Interactivity is a key element when it comes to successfully spreading web content, which is why the ARG or transmedia experience — which works across platforms to create a narrative that the user has to discover on his or her own — has become a much more visible part of the landscape. Enter a recently launched ARG created specifically for the web series community, one that celebrates it.
Created by producer Jenni Powell and No Mimes Media, Webishades launched earlier this month via an article posted on Tubefilter. That article included a link to the Webishades website, which had secrets to be unlocked with phone calls, emails and ads on websites for series including The Guild, Squatters, Compulsions and The Temp Life. “It was a lot insidery, but that was part of the fun of it,” Powell said via phone.
To be honest, I completed the Webishades challenge in about ten minutes, because I cheated. And while I cheated — with some help from the ARG forum Unfiction, where previous players have documented the complete path to victory — that low level of commitment is deliberate.
Webishades is part of No Mimes’ recent string of 10 Minute ARG projects, which are created to be self-sustaining in perpetuity. “People don’t do stuff when we want them to, necessarily,” No Mimes managing director Benham Karbassi said via phone. “So we want to give them the opportunity to do it when they want to.”
So far, by Karbassi’s estimations, “a few thousand” people have checked out the Webishades website, with “a few hundred” following up on the phone call. But every component of the Webishades experience is automated, and as long as the participating web series don’t remove the clues from their websites, the game will be playable for the foreseeable future.
Not that there’s a lot there, to be frank — Webishades doesn’t have much in the way of story, instead operating as a promotional engine for the shows involved, and the reward is relatively Spartan. “It’s not as narrative as other ARG games,” Powell said. “It’s very different because it’s advertisement-based: ‘Here’s this fun fake product, let’s talk about it.’ That’s more of the game. We could have blown this out more, but it was just a fun way for us to work together.”
One of the complications is that Felicia Day, who in the project’s original iteration played a much larger role, was cast in a multi-episode arc on the SyFy Channel series Eureka this summer, meaning that her involvement had to be scaled back dramatically. “As you go, you have to be really flexible — that’s why ARGs are so fun to design,” Powell said. “You have to be on your toes the entire time.”
No money exchanged hands in this project, with everyone instead donating their time to put the elements together (with the exception of performance fees for actors in the Webishades commercial). That’s because Webishades isn’t intended to be a moneymaker; in fact, a Crackle representative, during a call with Powell and the No Mimes team, directly challenged No Mimes as to why they were doing this project — because it was just going to cost them money.
Karbassi’s reply at the time was that it would be great advertising for them, and also give them access to the web series community. Which seems to have paid off, at least in regard to the latter point: The number of series which participated in the project does represent an impressive range of the talent currently making web narrative. And while the numbers are low on players who have fully engaged with the project, those Webishades ads do remain on all the respective sites. The game is still on.
Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Shattering the Fourth Wall To Find Web Audiences
*To the devs in this room, anyway
(L to R: Mark Kvamme (Sequoia Capital), Albert Cheng (ABC-Disney Television), Jessica Steel (Pandora), Gordon McLeod (WSJ Digital)
My day at the inaugural AppNation conference has mostly been spent remembering what big business apps are. Not that I ever forgot that, but since my job mainly revolves around phones - and not the apps they run - spending a day or two at an event like this really immerses me in the reality that the development, marketing, selling, promoting, and reviewing of apps is huge business. Huge.
The question that I keep coming back to when I think about apps is this: We all know there's plenty of money in Apple's iOS App Store, but what about on the other platforms? Is anybody making money - real money - developing for Android? And BlackBerry and Windows and webOS, do developers see opportunities outside of the Apple-Google War?
The answer I heard today was a pretty resounding, "Nope."
Bear in mind that what I witnessed was a very informal straw poll taken in a room of maybe 250 people, so don't take this as a necessarily representative cross-section of mobile developers worldwide, let alone any sort of scientific proof. But, when Mark Kvamme (a partner at VC heavyweight Sequoia Captial) asked the audience at the opening roundtable what platforms most interest them, the response was pretty clear: Only two of 'em matter.
After asking the roundtable panelists "If you had to pick only one platform to develop for over the next two years, what would it be?" and getting the predictable non-answers, Kvamme asked for a show of hands from the crowd to answer the same question. Android and iOS each got close to fifty-fifty shares, with Android looking to have a small lead. BlackBerry? Zero hands in the air. Windows Phone 7? Maybe five or six. "Is anyone interested in what HP is going to do with Palm and webOS?" Five hands.
I'm still looking for Android developers who are making the kind of money folks are earning selling iOS apps, but the utter lack of interest in virtually any other platform came as a total shock to me. Granted, this is a small conference and I have no idea what the ratio of devs to execs to media types was in that room this morning. But nobody raise their hand for BlackBerry. Wow.
What say you, especially the developers and/or mobile businesspeople reading this? Are their opportunities beyond iOS and Android, or is the combination of Apple's App Store mojo and Android's sheer volume of devices too much to ignore when it comes to focusing your efforts? BlackBerry, WinPhone, webOS, Bada, Symbian, Meego ... is anything else worth developing for at this point?
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Feds Sue Fox <b>News</b> Over Reporter Catherine Herridge's Charges Of <b>...</b>
WASHINGTON — Federal authorities are suing the Fox News Network for allegedly retaliating against a reporter after she complained about unequal pay and job conditions based on her gender and age. The Equal Employment Opportunity ...
Reese Schonfeld: Third Quarter Cable <b>News</b>: Bad <b>News</b> for All <b>...</b>
Could it be that the decline in news viewers is symptomatic of a general and genuine disgust by news viewers who are just fed up with the kind of news being fed to them?
Evri Expands Mobile Offerings Beyond Tech <b>News</b> to Sports, Music <b>...</b>
Evri is going mobile in a big way. The Seattle- and San Francisco-based information discovery website backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital introduced an.
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Interactivity is a key element when it comes to successfully spreading web content, which is why the ARG or transmedia experience — which works across platforms to create a narrative that the user has to discover on his or her own — has become a much more visible part of the landscape. Enter a recently launched ARG created specifically for the web series community, one that celebrates it.
Created by producer Jenni Powell and No Mimes Media, Webishades launched earlier this month via an article posted on Tubefilter. That article included a link to the Webishades website, which had secrets to be unlocked with phone calls, emails and ads on websites for series including The Guild, Squatters, Compulsions and The Temp Life. “It was a lot insidery, but that was part of the fun of it,” Powell said via phone.
To be honest, I completed the Webishades challenge in about ten minutes, because I cheated. And while I cheated — with some help from the ARG forum Unfiction, where previous players have documented the complete path to victory — that low level of commitment is deliberate.
Webishades is part of No Mimes’ recent string of 10 Minute ARG projects, which are created to be self-sustaining in perpetuity. “People don’t do stuff when we want them to, necessarily,” No Mimes managing director Benham Karbassi said via phone. “So we want to give them the opportunity to do it when they want to.”
So far, by Karbassi’s estimations, “a few thousand” people have checked out the Webishades website, with “a few hundred” following up on the phone call. But every component of the Webishades experience is automated, and as long as the participating web series don’t remove the clues from their websites, the game will be playable for the foreseeable future.
Not that there’s a lot there, to be frank — Webishades doesn’t have much in the way of story, instead operating as a promotional engine for the shows involved, and the reward is relatively Spartan. “It’s not as narrative as other ARG games,” Powell said. “It’s very different because it’s advertisement-based: ‘Here’s this fun fake product, let’s talk about it.’ That’s more of the game. We could have blown this out more, but it was just a fun way for us to work together.”
One of the complications is that Felicia Day, who in the project’s original iteration played a much larger role, was cast in a multi-episode arc on the SyFy Channel series Eureka this summer, meaning that her involvement had to be scaled back dramatically. “As you go, you have to be really flexible — that’s why ARGs are so fun to design,” Powell said. “You have to be on your toes the entire time.”
No money exchanged hands in this project, with everyone instead donating their time to put the elements together (with the exception of performance fees for actors in the Webishades commercial). That’s because Webishades isn’t intended to be a moneymaker; in fact, a Crackle representative, during a call with Powell and the No Mimes team, directly challenged No Mimes as to why they were doing this project — because it was just going to cost them money.
Karbassi’s reply at the time was that it would be great advertising for them, and also give them access to the web series community. Which seems to have paid off, at least in regard to the latter point: The number of series which participated in the project does represent an impressive range of the talent currently making web narrative. And while the numbers are low on players who have fully engaged with the project, those Webishades ads do remain on all the respective sites. The game is still on.
Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Shattering the Fourth Wall To Find Web Audiences
*To the devs in this room, anyway
(L to R: Mark Kvamme (Sequoia Capital), Albert Cheng (ABC-Disney Television), Jessica Steel (Pandora), Gordon McLeod (WSJ Digital)
My day at the inaugural AppNation conference has mostly been spent remembering what big business apps are. Not that I ever forgot that, but since my job mainly revolves around phones - and not the apps they run - spending a day or two at an event like this really immerses me in the reality that the development, marketing, selling, promoting, and reviewing of apps is huge business. Huge.
The question that I keep coming back to when I think about apps is this: We all know there's plenty of money in Apple's iOS App Store, but what about on the other platforms? Is anybody making money - real money - developing for Android? And BlackBerry and Windows and webOS, do developers see opportunities outside of the Apple-Google War?
The answer I heard today was a pretty resounding, "Nope."
Bear in mind that what I witnessed was a very informal straw poll taken in a room of maybe 250 people, so don't take this as a necessarily representative cross-section of mobile developers worldwide, let alone any sort of scientific proof. But, when Mark Kvamme (a partner at VC heavyweight Sequoia Captial) asked the audience at the opening roundtable what platforms most interest them, the response was pretty clear: Only two of 'em matter.
After asking the roundtable panelists "If you had to pick only one platform to develop for over the next two years, what would it be?" and getting the predictable non-answers, Kvamme asked for a show of hands from the crowd to answer the same question. Android and iOS each got close to fifty-fifty shares, with Android looking to have a small lead. BlackBerry? Zero hands in the air. Windows Phone 7? Maybe five or six. "Is anyone interested in what HP is going to do with Palm and webOS?" Five hands.
I'm still looking for Android developers who are making the kind of money folks are earning selling iOS apps, but the utter lack of interest in virtually any other platform came as a total shock to me. Granted, this is a small conference and I have no idea what the ratio of devs to execs to media types was in that room this morning. But nobody raise their hand for BlackBerry. Wow.
What say you, especially the developers and/or mobile businesspeople reading this? Are their opportunities beyond iOS and Android, or is the combination of Apple's App Store mojo and Android's sheer volume of devices too much to ignore when it comes to focusing your efforts? BlackBerry, WinPhone, webOS, Bada, Symbian, Meego ... is anything else worth developing for at this point?
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Feds Sue Fox <b>News</b> Over Reporter Catherine Herridge's Charges Of <b>...</b>
WASHINGTON — Federal authorities are suing the Fox News Network for allegedly retaliating against a reporter after she complained about unequal pay and job conditions based on her gender and age. The Equal Employment Opportunity ...
Reese Schonfeld: Third Quarter Cable <b>News</b>: Bad <b>News</b> for All <b>...</b>
Could it be that the decline in news viewers is symptomatic of a general and genuine disgust by news viewers who are just fed up with the kind of news being fed to them?
Evri Expands Mobile Offerings Beyond Tech <b>News</b> to Sports, Music <b>...</b>
Evri is going mobile in a big way. The Seattle- and San Francisco-based information discovery website backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital introduced an.
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Feds Sue Fox <b>News</b> Over Reporter Catherine Herridge's Charges Of <b>...</b>
WASHINGTON — Federal authorities are suing the Fox News Network for allegedly retaliating against a reporter after she complained about unequal pay and job conditions based on her gender and age. The Equal Employment Opportunity ...
Reese Schonfeld: Third Quarter Cable <b>News</b>: Bad <b>News</b> for All <b>...</b>
Could it be that the decline in news viewers is symptomatic of a general and genuine disgust by news viewers who are just fed up with the kind of news being fed to them?
Evri Expands Mobile Offerings Beyond Tech <b>News</b> to Sports, Music <b>...</b>
Evri is going mobile in a big way. The Seattle- and San Francisco-based information discovery website backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital introduced an.
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Feds Sue Fox <b>News</b> Over Reporter Catherine Herridge's Charges Of <b>...</b>
WASHINGTON — Federal authorities are suing the Fox News Network for allegedly retaliating against a reporter after she complained about unequal pay and job conditions based on her gender and age. The Equal Employment Opportunity ...
Reese Schonfeld: Third Quarter Cable <b>News</b>: Bad <b>News</b> for All <b>...</b>
Could it be that the decline in news viewers is symptomatic of a general and genuine disgust by news viewers who are just fed up with the kind of news being fed to them?
Evri Expands Mobile Offerings Beyond Tech <b>News</b> to Sports, Music <b>...</b>
Evri is going mobile in a big way. The Seattle- and San Francisco-based information discovery website backed by Paul Allen's Vulcan Capital introduced an.
bench craft company rip off
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