What would Rupert do?

The usual marketing scheme for a successful series would be selling licensed products. So there is a loveless website, t-shirts, coffee mugs, DVDs, comics, eventually the stars produce a mediocre pop song. Fan pages will be sued, and the industry would bitch about weak sales because of evil pirates. However we’ve seen more successful ways, for example when the fantasy and science fiction novels that came along with Forgotten Realms or Shadowrun became more popular than the original role-playing games. All those products are set in the same fictional world, but the different media remain closed in themselves: for understanding the novels it is not necessary to know the game.

Then what is transmedia? Here is a quick introduction:

“Heroes provides the most innovative and immersive interactive TV experience on the web.”

Central in that universe is the TV series, accompanied by a wiki, web comics (in JPEG, flash or PDF format), several websites, mobile strategies, webisodes exclusively published on the web and many more – and they all form a narrative whole!

Transmedia Storytelling

When a character doesn’t appear in the series for a couple of episodes, their story goes on in the webcomics. The fictional characters have their own blogs, pages on MySpace and Facebook and ask their fans for help via SMS. Hanna even publishes clips from news channels in her blog. A fictional candidate for the US congress has his own website hacked by Hanna. Another discusses scientific theories in his book Activating Evolution (would be even more convincing if it was out-of-sale at Amazon). Fictional companies appear in the series, fans can apply for jobs on their websites thus getting insider information, or they can “hack” their surveillance cameras. Fan fiction and art is supported and can eventually become part of the series.

That idea isn’t exactly new, emotionally drawing in the fan base through “secret” information. As early as 1997, before the Star Wars prequels, George Lucas registered numerous domains temporarily forwarding to starwars.com. Then the information was spread around in Usenet and they observed which domains generated the most page views. Then a mysterious swamp environment was created at naboo.com. Apart from the usual swamp noise we can hear the calls of the Peko bird and the Nuna toad. Subtly playing with the methods of easter eggs those animals will move across the screen when you enter “peko” or “nuna” hearing their sounds. After about five minutes the swamp water begins to ripple. If you click on it you originally landed on a simple page with background information. Of course ten years later Heroes is editing and interweaving the content more elaborately – originally there were five people on their web team, now there are more than fifty.

Heroes has a world wide fan community – even in countries where the series isn’t officially aired on TV. It’s one of the most unauthorized downloaded torrents on the web. At least producer Tim Kring doesn’t mind that: Kring says “we fish where the fish are.” The whole multimedia strategy is designed for numerous sources of income. If fans get hooked via illegal downloads, the company will earn money elsewhere with them.

Most importantly today’s fans want to participate in “their” series, and this means more than offering contests and sueing them when they actually adopt content. Heroes is the pioneer massively involving their fan community into that complex alternate reality. The web provides the central communication platform, technically but most important creatively. In that depth this is an entirely new challenge for TV providers and Internet agencies!

What can we learn from this?

On YouTube alone on this topic there are some 1,500 videos with a total duration of 25.2 hours. There are videos on almost every topic, however bizarre they may be. Even on topics that aren’t any topic at all, like “we got some food at McDonald’s and film now how we eat burgers.” Who watches that stuff? Hardly anybody. Welcome to the “long tail,” the niches of exponential decline accounting for a large amount of more than 100 million videos on YouTube.

There is a point when those niches become unmarketable. We’ve seen in the video above how larksome kids set their car on fire, or half a forest. Others test flamethrowers in their bedroom or try to light a cigarette with a flamethrower. These are rather silly actions, not mentioning obviously illegal things – alone on the consuming of psychoactive salvia (prohibited in Germany) there are 13,700 videos on YouTube.

Nobody would buy adverts on such a video. However, YouTube is financed by advertising. At the same time it becomes exponentially easier to produce and upload videos with a camera on your mobile: the “long tail” gets longer, thus the costs for hosting and streaming. Well, at the same time those latter factors get cheaper by the hour, but with the commercialization of those platforms the question arises: are those microgenres endangered? And what would we miss if we didn’t have these obscure contents any more?

Microgenres are the primeval soup of the Internet. Here the trends of tomorrow crop up, therefore they are also an economic driving force.

Even if there’s no such things as a community, a subculture of youth with self-made flamethrowers – for example the discussion whether there is a danger of flames flashing back into the container appears over and over again – still those contents create social relationships.

With those single irrelevant snapshots in time our society has the unique opportunity to create a comprehensive archive of everyday life of the 21st century. Just think of the scientific value of these recordings today or in a hundred years! Therefore yes, what we consider trivial today will have considerable historic-documentary or scientific value tomorrow.

And yes, in the hands of a company like Google that is subject to commercial constraints and changes, this content is in danger of getting deleted. Out of the top 100 companies existing a hundred years ago, today still three exist. While commercial, expensively produced content has linear growth, non-commercial content grows exponentially. When there is a point where the marketable part cannot support the other any longer, we are facing the loss of this archive of amateur recordings. Unless Google knows and speculates with that value?

A possible solution might be a new initiative by Wikimedia: let’s get video on Wikipedia. Because even while today 1,500 flamethrower videos are still irrelevant for an article on Wikipedia, they could find a new home at Wikimedia Commons.