My favorite video from the 2008 presidential campaign did not come from a network or cable broadcast or a Web news site. It came from YouTube and was a musical ditty called "Hockey Mama for Obama" — a spoof on Sarah Palin sung to the tune of "Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina." Don’t speak for me, Sarah Palin, the chorus went. "My son plays hockey and I’m his mama/But I am voting Barack Obama."
YouTube displays the number of views of a video. When I first saw Mama for Obama, views were in the tens of thousands. The next time I clicked, they were in the high six figures. Within a few days the views had exceeded 1 million. The count slowed after the Nov. 4 election, but as of this writing it’s at almost 1.5 million.
The video was an amateur production — two people in their living room. But as it turned out, the piano accompanist and the singer were professional musicians. They were a cut above, in other words. The more I clicked (I probably watched the thing 30 times) and linked (to family, friends and email lists), the more it occurred to me how unfortunate it was that I couldn’t pay them for giving me and my circle so much enjoyment. As a content professional myself, I like to pay for the good stuff, partly in hope that pay-to-play karma will somehow infiltrate written material on the Web.
The first issue, of course, was the right sum. I may want to go beyond free, but at a buck a pop like iTunes, I’d run out of money pretty fast.
Then it hit me: A penny a click. [Read more…]