Steve Rubel over at Micropersuasion has a brief interview he did with Megaphone Mark Cuban, billionaire media mogul and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, in which the two talked about things like the “Long Tail” of the Web (and Mark’s own coinage — the “vert ramp” — and how it affects new media. As is his wont, Mark shot from the hip about what the future holds and where advertisers should be putting their money, saying:
I think most blogs, vlogs , podcasts, broadband TV shows that sneak out of the Long Tail, my blog included, will have a tough time staying out and earning more than minimum wage for their efforts.
He also said that advertisers will inevitably “work with aggregators,” and that therefore “those who host the Long Tailers will get paid, those who create for the Long Tail rarely will.” Kind of a bleak view, but hey — Mark has a billion or two and you don’t. The big risk, he says, is the “inevitable saturation of ad inventory” in new media and the Web.
Steve and Mark went on to talk about high-definition, which Cuban — being the founder and CEO of HDNet.com — not surprisingly sees as the future. He also asks whether anyone thinks that “all those LCDs hanging on walls will be connected to computers anytime soon or show Internet video? They won’t.”
I think he’s probably wrong, especially with Google Video looking at putting YouTube content on mobiles and elsewhere — and with Xbox offering gamers the ability to download video to their TVs — but maybe that’s just me. Could Mark be one of the broadcast types my friend Stuart talks about here?
In other words, the Long Tail is largely crap; those who create it will starve; advertisers should pay attention to HD; and anyone who thinks TVs will show Internet video anytime soon is an idiot. Classic Cuban.
