connecting*the*dots

Dear Forward-Thinking Suits,

Thanks so much for pulling all of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert clips off of YouTube. You’ve now rendered a good number of my posts useless — posts that were marketing your shows for free. That’s right, you had thousands of fans, like me, pointing to and contextualizing clips from their blogs, generating millions of page views and legions of new viewers and you killed it because they weren’t your page views.

So dumb.

Let me ask you people a simple question: How much money do you pump into your marketing department annually? I mean, what’s your budget for marketing executives, their minions and external network marketing? Can’t you recognize that whatever percentage you had set aside for TDS and TCS brand awareness (not specific show promos, just awareness campaigns) was becoming a waste of money with the YouTube fans doing our thing? We were doing your jobs for free and doing it better than you ever could have done it yourself!

Come to think of it, maybe you did understand that angle before acting…

See, the way that I view this is that from an organizational standpoint, this type of viral marketing is a perfect opportunity to cut back on traditional marketing budgets and let the web do what the web does. But then again, organizations are made up of people and people need to provide value in order to get paid by the organization.

V.P. Johnson can’t keep that corner office if he has legions of fans doing his work for him at a price that puts him out on the street. So build that wall! Keep them out of our stuff! Send them back to Mexico… er… hm.

Congratulations, again, Comedy Central executives. You’ve proven yourself to be no more forward-thinking than this administration that your talent rails on each week. Someday, your network bosses will understand what this move did to your fan-base, but probably not until a competitor network — one that won’t collude with the rest of the big boys — embraces the web and the people that put food on your plates.

Colbert and Stewart are still my boys, but my passion for your product has dropped immeasurably.

And that’s The Word.

UPDATE: Mark Glaser (MediaShift) updated his open letter to Stephen Colbert with a report that lawyers from Comedy Central are cherry-picking the clips they want taken down from YouTube, possibly in a hardball negotiating move to tweak Google and their new acquisition.

So not all clips have come down. That’s good news. How Comedy Central decides to proceed from here, though, is key.

If they want to negotiate the creation of a channel on YouTube for CC distributed shows and all discrete segments of shows, that move will serve the desires of many CC fans, especially bloggers. The amount of ad revenue they’ll make on viral replays at this point in time pales in comparison to advertising revenue from the TV broadcast itself, but tacking on an ad to the end of a video (as Revver has done with zeFrank) works well for all parties involved.

This could work out for everyone if CC doesn’t get greedy and:

• attempt to add commercials within segments and shows, which are essentially already commercials (running across YouTube and the decentralized web) for their regularly scheduled programs on TV
• police people who upload their own segment edits, instead of chalking up the “lost revenue” as a marketing expenditure.

If Comedy Central can avoid those old media trappings, they just might come out of this as new media players.