The Myth of Hypersyndication

Hypersyndication is a buzzword (a bit long in tooth for web 2.0, but still prevalent) for massmarket online distribution. If massmarket distribution means being in every chain store from WalMart to Best Buy to your local grocery store and gas station, then hypersyndication is its web equivalent. The idea is your content should be out there as widely, freely, and unsupervisedly as possible… so it should be on iTunes, Amazon Unbox, Xbox, Netflix Watch Now, Hulu, Crackle, YouTube, ad infinitum, ad nauseam and also easily embeddable on blogs, Myspace pages, emails, widgets, and whatnot.

To a certain extent, it’s completely accurate. There is so much content already out there and so much new content being generated every second that you literally have to be everywhere just to be noticed. But there’s a dark side to hypersyndication… the same dark side as massmarket distribution.

Massmarket/hypersyndication is for mainstream, broadly-accessible content that requires no context. That’s fine for major studio tentpoles, but the trend these days is more toward niche/narrowcast than mainstream/broadcast. When niche/narrowcast content is seen out of context, it does more harm than good.

An example… Iron Man (directed by Jon Favreau) is mainstream/broadcast. 95% of people who stumble across that movie randomly could instantly be pulled in on some level. On the other hand, Tetsuo the Iron Man (directed by Shinya Tsukamoto) does not have the same broad appeal. Even someone who might fall in love with Tetsuo the Iron Man would probably not enjoy it immediately based on seeing it play in someone’s embedded video on their Myspace page. The viewer needs to know what they’re getting themselves into… they need to commit to Tetsuo the Iron Man before watching it. Iron Man requires no such prior commitment.

Does that mean Iron Man is a better film than Tetsuo the Iron Man. I don’t think so, I think they’re both great at what they are. It’s meaningless to compare them, they have nothing in common other than they are stories on film that we collectively label as “movies” or “films.” To Netflix, they’re the same thing. Netflix offers hardly any context. And once you have a Netflix subscription, the movies are essentially free. FREE means that there is no commitment on the part of the consumer… there is no due diligence required, and thus FREE further diminishes context. As Michael Ironside says in Starship Troopers “something given has no value.” I could see a mainstream Netflix customer who enjoyed Iron Man happen across Tetsuo the Iron Man, think to himself ‘I liked Iron Man, I’ll check this out’ and add it to his Netflix queue… then a week or so later it winds up in his mailbox, a week or two after that he pops it in the DVD player forgetting everything about why he selected it in the first place, and then he gets immediately annoyed by the movie, stops it after 3 minutes, mails it back and writes a bad review on Netflix about how it’s unwatchable and pretentious. That’s a bummer for Tsukamoto… he doesn’t deserve that kind of aggravation.

Most people will argue that hypersyndication still works because a small percentage of an exponentially larger audience is still far huger than a relatively large percentage of a tiny niche. The problem with that model is the Tyranny Of The Naysayers. Someone who dislikes a movie is far more likely to write a bad review than someone who likes a movie is apt to write a good review. If you exponentially increase the number of people who see the movie (knowing full well that the number of viewers it’s truly geared for is disproportionately smaller than those who simply won’t get it), you’re setting the film up to be tarred and feathered on the public stage. You’ll have no niche audience to champion the film, only naysayers hating on it… and most consumers can’t discern the comments of people who ‘don’t get it’ from people who ‘do get it.’

Some of the coolest, most exciting, most compelling films simply should not be seen by everyone. They’re great films, and they’re not for everybody. That statement flies in the face of the given wisdom about great films… about Oscars and box office and the meritocracy of great storytelling. Being a best-seller requires appealing to the widest possible audience–sure that can mean it’s a great transcendent film that every human being can relate to, but more often it means that it’s lowest common denominator cotton candy. There’s nothing wrong with cotton candy, but is it a better made food than sushi? Not everyone likes sushi… and even people who may like sushi wouldn’t like it if I put it on a stick and sold it to them at a theme park next to the funnel cakes and cotton candy.

One of my first questions to filmmakers is “who is the audience of this movie?” The answer is generally some variation on “people who love great films.” That is not a type of person. Iron Man is a great film. Tetsuo the Iron Man is a great film. If your audience is people who love BOTH movies, then your audience is smaller than you think.

Scarcity creates value. It’s better to build a core fanbase and grow your audience from there than to hypersyndicate and try to reach the largest possible audience as quickly as possible.

[BTW- before I get called out on the fact that Tetsuo the Iron Man is generally favorably reviewed on Netflix (despite it being a lower score than Iron Man or even the dreadful Invincible Iron Man animated movie), let me just point out I was using Tetsuo the Iron Man as an example that most readers could easily identify (and also I was being a bit clever, sue me). Tetsuo the Iron Man was not hypersyndicated upon its initial release back in the 90s, so by the time Netflix came along Tetsuo had already protected itself with a core following and a cineaste pedigree... precisely what I'm suggesting you do before you consider hypersyndicating. Also, I recognize Netflix has the 'Ratings of Users Like You' addition to the ratings system, which is an appreciated effort but not a silver bullet for the problems faced by content creators/suppliers.]