Prof Cunnigham started looking to identify how YouTube and content creators started to monetize and professionalize this platform. While working with Prof Craig with him, he realise the initial project was narrow focused and duo started ro understand the huge vastly complex and rapidly interactive space emerging space around this new proto industry.
Cunnigham and Craig interviewed with multiple social media platform such as Vimeo, Vine, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Periscope, Facebook, also interviewed content content creators, Multi-Channel Networks, Digital Studios, influencer, ad agencies, PR agencies and third party data firms.
They find out that social media platforms have become strong alternative media to attract significant sum of advertising money and brand interest. It all started with YouTube and now it has proliferated to other social media platforms. Some of the big genres/ verticals are comedy-pranking, game play, blogging, style and beauty tips. Not surprising, this year digital advertising is going to top broadcasting and cable advertising in America and rest of world will shortly follow. the content in this space is communal in nature as people go on to share time together and hangout with friends. In Vlogging creators got paid to talk about the things/products they like and care about. Also, it is no longer audiences, it is communities, it is no longer channels it is platforms an it is no longer content creators it is communicators. They are engaging in new types of innovation and entrepreneurism in this space. Another interesting part of this story is that though the platforms are global, the kind of entrepreneurism, content innovation, co-creation, co-modification, and the kind of communities emerging on cultural, sub-cultural, regional sub-regional are very different and local.
It is also true that many Communitainment platforms are struggling for sustainability. In fact YouTube has only recently made a profit and is doing well only in the last year or two but platforms like Twitter, Vine and Periscope are struggling, Facebook is entering this space as they also see lot of opportunity.
In all these spaces getting viral is the key. But vitality is a strange metaphor for a start because it implies a disease and it has got some bad connotation but no one can control it. There is no set formula that what may become popular.
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