CONTENT TRENDS

A review of the Creating, Protecting and Selling Content seminar at the Phoenix Forum

While the title of last Friday’s second seminar at the Phoenix Forum was, “Creating, Protecting and Selling Your Content”, most of the focus fell squarely on the issue of protecting content, rather than creating or selling it.CONTENT TRENDS

A review of the Creating, Protecting and Selling Content seminar at the Phoenix Forum

While the title of last Friday’s second seminar at the Phoenix Forum was, “Creating, Protecting and Selling Your Content”, most of the focus fell squarely on the issue of protecting content, rather than creating or selling it. The panel members, Greg Anders of Shaw Internet, Steve Jones of Lightspeed Media and Christopher Levy of DRM Networks, had disparate opinions on the extent to which content security should be a concern for webmasters. From Levy’s assertion that protecting your content from theft and free distribution is crucial to maintaining your site’s value, to Jones’ essentially open invitation to steal his content and thereby give him free advertising, the panel provided a broad perspective on a constant source of concern for adult webmasters.

Lightspeed creates virtually every byte of content contained on their websites, and they offer over 25,000 images to the webmasters on the Lightspeed Cash affiliate program to use in promoting the Lightspeed family of sites. Jones said that, because of the heavy branding that Lightspeed uses in their photo sets, including stamping the site URL on each image, he doesn’t worry too much about content theft. “I see it as a source of free advertising,” Jones said, “as far as I’m concerned, you can feel free to steal my content and post it all over the place.” Jones said his opinion is supported by the fact that 50% of Lightspeed’s signups come from direct type-ins to their domains (although some of those are certainly return customers). When Levy pointed out that it’s a simple matter for a thieving webmaster to remove or obscure the URL stamp using Photoshop, Jones said “That’s even better, because then I can sick the lawyers on you and really have some fun.”

Jones also voiced an opinion that echoed the dismay I’ve heard many times from paysite operators when it comes to tightening up their security; how much time and money do you want to spend on preventing theft, considering how ineffective the whole approach is? “If you have really good security,” Jones said dryly, “it might take a 13-year old a whole hour to hack you.” (A comment met with a chorus of knowing laughter from the audience of webmasters.)

Anders said his primary concern about content theft is the consumption of bandwidth, since Shaw Internet specializes in video streaming, a more bandwidth-intensive form of content than still images. Since Shaw’s focus is providing streaming content to client sites, rather than running their own sites, Anders said that their security concerns were totally different from those of Lightspeed. “We provide the streaming on our bandwidth,” Anders said, “so we eat the bandwidth costs whenever there’s a breach on one of our client’s sites.”

All of the panelists seemed to agree that the Windows Media format for video streaming is the superior technology among the commonly used video formats. Levy cited the format’s flexibility, the fact that it comes included on Microsoft’s market-dominating operating systems, and the file-level security the format affords. Anders also pointed out that RealNetwork’s new business model is summed up by, “Let’s spam our users to death every time they try to play a video”.

Levy’s perspective on the importance of protecting content is formed largely by his background in mainstream media, and his knowledge of the peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software that is becoming increasingly popular among Internet users. He says that the ability to protect Windows Media files at the file level is not currently being taken advantage of by webmasters. “If you just have a directory full of Windows Media files sitting around on your site, I guarantee they’re being swapped around on the P2P programs right now,” Levy said, although he conceded Jones’ point about the difficulty of preventing unauthorized access. “No doubt about it – everything gets hacked,” he said, “but Microsoft has huge teams of programmers fixing the security holes as fast as people find them, and it’s still worthwhile to protect your content to the extent that you can.”

In subsequent discussions I had with several webmasters who attended the content seminar, it became clear that most webmasters regard the central question as, “How much does content theft affect me, versus how much do I have to spend to prevent it?” If the seminar made one thing clear, it was that each webmaster needs to answer that question for themselves.

Quentin is part of the Marketing & Public relations team for TopBucks.com and TopCash.com and can be reached at quentin@topbucks.com.