Bob Bowdon: Content Promotion and Monetization

Our interview of Bob Bowdon for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere. Bob is the CEO of VidaFair, a content monetization platform that allows creators to set their own fees for their content.

Bob has experience as a television reporter, TV producer, talk show host, and documentary filmmaker. Bob talks about his experience as a recurring character on The Onion News Network and shares a story about a foreign news agency mistaking an Onion story for real news. Bob shares his vision for the future of VidaFair and gives advice to creators on how they can promote their content.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I am joined today by Bob Bowdon. Welcome to the podcast.

Bob Bowdon:
Thanks, Jon. Appreciate it.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And we had talked before we started recording that we would do a dog introduction. So let me get Carnegie.

Bob Bowdon:
People love it, Jon. Oh, let's see Carnegie.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Oh, Carnegie. This is Carnegie.

Bob Bowdon:
Wow. How much does Carnegie weigh?

Jon Pfeiffer:
40 pounds.

Bob Bowdon:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
He's a rescue-

Bob Bowdon:
So it's going to be a bit tougher, so Moe weighs 90 pounds, but I'm going to do my best right now, okay?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay.

Bob Bowdon:
Come on. Hey Moe, come here. Come on Moe. Here he comes. Oh, good boy. All right, we've got to get him over here. Come here, Moe. Come on. He's confused as to what's going on. Hold on, hold on. He's a big boy. There he is. There's Moe's appearance on a podcast.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay, I'm going to put you down Carnegie. Okay. That's a first.

Bob Bowdon:
That might've been the strongest start to any interview in my career, so I appreciate the indulgence.

Jon Pfeiffer:
That was fun. And I did see in one of the headshots that were sent over, it was you and your dog. So it is appropriate that we have him.

Bob Bowdon:
Apparently, I'm shameless when it comes to Moe promotion. His name is M-O-E, like The Three Stooges.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I forget which, oh, it was Curly that doesn't have hair, okay, that's right.

Bob Bowdon:
That's correct.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So you are the CEO of VidaFair. And we want to talk about that.

Bob Bowdon:
Indeed.

Jon Pfeiffer:
But in preparing for this, I found that you also have a recurring character on The Onion News Network. For those who don't know what The Onion News Network is, I found three headlines just to set the scene. One of them was, "Breaking story, so no new reporter literally has no information." "Deadly Super Rainbow Tears through the West Coast." And, "Mother shows how video games radicalized her son to run around and pick up coins." So with that backdrop of what is Onion News, who's your character?

Bob Bowdon:
So I used to do that, that was a few years ago, but I included in the list because people get a kick out of it. My character was Brian Scott. I was an on the scene reporter. So they first did these videos as a YouTube channel, The Onion News Network, and then they got two seasons on the IFC cable channel, and I was on both of those seasons. But yeah, we did all kinds of silly news stories that usually people understood right away was satire. But I'll tell you, there was an occasion once where the Chinese government run news agency didn't understand that an Onion story was not real, and they basically reported on the Onion story as if it were real, and they got so embarrassed and so much mockery online about it the next day they ran a story that said, "Do you know that in America there are news organizations who are paid to lie?" That was how they justified their error.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, I teach a class at Pepperdine on media law to the undergrads, and when we talk about the SEC, I have an Onion News where they're purporting to interview somebody at the SEC on why it's okay to show nudity and how they're changing their policy. And what about a-

Bob Bowdon:
From the Securities and Exchange Commission, yes, right.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Where did this come from? So anyway, so let's talk about your company. So when did you form your company?

Bob Bowdon:
Well, it was formed really kind of during the pandemic, and we took a couple of years to build out the technology for it. And then once you do that, I learned that then you have a working but completely empty platform. So then we needed to get some demonstration content on there because a lot of people don't want to be the Guinea pigs of their content on a platform they never heard of. And we're kind of now past that phase and we're now ready to scale, that's part of why I'm doing interviews right now.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And you also, I saw, have a degree from Purdue and Stanford, which I guess would make sense given, well, what are your degrees in and then how did it help you with this platform?

Bob Bowdon:
Sure. Well, mechanical engineering undergrad at Purdue, and then an industrial engineering and engineering management master's at Stanford. How did it prepare me? I mean, I think thinking analytically, I also did coding in some of those years, it was a few years ago, I'll say, Jon, it wasn't yesterday, my higher education.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Notice I did not ask what year.

Bob Bowdon:
I'm sorry.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I did not ask what year.

Bob Bowdon:
Yeah, thank you for that, yeah. But that said, you'd be surprised that while my coding skills aren't at all up to date, you might be surprised how many concepts still pertain to basically the logic structure of building a platform and writing code and whatnot. And then after that, most of my career was in the media, I've been a television reporter and TV producer and talk show host, and gee, I was a documentary filmmaker and then as you mentioned, a little stint in comedy reporting. But most of my career was in media with that kind of technology front end to those years. And so they kind of both play into this startup called VidaFair.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Now, a lot of my clients have subscription accounts, different subscription platforms. What is the concept behind your company on kind of moving, not kind of, but moving away from subscription platforms?

Bob Bowdon:
Thank you. That's my favorite first question to start with, because I'm sick of subscribing to things, content especially, it's one thing to subscribe to like a cell phone plan or something, but content subscriptions, I'm sick of them, I'm sick of forgetting to unsubscribe to content I no longer watch. And most people are, I saw some sort of survey where half of America will just shut their brains off immediately if you pitch them on subscribing to anything else, yet another new content service.

So while I suppose there's a place for subscription monetization of content, that people want to pay once a month for Netflix or HBO or something else, Patreon subscriptions for example, there is at least hundreds of millions, I would say, of potential customers who would be happy to pay for content for someone they really like and really want to support, but they would not be happy subscribing, they just want a way to pay without a subscription monetization, which could be either paying à la carte, just a one-off payment to rent content this once, or if they want discounts, they can buy a package of what we call our grain tokens. But it's basically to buy to pay once and you distribute the financial transaction costs over many more rentals. So it's a way of providing a volume discount to people without ever subjecting them to this repeated payment that happens every month on their credit card. Does that make sense?

Jon Pfeiffer:
It does. And, well, I looked at the videos on your page, or on your site, it's not a page, but on your site and they tend to run from 99 cents to 2.99 as a general rule. I mean, just I'm overgeneralizing, but that's kind of what it is. What I was reading about it, the creators decide what to charge, how do they pick what to charge?

Bob Bowdon:
Well, the concept of VidaFair is, I'd have to actually ask you or any of your listeners to think about it, how would you design a content monetization platform from scratch to be as fair as possible to all parties? And that was essentially what we were trying to do and originally what I was trying to do, just how from the top down, if you got a blank piece of paper, I was going to bring a blank piece of paper as a prop here and I forgot, but if you had a blank canvas, I'll use that metaphor instead, I mean, how would you design it from scratch?

Number one, I would say let the creators set their own fee. Why? I don't know how much time they put into a project, how much money they put into a project, I don't know the duration of projects obviously could anywhere from two minutes to two hours. The idea that any sort of outside group would top down instruct, I mean, everywhere else in society, if you have a sandwich shop, you set your own pricing for your sandwiches, anything else. We sometimes talk about this kind of being the Airbnb of content, where an Airbnb, you set your own price to rent a condo, here you set your own price to rent content. So the idea is to create basically a marketplace instead of any kind of top-down direction on how they have to price their work.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And at the top of the interview you were starting to say about building it out and then getting content on it, how long did it take to build it out first, just to get the platform? And then once it was built out, how did you let people know about it so they knew this was an option?

Bob Bowdon:
Sure. So first of all, it's not easy taking on big tech as you might imagine. So really it took a longer than I thought. It really took a couple of years, I would say, to get the platform built and stable because between you and me, first I hired a group to do it, and then the first thing they did is hired a subcontractor of programs in India to do essentially.

Jon Pfeiffer:
All the time.

Bob Bowdon:
Right. So then the next thing you know, they start fighting with each other. Next thing you know, they're not even talking to each other. Now I'm talking to the Indian subcontracting group and I'm talking to this group in Brooklyn independently. And then eventually then I basically had to just throw it all the way and start all over. I had to pay everybody off, start all over, hire a new company, new programmers essentially. And so I'm confessing here that I may not have done it the most optimal way.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, let me say this. I don't know anybody that really does.

Bob Bowdon:
Yes, fair enough., Yes. So then I found some great guys and hired them. And so yeah, to answer the question, it took about a couple of years. But understand, we also, we have an iPhone app, we have an Android app, we have a website, and we have financial transactions going on. So in other words, people can use credit cards, we have a banking interface in other words as well. So we had to work with everything from financial institutions to the Apple App Store and Google Play to get everything working together. And so it wasn't simple. It wasn't particularly simple.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Which came first, the app or the website?

Bob Bowdon:
The website came first.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then which came first, the Android or the iPhone app?

Bob Bowdon:
They were developed simultaneously, but we kind of leaned, I have to admit, I just have an iPhone, so maybe I'm biased, but usually if they're-

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, me too.

Bob Bowdon:
Yeah, what can I say?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. So how long has the app been up or available? Excuse me.

Bob Bowdon:
A year and a half, two years, something like that.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So you've had a chance to see which is drawing more traffic. Which draws more traffic, the apps or the website?

Bob Bowdon:
I was surprised at how, maybe I'm a dinosaur that I'm still kind of computer centric in certain things, I guess I have to check myself because maybe it depends on what activity I'm considering, but generally when I'm looking at content, I will watch it on a TV set or a laptop for something like video most of the time anyway. All I'm trying to say is that it surprised me how the apps both Google and Apple were combined about two thirds of our traffic, much more, I kind of thought it would be the other way around. So there it is.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. I'm actually not surprised because neither one of my sons have TVs.

Bob Bowdon:
Right, right. But even just mean, do they have laptops or do they just-

Jon Pfeiffer:
No, they have MacBook Pros.

Bob Bowdon:
Okay. Well, yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So how did you get the word out to the creators?

Bob Bowdon:
Well, you start everywhere we can. We would go to film festivals and have receptions for filmmakers. We advertised online on everything from Google search to social media ads that pertain to content creators. I say filmmakers a lot, because that's just the kind of content we've launched wit because you have to pick something really, but all along it's been our view that we want it to be more the YouTube that has a pay-per-view feature, rather than thinking of ourselves as a Netflix that has a pay-per-view feature. In other words, we see ourselves as not film specific, even though the majority of our content right now is independent film. We see the future of VidaFair as being podcasters, as being people who want to do any kind of show from a cooking show to, I just talked to a guy who does bicycle tricks, like on half pipes and stuff, and spins his bike around. We have an investor who's done content for us, investment advice. So our view is that there's no reason to limit the content to just independent film.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How many of the creators on the site are one off videos versus series?

Bob Bowdon:
Well, so we have a number of comedians and they are all multiple uploaders, whereas a filmmaker, probably half of the filmmakers, maybe more than half, maybe two thirds to three quarters have just one film that they've uploaded and that's it.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Let's say I come, I'm a creator and I decide this is for me. I'm on YouTube, I'm on TikTok, but I realize there are some videos that I could monetize because they're really good. Where would you suggest they start?

Bob Bowdon:
Well, they would come and they'd create an account on VidaFair, and then they go to our menu and we have a menu item called Content Creator. In fact, let me back up, the first place they could really start even before that is go to our website and go to the menu. And at the bottom there's something called earnings calculator. And there they can basically just put in the duration of their content, if it's 10 minutes, if it's 20 minutes, if it's five minutes, if it's an hour, whatever it is and then they put in the amount they want to make on each rental. They say, "Here's what I would want to make on each rental." And they get to see then what the à la carte retail price would be for someone who's a fan of theirs, a social media followers of theirs, what it would cost just one off rent that one video.

And they also see, what we call the grain token price, which is for the volume users, how much that price would be. And they can then estimate the number of views in one year, for example, like, "Gee, I think at this price point, maybe I'd get 500 people that rent it, or 100 or 50 or 10,000." I don't know how many followers they have on social media. But they can basically then play with their own pricing based on the duration of their content, and then look at how much they would make based on that, all those particulars.

So that would be the first place is just go to our earnings calculator, put in these numbers and get an idea for what, "If I charged this and rented this many, I would personally net this amount," et cetera. And this would be the retail price.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Let's say a creator does that and they upload... Actually, I'm going to digress a second because I was looking at the different categories you have, film drama, film romance, comedy film, documentary, music videos, podcasts. There's a lot more, but I did the list. Is there an other?

Bob Bowdon:
So the categories, I should say, are evolving, Jon, yeah, certainly. I was just explaining to you, we have no category right now for this bicycle guy. So yes, it's not so much it would be called other, it's that it would still appear on our homepage, there's an algorithm that determines which videos are presented to users on the homepage so even if they were completely new, I don't know, somebody does a... What's a crazy category, Jon, that you think that would be?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Oh, I mean, bike tricks, skateboarding, surfing, somebody has a GoPro going into a surfing channel.

Bob Bowdon:
They don't send that crazy to me. But anyway, maybe I'm crazier than you are. But the surfing guy, we don't have any surf videos, but he goes, "Look, I got 10,000 followers on Instagram and I got this many followers on X or on Facebook or whatever, I got my video." And yeah, they go to content creator on our dropdown after they'd make a basic account, we just need someone's email address and they'd create a password and then they make an account and then they would upload it. Basically it used to be free when we launched, now it's still literally $2, one time charge of $2 to upload. And that's if you pay à la carte. If you buy our grain tokens, it's only $1.

But anyway, so it's a negligible upload fee. And then they get a link that they can send, they can put it on email blasts, they can put it on websites, they can put it on their social media. They can even advertise it. These days, it's not like the old advertising days, what's it called? The TV show?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Mad Men.

Bob Bowdon:
Mad Men. I don't know why I blanked on that. It's not like the Mad Men days where you need some sort of guys in suits somewhere to buy ads for something. You can try $10 worth of advertising on a link with your film or your surfing video and all you got to make is if you spend $10 and you end up making $11 out of your $10 ad buy, you can scale, you're good to go, you can kind of keep that going and you're profitable. So yes, you get a link, in other words, to your own content or your own channel on VidaFair, and you can promote that, advertise that, et cetera. And every time someone rents it, you get paid the amount you set for yourself.

Jon Pfeiffer:
The last minute or so you anticipated it, my next question was how do creators promote it? And it sounds like largely on their social media channels.

Bob Bowdon:
That's the freeway. Again, they can email blast it, but I think the advertising piece is something many people haven't thought of. We are a monetization platform, and there's an era when kind of everyone I knew thought all content should be free, like, "Pay for content? That's crazy." There's a psychological thing that we need to overcome somewhat, which is the idea like, "Oh, well, I'll pay for a movie with celebrities in it that's big studio film, that I'll pay for, or maybe a comedy special by Dave Chappelle or Bill Burr," somebody that they think of as famous. That seems to be a thing they're happy to pay for. We're increasingly finding people paying super chats, by the way, on YouTube to people they follow on YouTube so they're increasingly comfortable with that.

But yes, this would be kind of a different paradigm for monetization to some degree. But yes, it would be to get their followers who follow them and say, "Look, you're supporting me by renting my content. You get my free content every week on YouTube or on Instagram or something else. Well, if you want to support me further." And no different really than how Patreon markets itself, it's just a subscription version and that sometimes people think of us as,, that kind of the pay-per-view Patreon.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, except it's à la carte, so that's always the thing that's troubling me with Patreon is all or nothing.

Bob Bowdon:
Exactly.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You don't want that much.

Bob Bowdon:
Exactly. Here, you can pay $1, $2, whatever, you're directly supporting an artist. And incidentally, people often ask us, they'll be like, "What percentage do you get?" We started on that basis like, "Well, we should charge a percent. They'll set the fee and then we'll take a percent." And then we thought, but that's actually not the fairest way to structure it. If you go back to my blank canvas idea, why should we be paid based on how much they charge? If person A charges double person B, and they're both 10 minute videos, why should we get more from person A if we're doing the same amount of service that we're doing to person B? We should charge based on our costs. Our platform fee, in other words, is based on the duration of the content. It has nothing to do with the creators' fee that they set. They set their own fee, whatever they want and our fee is based purely on the file size. So we're not a percentage, in other words.

Jon Pfeiffer:
One of the early problems YouTube had and still has, frankly, are copyrighted content where somebody's ripping somebody else off. Have you had that problem yet? And if somebody feels that another creator has ripped them off, what processes do you go through?

Bob Bowdon:
So I had a list of things, Jon, I was going to say, here are the blank canvas things we were going to offer content creators to say we wanted this to be the fairest to you. And one of the items on there was no censorship, or if you want to call it thought police, or if you want to call it whatever, we want to be a free speech platform. But we do have some flags that users can flag content for. So we have five of them, basically no porn. We're a no porn site. No copyright infringement as you just cited, we don't want someone uploading the new Avatar movie and charging for it or something. No child abuse, no doxing, no personal threats. But apart from that, we are kind of an anti-censorship kind of free speech, free open ideas kind of platform. But yes, copyright infringement is one of the flags that if a user sees something, they can flag the content and then that tells us to take a look.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, I think the no porn was a really good decision because that's what killed Dailymotion is they allowed it.

Bob Bowdon:
Oh, really?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Essentially, because parents couldn't let their kids go on to the platform where if you don't have to worry about that, you don't have to monitor 24/7 on what they're watching.

Bob Bowdon:
Well, another take on that is something someone just told me, now, this is just hearsay, I'm not saying I know this to be true, but I was told that the original OnlyFans business model was essentially what we're doing, and they figured out they could make money much faster by going kind of the sex route so whatever. That's not kind of the route we're taking.

Jon Pfeiffer:
No, I mean, it is a very niche, you have to decide what your lane is because I will tell clients that are on Instagram, once you take your clothes off, you can't put them back on because it's a different following. You just have to decide what you are going to be. I'm not talking to people that are on OnlyFans, but that is a conscious decision that you're not likely going to have a cooking show.

Bob Bowdon:
Right, exactly, exactly. And from the beginning, I want it to be the YouTube where you could make money, the YouTube where you could set your own fees. And yes, technically you can make money on YouTube through advertising monetization, but you get on average less than 2/10ths of one penny per view, it's like the average is 0.18 cents per view. So five views is less than one penny on YouTube. Whereas here, imagine on our platform, you could charge $1, $2, whatever you want per view. So it's quite a bit different. But yeah. So apart from that, yes, we want it to be the YouTube that has monetization.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I want you to put on your prediction hat, where do you see yourself in a year? Where do you see yourself in three years?

Bob Bowdon:
Well, I would say that in a year we will have hopefully gotten, so we have great content now, we have award-winning films now, I'm proud of it. We don't really have anything famous right now. I would hope that in a year we have a few, whether they're famous comedians, famous surfers, skateboarders, famous investment advisors, somebody with a large following, call it a half a million up, something like that, that's where I want to be. I want to have at least a handful of those, let's say a dozen in a year. And then three years from that, we could just scale it, I don't know if we ought to triple or quintuple something like that in three years.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I'm curious, how do you consume your content? Where do you go for content?

Bob Bowdon:
I mean, like a lot of people, I watch a lot of YouTube. I have no problem with YouTube as a business model, I think there should just be another option for monetized content. So yeah, I would say, and I have a big 85-inch TV that I probably consume most of my content on. And so is that what you were asking?

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, no, that's exactly what I was asking.

Bob Bowdon:
Okay. I mean, yeah, I got the iPhone.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. Second to the last question, what should have I asked you that I didn't?

Bob Bowdon:
Well, I think what's been holding us back, really, maybe I'm a bad marketer to even bring that up, I should just say everything's straight upward and hockey stick to the sky, but I would say to some extent, just primarily, of course, most people haven't heard of us at all so maybe let's start with that. But I think that there's a reluctance to put your credit card into any platform you've never heard of. Usually your friends all tell you about it, I don't know. So I think that's a barrier, there's some psychological barriers that we have to court to prove credibility.

There'll be times that we'll be kind of promoting ourselves on Facebook sites for filmmakers or whatnot and some people will be wondering if it's a scam. They'll say, for example, "Oh, you have these tokens, these grain tokens," which is you just buy them, you could buy them for $6 or $11 or $20 bigger batches. And people will be like, "Oh, so you've created a currency, this sounds like a cryptocurrency scam." And then we're like, "No, no, no, it's not a currency. Currencies trade separate from the dollar. You could have a Bitcoin dollar chart, you could have a Euro dollar chart. We're a token. We're priced in dollars. We are not a currency." And so, yeah, there is a certain degree of skepticism of just a platform people haven't heard of that doesn't involve money. And so hopefully, I guess and my solution to the problem I just laid out is if we have enough famous people coming along, or not even super famous, but somewhat known people posting content that will help resolve that skepticism.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And then where can people find you in the app store and on the internet?

Bob Bowdon:
So VidaFair, again, I said it maybe we had a name that could be pronounced two ways, but it's just eight letters, V-I-D-A, like vida, like life, and then fair, F-A-I-R. So that's on the Google Play, it's on the App Store. And it's also if you put.com after V-I-D-A-F-A-I-R that's our website.