NYT has a story on the web sensation Susan Boyle on the phenomenon of web sensations and the challenges of monetizing it.
Susan Boyle is seen by millions online, but cashing in on the clicks has been tricky.
Susan Boyle, the frumpy Scotswoman who became a worldwide singing sensation last month, may wind up as the winner this week of “Britain’s Got Talent,” the hit ITV show.
After a six-week absence, she returned on Sunday night to sing “Memory” from the musical “Cats,” wowing the crowd and advancing to Saturday’s finale. The producers immediately posted her performance on the Internet for the rest of the world to see.
She has already won a popularity contest on YouTube, where videos of her performances in April have been viewed an astounding 220 million times.
But until now, her runaway Web success has made little money for the program’s producers or distributors.
FremantleMedia Enterprises, a production company that owns the international digital rights to the talent show, hastily uploaded video clips to YouTube in the wake of Ms. Boyle’s debut, but the clips do not appear to be generating any advertising revenue for the company. The most popular videos of Ms. Boyle were not the official versions but rather copies of the TV show posted by individual users.
The case reflects the inability of big media companies to maximize profit from supersize Internet audiences that seem to come from nowhere. In essence, the complexities of TV production are curbing the Web possibilities. “Britain’s Got Talent” is produced jointly by three companies and distributed in Britain by a fourth, ITV, making it difficult to ascertain which of the companies can claim a video as its own.
Before the current season of the talent show started on April 11, the parties tried to cut a distribution deal with YouTube, but they could not agree on terms, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. The people asked for anonymity before they would discuss confidential negotiations.
YouTube, a unit of Google, has been keen to make money from its hulking library of online video by signing contracts with copyright owners and sharing the revenue from ads it sells before, during, after and alongside the videos. Major media companies have shown varying degrees of interest in these deals, in part because they are reticent to split much money with Google.
Then Simon Cowell, an “American Idol” judge who is also a producer and a host of “Britain’s Got Talent,” helped introduce Ms. Boyle to the world.
Her performance was a made-for-TV fairy tale: a dowdy 48-year-old makes awkward jokes, the audience engages in a collective eye-roll, then the performer shocks everyone by bursting into a soulful, Broadway-worthy rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream.”
Cut to the amazed faces in the theater, hear the judge Piers Morgan call her singing “without a doubt the biggest surprise I have had in three years on this show,” and cut to commercial.
On YouTube, though, where the segment was viewed by more people than could ever have witnessed it on TV in Britain, there were no commercials. The tens of millions of views swiftly brought YouTube and the producers back to the negotiating table, according to the people with knowledge of the talks, and soon they reached a deal for video clips.
YouTube was especially interested in a deal, according to the people with knowledge of the talks, because the company was essentially losing money by serving every video stream without recouping any of the costs.
FremantleMedia, which had registered YouTube accounts for the next several seasons of “Britain’s Got Talent” in advance, uploaded dozens of clips from the show in late April. But American viewers are not seeing ads on the video pages, suggesting that the companies still do not see eye to eye.
FremantleMedia “is investigating the best routes to monetize the channel in conjunction with relevant partners,” said a spokeswoman, Belinda Thomas, who said the company would not comment further.