Two things happened Wednesday that got me thinking about piracy, digital content, and advertising.
The first was meeting Faris Yakob at Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling class at USC. Yakob talked about his experiences incorporating transmedial approaches in his job as the EVP Chief Technology Strategist at McCann Erickson New York and gave this presentation about transmedia storytelling in a converged culture.
The second thing was seeing a post on techdirt.com about Kevin Smith’s take on digital piracy of his products. When asked, “How much money do you think your projects have lost to piracy?” Smith replied:
See, I think “How many more converts did I get from piracy?”
Smith’s comment echoed my own thoughts about digital piracy: it’s a never-ending game of Internet whack-a-mole. I was pleased to see that someone who had achieved success in the entertainment machine agreed with that view.
So, what does transmedial advertising and digital piracy have in common?
I’d like to suggest that piracy is advertising (I won’t go on record and say the reverse is true).
People can’t buy what they’re not exposed to. Piracy gets your product exposure.
Now, the catch is determining whether you make up your “lost” sales (the people who consume the pirated content and never buy) with the “found” sales (the people who purchased your product because they were exposed to it through piracy). There are no hard numbers either way (though there’s some initial research that appears to indicate digital piracy isn’t the death knell of books), but the reality is that if content is good, it will be digitized. If not by the creator, then by someone else.
Even if you don’t buy my argument about piracy and advertising, you’re only alternative is to pick up the mallet and start whacking.