revenue made off of these clips. And that is where things get more interesting, because in a separate deal with some of the advertisers, MacFarlane is also creating some of the animated ads that will run alongside the show (most likely in preroll form).

Such deals don’t come cheap. This deal represents “by far the largest amount spent on original Internet content to date,” according to the Times. Specifics were not given, but it is a multimillion dollar deal.’

This is visionary, Google provide the target audience, so neo-Christian anti Family Guy types don’t see the cartoons, but cartoon-humour-educated-low-fat-mozarella-pizza-loving-neo-nerds do.

‘But that will seem like a relative bargain if this move pays off for Google. The web is such a dynamic place and while advertising continues making the move to it, it’s thinking outside of the box that will likely pay off in the end. That worked for Google the first time around, can it again?’

So Google becomes content creator, studio effectively and opens up a new content space for branded entertainment in a place where we already expect it. Branded entertainment is a hugely exciting space to be in right now and if this foray is a success then we can expect more short form innovative brand ventures in the future.

Please add anymore details on this deal below, I need info!