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Ethically loose, shockingly lazy and one of the reasons it's all going to hell.

I wouldn't say it's predatory. Entertainment shows routinely run studio EPKs that are somewhat edited to make it their own. It's competitive marketplace and Variety is taking the easy route out to compete with you DP. That said, at the end of the day, it's quality of product. And it won't take long for people to realize your material is actually original in addition to being longer etc etc.

DP, have you thought about advertising/embedding your video interviews a little more on the main page of MCN?

Dave,

They're going to do what they're going to do, but perhaps an answer is to be more aggressive about getting your work out there.

Maybe you've done this already, but there are all these sites like MetaCafe where people can upload their videos. Even Google and Yahoo. A little bit of time doing that on some of your best stuff might bring more people to the THB. Let their search engines work for you. You might even to set up more long-time relationships with some of these sites, to run everything you do. Having your interviews in so many places would make you a more desirable get for publicists and might even generate income. Just a thought...

"It's competitive marketplace and Variety is taking the easy route out to compete with you DP."

Do you really think Variety's move has something to do with DP? Far as I can tell, the number of visitors to Variety's website dwarfs the number of visitor's to DP's websites. Of course, that might be an oversimplification; I haven't a clue how much industry clout or penetration DP's websites have.

Variety is not stealing David's video, period. Nor is David's idea original to the point of legal action or, really, logical irritation when it's mimicked - however involving and informative the videos have been.

My gripe is that Variety CLEARLY makes it look as if it's a sit-down one of their employees had with Aronofsky when it is, in fact, a FSL promo product. Most of the entertainment shows at least have the stones to delineate the difference with a credit line.

Studio EPKs are made with the intentional, express purpose of being edited down for others to use for promotional purposes.

I am not saying that Variety is stealing anything from me... including an idea... though the effort to do longer, individual sit downs online has multiplied on all kinds of sites since I started doing it.

I don't think David Carr talking to camera in the basement is stolen from the original year of Lunch With David either. People did it before me and people will do it after both of us retire.

Our traffic is better than Variety.com, Mystery. Deal. Site guesstimators, like Alexa, are based on specific constituencies who read the most broadly broadcast stuff primarily. We are primarily an industry-driven site.

And , Mystery, Variety has rules about MCN because they do, indeed, see us as serious competition. They have gone out of their way to try to undermine us. They scream when we review before them... they avoid stories when we scoop them, etc. (As they do with much of the web... your notion that they are so big and important is old, old news.) They are more scared of Nikki these days, but only because they are stupid and still see it all as though they were getting people to buy a newspaper because Michael Fleming had the earliest "scoops." That model is fine for a stand alone site like Nikki's with virtually no overhead, but it is extremely wrongheaded for an infratructure like Variety's or the LAT or whomever.

We have run "exclusive" video from marketing arms as well, such as the Ben Button piece that ran a few weeks ago. But what we did not do is to pretend that it was our video. It was our exclusive, handed to us by the studio. And we treated it as such.

That is where I see the line blurring. Like the HuffPo pulling graphs of stories - most of what people would read - posting on their page and then linking at the bottom for the small percentage that is not satisfied.

From the beginning, MCN has celebrated good work wherever it is and we LINK. We don't steal. No one should.

And thank you, Reid. We have generated income with the video in the past and have some that have had 10s of 1000s of viewings. The 30 minute form has been a bit of a block. And being understaffed has been a problem in terms of cutting shorter segments for a regular YouTube presence, etc.

Traffic is not a problem for this site or this blog. We've had steady increases every year from the start and don't really know of any industry only website with more traffic. I know this issue tugs at the heartstrings of certain competitors, but I know our numbers from actual hard reports and they do not. I don't know a single tracking company that has it right with us. But the studios seem to get it.

Oh well, who knows why Variety is doing that?

The question is whether Variety is journalism or entertainment fluff. Maybe I'm crazy, but I always looked at Variety like the WSJ of the film industry. Which implies journalism. In which case, showing videos like that without an on-screen chyron or at least a txt credit in the html to make it clear it's basically an ad from an EPK, is unethical. It's a cheap way to give your site some production value, but for those than know the game (of which Variety attracts many) it's a cheesy move that weakens the rest of the site's content.

"Our traffic is better than Variety.com, Mystery. Deal. Site guesstimators, like Alexa, are based on specific constituencies who read the most broadly broadcast stuff primarily. We are primarily an industry-driven site."

I plugged the sites into websiteoutlook.com. I thought they might have a ballpark idea of the traffic of different sites. If what you say is true, then they are WAY WAY off (they had variety.com at around 300,000/day, and your sites at around 8,000/day). That's why I qualified my statement.

By the way, I'm not sure what you mean by "Deal." Are you telling me to "deal with it", as if I care who gets more traffic? I don't visit variety.com. I was just curious.

We had more than 8000 uniques a day on our first day in business.

"VARIETY.COM has about 766,800 UNIQUE visitors monthly and Moviecitynews.com has ONLY 24,000 monthly."

so...some facts please...as of today, according to ALEXA.COM, Variety.com is ranked the 3,540 site on the web, while Moviecitynews.com is ranked the 138,333 site (the lower the figure the most traffic)...BIG difference.

Also, QUANTCAST.COM measured 766,800 UNIQUE monthly visitors to VARIETY.COm site. However, Moviecitynews.com ONLY has around 24,400 UNIQUE visitors. Therefore, due to his small EGO, Mr. Poland is becoming like Bob Dole's brother Kenny the EXAGERATOR.

So, let's get real and admit (based on facts) that Variety.com HAS massive amounts of UNIQUE visitors (around 26,000 daily) while MovieCityNews.com has a few hundreds (around 800 people daily).

My ego has nothing to do with it, Abraham.

Neither Quantcast nor Alexa has real numbers. I do.

If you actually look into Alexa, as I have, you will see endless anomolies based on how they get their data. For instance, Huffington Post is ranked 2 slots ahead of Twitter. Does that make sense to you? Mutantwatch.com, which hasn't existed in years, is still ranked #15 amongst movie sites. Blu-ray.com is ranked over studio sites and many others. HFPA's almost-no-news site is ranked ahead of indieWIRE. The highest ranked movie site on Alexa... Australia. Etc, etc, etc...

I know people love to play this game, especially when it's in their favor. But every service is based on a survey of some kind. MCN is a fairly specialized site. We don't do a high percentage of click-thrus. And we don't have ad servers. This makes us somewhat invisible to these rankers.

Alexa, in particular, is based on people who have Google toolbars on their computers, which no one I know has.

According to Quantcast, who I never heard of until your post: "Quantcast currently captures the audience and behavioral activity of over 10 million distinct media assets from over 80,000 partner publishers worldwide." In others words, they guess at what our readership is comes from how often we are clicked on by someone on one of the 80,000 sites they are in business with. According to them, our traffic peaks in early August... insane. But I bet one or two of their sites linked to us that month for whatever reason and that is why there was a spike.

Everyone thinks they are experts because some website told them some very specific piece of information based on a guess that is based on a narrow filter. This is not new to the world of surveys.

I don't think Variety would be pleased to be pegged with having just 26,000 unique visitors a day. Maybe you should ask them. I will bet a lot of dollars that they are not using a number close to that for their web ad sales.

But thanks for be emphatic, even if you are dead wrong.

You could clear all of this up by simply telling us how you know Variety's website stats (obviously, you know your own).

That's a fair question, mystery.

And you are absolutely right.

I am wrong to think that I know what Variety.com's real stats are when all I have is public numbers.

I was wrong for comparing numbers on that basis. And I will not make that mistake again.

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