Since 2001, Creative COW has proven the largest and most successful long-running community dedicated to supporting professionals working in film, video, and audio. Over the years, they’ve helped forge some powerful relationships. Let’s see how they can help you share your story, find your peers and/or open a door for you. You’re never alone with the power of community.
Panelists
Transcripts from talk
Sarah Marince:
Hello everyone, happy Wednesday and happy Cinco de Mayo. Yes, Cinco de Mayo today. I totally forgot until like an hour ago, but welcome. Thanks for being here, everybody. I’m Sarah and I will be your host along with Jade, the lovely Jade, for tonight’s talk brought to you by shoots.video. And today our special guest is Tim Wilson from creativecow.net. Hi Tim, how are you?
Tim Wilson:
I’m doing great, Sarah. Thanks.
Sarah Marince:
Yeah, of course. And so, Tim, do you want to kind of tell us who you are and where you are just like a little intro for yourself?
Tim Wilson:
Yeah, the speediest part is I am in Hawaii on Oahu, on the East side of the Island, and with no complaints about that whatsoever. I’ve lived here for about three and a half years and loving it. Came from California before that I move around constantly. I added it up the other day, 48 times in 60 years. So I moved a lot. Yes, moved all over the country, all four corners, lots of places in between. And I love it. I love moving around, but have definitely come in for a landing here and creativecow.net is the place that I work an online community for media professionals. And we are at creativecow.net. And my role there is editor in chief and we’ll talk about what all of that means.
Sarah Marince:
That’s very cool. Is Hawaii your favorite place that you’ve lived so far?
Tim Wilson:
Yeah, I was going to come up with some clever thing about, well, there’s been something magical about every place we’ve lived, which is why we lived there. And in fact, I have liked pretty much every place I’ve lived. I’ll always be a New Yorker spiritually. That’s where I started my family’s roots. Go back there since they came to the U.S, my father’s family from Ireland, my mother’s family from Italy. And, they started my father in hell’s kitchen, working their way down. My mother’s family were potato farmers on the, in the far Eastern reaches of long Island. And they met in Brooklyn and we all lived happily ever after. So at the end of the day, Hawaii is definitely the favorite place. I don’t, I don’t anticipate leaving.
Sarah Marince:
I haven’t been there for pictures then that’s beautiful. Oh, very cool. Thank you for joining us tonight. And as always, we have our list of questions for you and for everyone tuning in. If you have a question throughout the webcast, please drop it in the Q and a box, and then we definitely will get to those, but I kinda want you to tell me like how Creative COW got started, where did they come from? So we kind of start with that.
Tim Wilson:
Yeah, let’s do that. The name COW actually started with actual cows, the founders, Ron and Kathleen, Linda Boon, both had cows in their lives. Ron grew up on dairy farms in Orange County. The family, when they sold the last of their holdings, it became the parking lot at Knott’s Berry Farm. I mean, they go way back in orange County as dairy farmers there, and his wife was just happened to collect cows, and so, in thinking about how to name a company for the 21st century in the tech world, they thought about names like Amazon and Apple, Adobe, that were organic names, not tech names and liked the idea that cows are communal animals, and they move slowly and deliberately. There’s a, you know, cogitation is kind of built into the bovine, digestive system.
Tim Wilson:
So this idea that we would be thoughtful and considerate and move a little bit slower in an organic way, rather than, you know, being named some hardcore tech gogo name, then a few years later, one of the members in the community said, well, you know, you could say it stands for creative communities of the world it’s like, Ooh, we like that. So they adopted it, but it really did come from actual cows. The roots of the community actually go back to 1995, where it began as a online user group, mostly around media 100, which was a very big part of the beginnings of desktop video that ran into the fate that many, many companies do along the way as changes happen, couldn’t keep up. And so, very quickly moved into other tools related to production cameras, storage, software, especially, after effects in those days, even before Adobe owned, it, became a very big part of the community.
Tim Wilson:
And in trying to turn it into something that was a business, that’s where Creative COW came in. none of us involved in this have any background in the web because it came along later. And, I’ll talk a little bit more about that later, but a lot of the things, well, everything at the COW had to be built by hand. we predated YouTube, we predated, obviously Facebook, WordPress, you know, all of those things. There were no PHP forums in a box then. So it was built by hand out of Pearl and CGI script back in the nineties, back before there were MP3s before there was streaming. So, you know, they built their own players and they built their own web architecture. So, the heart of the community is forums. The number grows and shrinks as, people tell us what they’re interested in.
Tim Wilson:
And there were times when different kinds of storage needed their own, support forums because, Oh, this isn’t RAID, this is archive. This isn’t shared storage. It’s fast storage. Well, now it’s a little bit easier do all that stuff. So we have one storage in archiving form. So those kinds of changes happen naturally, but it’s given us a front seat for a lot of the changes in the industry. My part in this came going back to the very, very beginning. I’d always wanted to be part of the behind the scenes part of television, not in front of the camera. I loved, control rooms. And when I saw, editing, that was something that I got into. So I started editing in the seventies, then in the nineties, my wife and I started our own production company in the Florida keys, which was another great Islandy place to live, very beautiful, but nobody there was doing video, to speak of.
Tim Wilson:
There were people who were coming in from afar to do it, but nobody was really doing much with production at all in the very, very early, I guess, late eighties, we started there in 89 and started our business in 91, as a full-time thing. So we started doing things the best we could with small format cameras that were starting to become available, but man, was it hard? Nobody knew anything. And a lot of the things that people were doing were kind of, companies were horrified to find out that we were using their products and the way we were, the name of the company was Keys, Entertainment, and advertising. And, that was basically what we were doing a lot of basically evening magazine kinds of stuff oriented around the outdoors in South Florida. so we eventually started doing some government work and did a show for, I don’t know, 125 episodes or so that was jointly underwritten by Noah, EPA and Everglades Everglades, national park, Noah through the Florida keys, national Marine sanctuary.
Tim Wilson:
So a lot of outdoor stuff, science nature, it was very enjoyable, very much appealed to the liberal arts nerd in me that wanted to know something about everything and be able to communicate to people in the community. So we did a lot of community organizing as well, and, for my wife that this led into politics, so she became a politician to try to implement some of the visions that we saw in our community and to try to build up communities. That was a big part of what we did. we helped some communities incorporate and, were engaged with issues oriented, electoral stuff. So initiatives say ballot initiatives rather than necessarily candidates, around 1994 along comes Netscape navigator. And the internet is starting to now make sense as a thing, America online was a big part of the production community back in the day.
Tim Wilson:
There was a thing called the Cosa Cafe at America Online, which was a place for after effects users when it was still at the company for art and science before they sold it to, Macromedia, or I should say All This, then All This bought it and spun and off to Adobe. So this was also in 95. So I wound up going digital nonlinear in 1995 into 96. And that’s when I started hanging out with the community that the Linda Booms formed at that time, the WWU the worldwide users group. So as the business evolves, I wound up joining, Boris effects, full-time, first as a demo artist then as their product manager for Boris effects for us red, mostly on the compositing and graphic side of the company, visual effects, a little bit of the titling stuff, but that, wasn’t what I primarily developed.
Tim Wilson:
And from there, I went to avid where I became the head of senior product marketing manager for the media composer family. My last, role there was to launch the software only version of media composer, which I was very proud of. That was a great launch if I say so myself and obviously a big step for avid to move into the world of software, only editing as an option, but it wasn’t a good fit. I was not a corporate guy. My bent was entrepreneurial and, independent and kind of stubborn and was not really used to, sharing, at the steering wheel. So I was lamenting this to my friends at creative COW and they said, well, you know, you could come work for us. So I did in 2006, started working there full time after having been a member of the community at that point for, over 10 years, because at the end of the day, what I really wanted to do was help people not argue with them, not persuade them, not sell them.
Tim Wilson:
I wanted to help them. And that’s really what we’ve been trying to do for these now 26 years is wherever people are help them. And I want to emphasize wherever they are. I was in the Florida keys when I started a community participating in this community in a town of 8,000 people. Ron and Kathleen who founded it were in Paso Robles, California, beautiful place, middle of nowhere. If you’ve tried to get there, you know, it is not on the road to anything. And they had the same situation that I did. There were no manufacturer reps there. There were no, people like us weren’t allowed into trade shows. There were no traveling shows. In fact, when Boris asked me to start doing demos for them in 1998, I said, what’s a software demo. I’d never seen one before. Nobody that I knew had ever seen a software demo, it was the wild wild West.
Tim Wilson:
So, it was important to us to be able to find people like us who were doing work. That was interesting in its own way. Even if it wasn’t going to be in anybody’s sizzle reel, that was going to get me a job at Marvel or anything, but it was, it was good work. It was interesting work. I was making a living, but I had questions and manufacturers weren’t interested or able to help, in the beginning, storage manufacturers in particular were horrified to find out that we were using their, their stuff to play video because that’s not what they designed it for because nobody was doing that. So we kind of, we, not me personally, but we as an aggregate users kind of force the issue. So then they started swooping in and saying, Oh yeah, video. We do that. they didn’t get was terrible.
Tim Wilson:
It was just disastrous and people were losing their work. So, you know, nowadays storage is mostly reliable and you’ve probably got some kind of backup. Well then all of these things were a big crisis. So being able to help people, you know, it’s funny looking at this now, it was a big deal that there were these affordable cameras, right. And affordable computers. Well, I paid $2,000 for my first video production computer. Well, in today’s dollars, that’d be more like $12,000. I paid $5,000 for eight megabytes of Ram, not gigabytes. Eight Megabytes of Ram cost me $5,000. It was so expensive. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away when it was obsolete. I used it for Christmas decorations still about, I don’t know, until about 96 or 97, because it was just too painful to part with this obsolete, pile of stuff.
Tim Wilson:
So we took out a loan to start our business against our house. We took a second mortgage basically. So in those days, most of the people who were doing cheap video were having to take out second mortgages. So they tended to be people like me in their thirties, if not forties, second or third careers. And yes, it was cheap, but it was hard. And if something went wrong, it was your house that was on the line. You had bills to pay, to keep up the payments on your gear. And if, if it went South, they weren’t just going to collect your gear. They were going to collect your house. And that was not really doable. The stakes were high. Well then the turn of the century comes in. Now people can go to school, learn things like digital video and nonlinear editing. And we don’t even call it that anymore because it’s just editing.
Tim Wilson:
So then people started saying, well, okay, I’ve gon to college in this thing. Now I want a job. So we saw the industry transition from entrepreneurial based. You have to have money in your pocket to, well, you know what, I’m going to work for somebody else and get them to do it. So it was, it’s been very interesting to see that transition as more and more people are doing their work in-house, but because we’d already had the eyes to see that work was going on in different places, you don’t think of someplace like Pfizer is having a huge video production arm, but they do. And it’s not stuff that you’ll ever see if you’re not part of their network of, you know, partners, and investors. And, you know, it’s very internally focused and all of the that you see on social media, that’s being produced in house.
Tim Wilson:
This is now a big, big part of the world. So we got to see and have a front row seat on all of these changes, the change from entrepreneurial to in-house the change from expensive digital to, or expensive analog, to expensive digital to inexpensive digital. Now everything is relatively affordable and everything is possible. You know, the things that you see on YouTube and Instagram and elsewhere that people are doing just to kind of show that they can with inexpensive cameras, with inexpensive software, like after effects and doing these massive visual effects thing, it’s been very exciting to see that, you know, the democratization of video and the, you know, the promise of as many channels as there are creators. That was always what people were talking about in the nineties. But it’s really only been the past, say five years that we’ve actually seen it. So I’ve been around a long time and I’ve seen a lot of stuff and I’ve done a lot of stuff, but it’s always exciting because there’s so much that’s still changing and we don’t even know what’s going to come out of the past year and how much longer it’s going to last and what those changes are going to be as we move forward. And that’s some of the stuff I want to talk to all of you about.
Blake Barnett:
Yeah. We should get into it. Tim, before we get into the questions, I had like a follow up question, which was like way back earlier, when you’re talking about your production company, I was just curious if your production company predated the Fantasy Fest in the keys.
Tim Wilson:
No, fantasy Fest was going, but that was in a, a much different place. The Florida keys is a string of islands, 110 miles long. We were at the far Eastern, Northern end in key Largo key West in fantasy Fest is down a hundred plus miles the other way and tended to there that’s a long way in practice. It, you might say a hundred miles. Well, that’s not that far, but you know, if, if you’re living in San Diego, you probably don’t go to LA that often. Right. It’s that kind of thing that, or, you know, so it was, it was pretty far apart not now, especially when my wife was in politics.
Blake Barnett:
That was already going on before your production company. I was just, I was just curious how long it’s been. I went to one time and I was just like, I was curious.
Tim Wilson:
Yeah, well, Fantasy Fest as well. Then, my wife as a politician did ride in a convertible and Fantasy Fest and waved to people. So, yeah, it was a part of our lives, but in practice it was pretty far away. I’ve seen a couple of other questions and I, I’m to jump to them if you don’t mind. The forum is built. In fact, I’m going to just do a quick screen share here. Okay. which is, Oh, I put it on full screen. There we go. Share screen. So I’m going to now do that. So let me pull up my question. The question is talking about the forum software and then also the revenue stream. So as I mentioned in the very, very beginning, we had to build our own forum software because nobody else built it.
Tim Wilson:
There was no such thing as forum software. So we built our own, obviously the, the, century turns and there are many options. Now we were slow to adopt those other options because they didn’t do enough in the beginning. Well, now they do. So our forum, we moved actually just recently in, over labor day, we moved into a WordPress based community. And, this is the main page, creativecow.net. And you’ll see here a feed, not unlike feeds that you see in lots of other places. You also see a few ads. Somebody asked about revenue stream, and I do want to talk about ads because ads are a part, the people who advertise are part of our community. And I want to be very specific about what we do and don’t do with advertising, because some of the stuff we don’t do with ads is some of the stuff we feel most strongly about, because we think that nobody should be doing them. So I’ll talk about that. But, in general, this is the feed, basically all the forums, all the forums, top forums are exactly the ones that you would expect, fate, that they would be. And then, we have the full list of forums, you know, down the link. But in addition to that, we have built up, very, robust user and member community is actually the view out my window, on my profile page.
Tim Wilson:
That’s the last, that’s the last, I will do that. But what I wanted to show is, within the scope of creative COW as a whole, it can be overwhelming. In fact, I, I do have a, I hate to do this, but you know, it’s kind of worth doing to, do this, which is to the numbers are worth talking about, we have around 700,000 members or people visiting us a month over the course of the year that works out to about 8 million people over the 20 plus years that we’ve been going, we’ve got 350,000 plus members, 250,000 plus followers on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn. And we have a newsletter. I’ll show you some of that right quick. but the, the numbers are large and with a hundred plus forums and 350,000 people, it can get overwhelming. There’s no doubt about that.
Tim Wilson:
So as part of what we’ve done in our world of creating feeds, I have, you know, 51 people specifically that I am, following along. And when those 51 particular people have anything to say, I see them in my specific feed for the people that I’m paying attention to. So I’m going a little bit slower on the loading here as I’m sharing my screen. But, this is the idea that within this context of the people that I’m following, I can see the things that they do. I get notified up here, a little notifications as they speak. So you can also along the way, subscribe to specific forums, which many people do so that you get notified of discussions in your favorite forums. There were a number of things that we did along the way that we’re pioneering. One of them was faces.
Tim Wilson:
Now again, think back to the nineties. When I say we started in 1995, that was the year that the JPEG standard was released, but nobody was actually compressing to JPEG without standalone third-party software. this was before MP3. This was before any of that stuff. So we said we wanted to do two things that were extremely controversial. One of them was real names because our thinking was, it’s a community. You can’t have a relationship with, you know, a screen name people and obviously some people choose not to do a picture. Hey, that’s their prerogative. Some people choose to have little clever icons. That’s cool too. If you want to have a little pit crew kind of thing, that’s fine too. That’s part of your self-expression right. But for us, it was important to have a name for a number of reasons. One was, we wanted to people to be able to connect, not just here, but on LinkedIn and, you know, meet through IMD MDB and be involved in each other’s productions and connect to jobs.
Tim Wilson:
The way that Boris found me to pull me out of my life as an independent producer to come work for him was in fact, my presence at the COW at on the about page, I wanted to mention in particular, one of the people that we featured on the about page Kylie Penya, she’s now the program manager for creative technologies and infrastructures at Netflix, which basically means if there’s a standards board that Netflix sits on, Kylie’s the person sitting on that board. So whether it’s, you know, CMT or, you know, streaming folks, or, you know, the Adam APOP1A, you know, whatever it is, that’s what she’s involved in. And she talks about in this quote that you can see on our, about page, that she started from a small town in Indiana. And she started coming to the COW, in her very early twenties, right after she came out of school because of creative COW, I was able to learn and share in an enormous global community while I was on isolated fans, financially and geographically from the greater industry because of the reach of the COW, my voice was heard and listened to early in my career.
Tim Wilson:
So she was tapped on the shoulder by a chainsaw posts, and she wound up being the workflow supervisor for Jane the Virgin among other things. She had like 150 credits at chainsaw before she went to Netflix. And so this is the thing that I wanted to underscore also is that this is a place where people who have influence are passing through, they’re looking for resources for themselves. if because we were part of this transition from expensive gear to inexpensive gear, we’re also part of a transition of things like, what’s the word I’m looking for it, infrastructure. so that the idea of things like USB storage, well, that was insane. There was no USB when we started. And the idea that you could use off the shelf storage was pretty insane to consider, but we did. So, we had companies that were coming naturally to the COW to look for their own resources.
Tim Wilson:
Okay. My, my company is moving from a copper based infrastructure to ethernet. How do I, how do I get video over ethernet? Well, guess what, the folks at the COW independent low end posts had been doing video over ether net for years. So these kinds of transitions, no independent post had started this low indie post was doing HD before you could get HD on your TV because we could. So I’ve always looked to independent outside the mainstream post as the place where innovation is happening, because I watched it for 20 years and that’s what we saw. So people who’ve come to the COW have found themselves tapped on the shoulder because these folks are passing through, looking for answers. And when they see helpful people with answers, they tap them. So anyway, a couple of other books,
Blake Barnett:
Tim you’ve had to site, like since the internet basically, Creative COW was around. Yeah. And so like, I, and I was there, I use Creative COW a lot more, when I was first starting, because like there wasn’t a lot of options. It was you guys maybe like a, like really not a lot out there, especially for communities, because it was like really before this total community, trends started being a thing. What are you guys doing now to like, get to the younger crowd with all these that like stand out now because you, you have the people that started with you and they’re there. And then you’re getting older, which I, that has put two and two together. It’s like a really good research. I’ve been doing this for years and they’re in these executive positions now. but yeah. What are you doing to reach out to like the younger, new people to the industry? Just because there’s so many options, you know, I don’t know
Tim Wilson:
I’m so glad that you answered because I was afraid this was going to look like a setup, but in fact,
Blake Barnett:
It was set up. We had a conversation beforehand.
Tim Wilson:
Well here’s the thing Google is very kind to share some data with us. this is a screenshot from Google analytics that I added some, narrative text too. But this is the idea that, 25 ish percent of our community is 18 to 24. 45 ish percent is 25 to 34. So you put that together and you’ve got 71% of our video of our visitors are gen Z and millennials out. And if you apply that 71% to 8 million, you get 5.3. So 5.3, young people, 5.3 million young ish people are passing through. And it’s exactly, as you say, some of it is received wisdom, kids in school, where do I go for help? Well, of course you’ve got Facebook and Twitter, but you know what, there’s a lot of people at the COW that can help. And then, we see people who are then in transitional parts of their careers, as they’re moving out of say like Kylie, she moved from editorial into the technical side of management.
Tim Wilson:
So that becomes now another opportunity to learn. As we drift here, we start to see, you know, gen X boomers like me, I’m now in this category. so I represent about 3% of the COW. most of the COW is 30 years younger than me. If not more. this is something that happened organically. We didn’t do anything to target. What we tried to do was stay helpful. One of the reasons why forums were important to us back in 1995. And I say us, because again, I wasn’t part of it then, but important to the founders back in 1995 is there were other things, there was AOL, not searchable. There were email lists, not searchable. today there are Facebook groups that are terrific. we’re members of them. We have our own Facebook, so I’m not disrespecting those, but you know what, they’re not searchable. You tried to search for anything that you saw on your LinkedIn feed like a month ago, who was it? Who said that good luck finding it because those are streams and they’re fast moving and there’s no real received wisdom. we had a thread not too long ago that really jumped out to me so much so that I, saved a little vision of it here. So actually I stopped my share or at least let me start that again.
Tim Wilson:
And that is this, there was a particular thread, and it was, this, this idea. Somebody wants to have animated number countdown with commas. Okay. That’s, that’s the kind of a nerd nerdiest aspect of the COW. A lot of it is about beautiful things or about, you know, I’ve got all this VHS and beta SP footage. How am I going to archive it? So there’s a lot of, technical questions, but every now and then there’s like maximum nerdiness. And I like that too. So as I’m scrolling down, you see 2019 and you see 20, 20, 20, 21, the reason why, but I want to go back to the beginning of this threat. So let’s go back to the beginning of this thread. This thread began in,
Tim Wilson:
This thread began in 2012, 2012. Somebody asks this, this question and he’s got a problem. He wants to do a countdown from 256, 252000, with commas and decimals. Here’s the thing, software changes over time.
Blake Barnett:
That’s what I’m saying that many times, there’s this answer like changed or the different answer over
Tim Wilson:
Yeah it was updated in seven specific years. And the thing that led it to be updated and the place where I saw it back on the front page, back on the main feed of the site, the reason why I saw it on the front page was because in January of 2020, Adobe changed their Java script ending. So if you’re building new, expressions far, faster, far simpler, it’s really a very powerful update. I understand why they did it. Guess what it broke compatibility with almost every old script. So people found that they had created expressions using the techniques for the old JavaScript engine, but now had to rebuild those expressions with the new JavaScript engine. So that it’s searchable meaning..
Blake Barnett:
You got that jargen Sarah?
Sarah Marince:
What did you say?
Blake Barnett:
You got that do you understand? Are you following along?
Sarah Marince:
I mean, Yeah I’m following.
Sarah Marince:
Yeah. Not the specifics of the JavaScript per se, but the important concept here is that by having a data, searchable people find stuff. And if you search for anything about after effects about avid, about the Vinci resolve about premier pro final cut pro chances are good. That creative count is going to figure you’re high in the results because there’s fresh stuff. So Google saw this thread get sucked back up because it’s alive. There are new posts on it in 2021. So it’s not really old anymore. It’s new again, because the problem has changed, but people aren’t starting over from zero, they have this foundation to build on. So that’s how we continue to bring in young people. We also have this concept of graduation which is look at a certain point in your career. You’ve got more answers to the questions. Maybe you’re going to share those answers at the camp.
Tim Wilson:
Maybe you’re going to share them with your company, but you’re not primarily in learning mode. Now you’ve, you’ve achieved a certain level of mastery. So people like Kylie, well, this was a critical part of her learning, the skills that she learned and building the visibility that allowed her to be tapped on the shoulder by, you know, major post houses and eventually Netflix. Well, she’s not a big part of the day-to-day life of creative COW. That’s cool. That’s, what’s supposed to happen. You’re supposed to learn and move on. So, we do definitely have some people who’ve stuck around to answer your question. Like who’ve been around since the beginning. there’s a guy who’s got over 30,000 posts in the COW. He’s been there since he didn’t come at the very beginning. I think he started in 2004. and Hey, God bless him. And the other folks like him who stay around to answer, and I do want to emphasize, you know, he happens to be a him, but we have about, almost a 30%, no, almost 40%, 38% of our community is women. And we feel very strongly about that. The company was founded by a woman. Our mascot Bessie is female.
Blake Barnett:
It seems like your, your, the platform is, it seems like more, mostly post-production like other stuff.
Tim Wilson:
Yeah. Primarily posts, no doubt about it. That’s our heritage. But, our heritage is also generalists. people who are doing more than one thing using more than one product, if you’re just using Apple stuff, you can get great support at the Apple site or the avid site or whatever Adobe resolve, black magic has terrific forums. So that’s all good. The problem becomes when you try to weave them together, or now you throw in cameras. Now you throw in storage. Now you throw in archiving, not all of those guys have forums, but the questions are different depending on what you’re doing. So we have this community of hundreds, of thousands of people over the course of every year, millions of people every year who now have this pool of expertise that they can contribute to. So that becomes,
Sarah Marince:
Oh, I was going to ask. No its okay. We’ve got a question from Jake who’s suiting and Hey, Jake, what’s the revenue stream that keeps going. And is it ad supported or is there a membership cost?
Tim Wilson:
it is ad supported and I did want to talk about ads. I like the companies that we work with. we have thrown out a number of companies over the years. No need to mention them. Most of them are gone now, because they were not doing right by the community. people who were being a little unethical or maybe a little bit of Beatty and switchy, we just didn’t want to have anything to do with them. So we, we sent them packing. I don’t know what the future of trade shows is and I don’t, I’ll be curious to see what some of you think about it. But one of the things that we had seen is that especially companies like black magic Aja, Flanders, sonnet, these are all companies who are not just famous for making products, but famous for their support of membership communities.
Tim Wilson:
They do give away to user groups. They make presentations to user groups. So it was natural that they would wind up with us and others who aren’t represented on this specific page. Like, you know, Adobe and many, many others who are offering a variety of products and services to the community. Here’s the thing that we feel very, very strongly about. We hate tracking. We hate it. We’re not web people, we’re not advertising people. We are production people and we are every bit as cantankerous and uncooperative as, as all of the rest of you. We don’t like it. So we don’t do it. the tracking that we do is strictly through Google analytics. That’s the only tracking we do. And it’s only for things like telling us who’s in the, in the site by general category. So yes, I’m happy to show you a chart about what, you know, the demographic breakdown looks like, but I don’t know what, like cookie looks like. I don’t know what stuff Blake has visited in the COW. I don’t know what communities I don’t want to know. That’s not something we care about.
Blake Barnett:
It’s typically oatmeal.
Tim Wilson:
Okay Well, that’s cool. So, none of our ads do offsite tracking, so you’re not going to come to the COW and look at a DaVinci ad and maybe go to the DaVinci forum and then go to wired or, you know, whatever site that you go to for tech news or entertainment, news, you know, entertainment weekly or whatever. You’re not going to go to those sites and now see, you know, remarketing ads for something that you saw on the COW. We absolutely forbid that that’s something we do not allow our advertisers to do. So there is no tracking whatsoever. We don’t do any personal tracking. We don’t do any, our ads don’t do any tracking. And this is something that we feel very, very, very strongly about. So I am,
Blake Barnett:
That’s a new benefit, like, cause people are really don’t want their information being tracked like Facebook and Google are getting in trouble with like, you know, getting that extra 1% of their, you know, whatever you want to call that. So that’s great. All right. And your, your practice, that’s a good practice.
Sarah Marince:
I was gonna say it’s refreshing.
Tim Wilson:
Yeah. Well, and what regulators are now saying is we want you guys to, Hey, look, do all the advertising you want, but it’s like, you know my TV doesn’t know who I am, anything more than what what show I’m watching. And they’ll feed me ads based on some general thing about that show or that channel or that time of day that’s legit. And certainly one of the things that we’ve done is made sure that the only ads you won’t see ads for credit cards, you won’t see ads for luggage. You won’t see ads for Amazon prime, all the things that I own and participate in. I have credit cards. I have Amazon prime. That’s all cool, but that’s not what we do here. So there’s no nonsense ads
Blake Barnett:
What about Netflix,
Tim Wilson:
You know, if, Netflix that’s A.. Yeah. They’ve never come by and offered. So we would consider it. but I would be more interested in ads for Netflix programming. Then I would just do sign up to Netflix in general. And we actually did have a conversation with Amazon where, they had a show several years ago, when they were first getting into shows that they wanted to, consider advertising. We wound up not doing it, but it was a very positive conversation and that we would be up for maybe, but that’s, that’s a conversation worth having, but something general lifestyle, even though it’s something that like you know, somebody pitched us a business cards. Well, you know, everybody in your community has a business card. And we were like, that’s true. We don’t want ads for it. So we’ve been very aggressive curators of the experience and it’s, we feel it’s a compact that we have with our members.
Tim Wilson:
We’re not going to track you. We’re not going to give you any relevant ad. They’re going to be ads for people that you know, that you go to trade shows that you can shake their hand and you can tell them how you feel about their ads or their products and ask for new features. These are people who are engaged with the community. And what we tell our advertisers is what we’re looking for is people who are going to engage with our community to have relationships with the members of the community, not just relationships with us, but relationships with the members of the community. And so our advertisers reflect those values and look, most of the people who are left are pretty good. I, I do want to be specific that everybody that we’ve thrown out has is gone. They’re not around anymore. So, I don’t have anything negative to say about, most people and the people that are in the COW.
Tim Wilson:
I have good things to say about it because I’ve known them for a very, very long time. Black magic Asia. These people at Adobe they’ve been with the COW long before I was, and there’ll be here after I’m gone. You know, the funny thing is I was talking about, our heritage in Google and the fact that we have these threads that have been going on, you know, for, for years, we didn’t think in 1995 that we’d still be doing this 20 odd years later. We weren’t thinking about anything eternal. When we thought about our cert our, our forum results being searchable. We assumed that we were talking about a fairly short window, but in fact, it’s turned out to be a long one. So to answer the question, yes, we are ad supported. We make no bones about it, but we do feel very, very strongly about the right and the wrong way to do advertising.
Tim Wilson:
And in fact, our model is very old fashioned. We don’t need to know anything personal about you. We know what you’re interested in because you’re here and we don’t care. What other stuff you’re interested in. we’re not going to sell you a ukulele ad or a shoe ad just because you were looking at ukuleles or shoes on some other site, right. We’re not going to receive those remarketing dollars either. So we’re strictly going to keep it, high signal to noise. That’s what they’re that’s what our motto is. We want to keep the signal high, the noise low. And that includes on the advertising level. And certainly on the personal tracking, we do absolutely zero personal tracking and we never will. I know that, and we get a lot of grief for it from people who aren’t advertising with us, but want to do that kind of personal targeting. And it’s like, we’re just not interested in, and it’s not because we’re, you know, we don’t want the money. It’s because the money’s not enough to make us compromise our principles. And we, we need money to run the thing, you know, we’ve got, I showed you got, you know, tens of millions of page views over the course of the year. It’s not cheap, but
Blake Barnett:
Well, you guys don’t really have anything to prove in that way. You guys have been around for a very long time
Blake Barnett:
And you have a lot of traffic.
Blake Barnett:
Oh okay. And then typically, people want to see the metrics just to make sure that they’re getting value?
Tim Wilson:
Yeah. And we’re happy to do that. And for advertisers, we set up a custom page at Google analytics. They can, you know, have a hundred percent transparency because that’s, we care about transparency. So they don’t have to wait on us to see those answers. They can see exactly. And if they want to know how many a 25 year old women in Israel are watching on iPhones, well, Google will tell them that, but we’re not going to.
Blake Barnett:
It’s a lot. It’s a lot of work. Go ahead.
Sarah Marince:
I was going to say, What does it mean to be a COW leader?
Tim Wilson:
There are people who by their nature are, inclined to help. And so these are people who have taken some, have been willing to take on some responsibility to not only make sure that a question get answers, whether or not they’re necessarily the one to do it. Maybe they can tap the shoulder of somebody else. They know who’s in the community who can help with the answer or draw our attention to, somebody who’s behaving inappropriately. We do have a very, very snoot, few small handful of rules. no politics, no religion. That’s one reason why we’re definitely still around is because we just don’t want to hear about it. don’t want to hear about anything on either side, we are political people, religious people. It’s not something that we bring to the community. So, that’s something that has been very important to us, but also, I did want to show you this one other graphic, and this is the last graphic I’m going to show. I promise, but it’s an important one to answer this question, which is this, just pull up the screen, share control again
Sarah Marince:
Do you have any new features Launching this year that you can talk about while you’re pulling that up?
Tim Wilson:
Oh, yes, and I will definitely tell you about those. I don’t know why I can’t get to the screen share button. So give me just a second here.
Blake Barnett:
Did we lock you out?
Tim Wilson:
No, it’s my fault. Oh, there we go. There we go. I’ve got to exit. I had, I had minimized it before I was ready. So operator error and nothing but. So this is the last time that I will, do a PowerPoint graphic for you, but it’s a good one.
Blake Barnett:
Are these on your website or are these just stuff you’re pulling up from your computer?
Tim Wilson:
No. No. I just made these for, I just made these for you. So I just pulled up a report from our data center. our number one city for data passing through is London. not just because of London, but because it’s a hub for the rest of the continent, but also New York is number two. Los Angeles is three, but Frankfurt, Singapore, Chicago, and Dallas, then Hong Kong. So we have members in 200 countries and territories, and we are feeding data from all over the world. So a big part of what we do in managing the community is managing expectations. The person who’s making a post might not be speaking English as their first language. Maybe not their second, maybe their third or fourth. it’s not at all uncommon. So one of the things that our leaders do is occasionally step in to suggest that, maybe you should, remember that, you know, not everybody is speaking English.
Tim Wilson:
So don’t, don’t pump bust, people’s chops over grammar is when it comes down to. so, those are the things that leaders have helped us with. They’ve been our eyes and ears because, no small set of humans. And it is a very small set of humans. There’s four of us that work at the COW. so with a community of leaders who are, not unlike the role of say mods that, Reddit or, people who are admins at a Facebook group, that kind of thing. So there, you know, if there’s inappropriate language, they can flag that or edit it, delete those things. So they are helping out with some administrative tasks. Now you asked about, stuff that’s coming up and I’ll tell you, I, I, I, in talking about the things that we’ve done over the years, I did it again, hit the minimize button when I meant the screen share button. we had a bunch of additional services beyond the forums and some of those we continue to have, and those are things,
Tim Wilson:
in addition to forums and a way to connect to individual users. we also have, an extensive new section along with, industry news is tutorials and on a whole bunch of stuff, not just a software, but also things like, creating a podcast studio. And, Kylie was a graduate of a media program coming into the,
Tim Wilson:
2008 recession. She graduated in 2009. And so had some things to say about people graduating last year and this year into the middle of the pandemic. So, you know, there are things that we do to try to create some, some visibility for people. Jonathan Winbush is another creative COW graduate. He’s a major VR player. yeah. Also does a lot with, 3d and visual effects.
Blake Barnett:
What do you mean by. Tim? What do you mean by creative COW graduate? Is it just that they’ve been on the site for a long time or
Tim Wilson:
Now on a daily basis, early in their careers that, and are now not part of the day-to-day life, but look back on it as a part of the reason why they got where they are. So we have a lot of different things going on in tutorials. we also have people news, and is something I want to encourage all of you to do. Some of these are executive level stuff. You know, this guy is a, you know, new vice president for, you know, whatever at grass Valley, whatever. Okay, look, that’s, that’s people news, but to us, we also want to talk about, you know, colorists who are, you know, now move to a different company, or if you get an interesting project, the tattooed Torah, Oh, that’s an interesting project. Tell me more, part of the USC show program. So, you know, if you are doing anything that anybody that you want to talk about to anybody send me a note, [email protected], and let’s see what we can do about making you one of the people that we feature here.
Tim Wilson:
We feel really, really strongly about people news, because this is who we are. And not just for Hollywood. Obviously a lot of these people have, you know, worked for post houses that have PR people working for them. But again, I started in this business in the middle of nowhere, Florida and town of 8,000 people. And I feel very strongly about wherever you are in the world, whatever it is you’re doing, if it’s worth talking about, let’s tell that story to millions of people, and I want you to do that. So, there were some other things that we had as part of the COW in our previous incarnation when we were hosting our own, that was another thing. we hosted our own servers in the beginning because there were no servers that were the right size for what we were doing. We were either too big or too small for everybody.
Tim Wilson:
Well, nowadays hosts are a dime a dozen. So, you know, that was a business that we got out of in 2012, I think. so among the things that we had as part of the COW that we were bringing back is lots and lots of tutorials. Oh, this is another thing that I meant to share at YouTube. We have, 85,000 subscribers and we have, need to move this to the bottom. we have, let’s see where it is. Here we go. So, we have, 85,000 subscribers over a thousand videos, tons and tons and tons of stuff. Every, every kind of application, all different things, Photoshop after effects, audio, video, you name it, it’s here. Lot of stuff going on. Now, this is a small set of our overall videos. These are the, I want to say 1600 or so. Well, the number of full videos or full tutorials that we had was more like 10,000. Well, we haven’t brought all of those over because as I say, it was just in September that we started transitioning the forums and the news to, this new WordPress architecture. But, we also had an extensive job board, with, I want to say 10,000, job listings and services in our services directory. We also had a real gallery. We expect all of those to be coming back online and now having, the controls again
Blake Barnett:
Hey tim with the, you said you had a job board. You’re saying that’s not up right now, but you’re going to bring it back.
Tim Wilson:
It is not currently up, but we want to bring it back. We also want to do a lot more things with training. we want to build out a full career center because we know that one of the problems that people are having as we’re dealing with all of this stuff is that it’s just hard to figure out what do you do next? And how do you prepare for the next job that you want say you get out of school. and, hold on a second. Let me see if I can.
Blake Barnett:
Well, on that same, on that same note Tim, like we have an intern and that’s a big thing right now. I think like a lot of you’re getting out of college or you’d like, you do an internship and you learn as a kind of an apprenticeship style. And, and I think that’s, that makes more sense. You actually end up learning a lot more than college a lot of times, but what do you do for, what do you do for like the new people in the industry? Like what do you recommend that they check out on your site? Or you mentioned maybe starting some new programs, for kind of like..
Tim Wilson:
Some things that we’re still developing. And, I really, I don’t want to get ahead of myself. It’s not that I’m trying to be cagey it’s that I don’t want to, suggest something is coming when it’s not coming. I will tell you the biggest thing that I’ve learned is that, everything takes longer than you think
Blake Barnett:
Twice as long or more. Yeah, easily, So just like with editing, like when my editors say like, Hey, it’s going to be 40 hours. I’m like, okay. It’s 80. Or like, Oh, I’ll have it to you on Tuesday. I’ll tell the client Friday, you know, kind of thing. Cause it’s like, they’ll always take longer than they think.
Tim Wilson:
Okay so, is can one of you zoom whizzes, tell me how to bring back the control bar so I can stop my screen share.
Blake Barnett:
I think you can end it.
Tim Wilson:
Oh, I don’t know how to stop the screen share without stopping the call. And I don’t want to stop the call. and I don’t know what I did to make the toolbar go away. I hate that. Oh, there we go. Thank you. I appreciate that. So let us now..okay. There we go. And I’m no longer sharing the screen, is that correct?
Blake Barnett:
Yes. just back to us.
Tim Wilson:
Good, that’s how I wanted it. so yeah, we do have some things coming and, some of it is going to be bringing back old stuff, including the job board, and the reels gallery. I love the real gallery and I learned, always learned a lot about what people were working on, especially in the world of motion graphics, which is over my head, I will admit. so those are kind of the heart of what we’re doing, to help people who are asking or who are in the, the, part of their career, where they’re thinking about the next step. I’ll give you an example. You come out of school and you’re the person that gets hired to post videos on Facebook, right? maybe you now step up to be the person who makes those videos. What about when you want to be the person who decides which videos get made and where they get posted, maybe you want to get tied into the rest of the company’s messaging platform.
Tim Wilson:
So you want to get more directly into marketing. somebody like Kylie who came from the world of editing and wound up in the world of standards, because of her expertise and workflow, that those transitions are unpredictable career paths exist today that didn’t exist, exist five years ago. so, the thing that I recommend is coming into the forum where you are, whether it’s premier or final cut or whatever, and ask, because somebody else has gone through that. And, we, we have these conversations all through the COW all the time and some of them, right now, you know, we saw a lot of people who were in the live production business have to move inevitably into the, streaming business. So how do you transition those skills from live presentation, into streaming presentations and all of that? So it gets crazy, but, I, I know that we’re coming to the end of things. So I want to ask if there are any other questions, cause I’ve been kind of a yappy here and then
Sarah Marince:
That’s okay, no, we like it. It’s great. I mean, I was going to say for anyone tuning in, if you have a question now would be the time to drop it in the Q and a box. But I mean, I I’ve been loved everything you’re saying. one question I did want to ask is what are your thoughts on the future landscape of your industry?
Tim Wilson:
You know what, I will tell you, wow, the sun is really coming in the window now. So I’m trying to kind of get out of the hot seat here. the number one trend that I see for 2020, into 2021 working a lot harder for a lot less money. I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t like it. Don’t like it at all.
Blake Barnett:
well that’s, I think that’s a tend in our whole, society, that’s our whole trend.
Tim Wilson:
Well, yeah, but I think especially so in production, because everybody’s a poor mouthingrd. Oh, you know my budget. And we don’t know when customers are coming back and look, I don’t, I don’t mean to be a little that that is a real thing. And we, you know, we have a sponsor partners who are saying, look, you know, our we’ve got, all of our gear is sitting on a loading dock in China.
Tim Wilson:
You know, we don’t have any drives to sell right now. So we don’t want to advertise. We have no drives. Well, I sympathize with that. I mean, that’s a terrible thing. I don’t mean to make light of this even a little bit. But I think what we’re seeing is that, because everything takes longer, we’re having to teach ourselves self stuff at a faster than usual pace. Nobody who’s in this business for any length of time has failed to learn how to teach themselves. If so they are out of this business and have been for awhile now. And that’s still different. Yeah. The only thing that’s consistent
Blake Barnett:
In our industry has changed. It’s always changing. Yeah. Yeah. So this round is different. I think we’re all working harder to keep up and all having a harder time, keeping up budgets are smaller, everything’s taking longer. So I’m, I really feel for people who are trying to make a go of it, in fact, I was going to ask, how are you making a go of it? Is this okay? is it not okay? I, I would love to hear, you know, like all of you, how, how is stuff going.
Blake Barnett:
Sarah? How are things? Are things Going good for you Sarah?
Sarah Marince:
Yeah actually Voiceover 2020 was oddly a really great year with voiceover, but that’s also because a lot of companies had to do a lot of shifting and getting their message out there or whether it was commercially or internally. they were, you know, you need voiceover. So, it was good. and you know, 2020 has been too. So, and I know with a lot of other voice actors, it’s, it’s, it’s been, it’s been alright, just with kind of the shift and stuff that it was, more work kind of coming in. Yeah.
Blake Barnett:
What about you, Brian? It’s one 2020 was not fantastic, but I actually enjoyed it. Do I want it again? No, but like, I got you, we got to slow it down. We got to revisit our process or workflows, but like we had two months of like zero business and then it was scary. And then things, you know, then the third month things started picking back up because I mean, we had to tell our landlord like, Hey, we’ll play it by ear. We can pay you right now. And like, but we have a really cool landlord. and he’s like, Hey, okay, I get it, everybody else. And we’re the only one, like he actually said afterwards, like you’re the only tenant that actually paid the whole time. I was like, well, great. Like, why don’t I overpaid? Give me some money back. But yeah, I mean, we did, we did, we did fine.
Blake Barnett:
I get like a lot of our gig economy. People they’re really struggling because we, we normally rely on them for overflow, like more or like on bigger shoots. And so we really were just with our internal team and, I mean, it was a little bit of a struggle for us. We weren’t like Sarah, we weren’t busier. and like some industries got busier, like, like web development type companies that, you know, some industries that goes really nice for them, like or zoom. but for us, I mean, we took a hit, but I feel like this year we’re going to get it all back. We’re like, we’re busier than we’ve normally would be. And so for us, it’s kind of like where we’re kind of evens out, but,, I mean, it was like, I feel for all the people that really had a hard time and a much harder than we did.
Sarah Marince:
Yeah. I mean, at 2020 made it very unpredictable for so many industries and areas just cause, I mean, you didn’t know, you didn’t know what was going to happen or what was going to happen tomorrow, but, yeah. I feel like people are starting to get on the right track and you know, businesses coming back and more work is trying to happen. So it’s is all a good thing. Good. Yeah. Yeah.
Blake Barnett:
So we’re, we’re pretty much to the end. I feel like the funny thing is Tim was like, I don’t know if I have enough to talk about to fill it out. You were really
Sarah Marince:
Good. Sometimes when I see it’s going to be one person I’m like, Oh gosh, well I have to like, you know, really filler talk or like that, but and so I like when there are multiple people on the panel, but this has been great. I just kind of got to sit back and listen, which, thank you.
Blake Barnett:
We’er part of the audience. we’re just hanging out. We’re the audience.
Sarah Marince:
Yes, but to close it out, like we always do. I just have you say, if you could say your name and gamble where people can find you like on social media, the website and everything.
Tim Wilson:
I, I definitely would love to connect with folks on LinkedIn, which is still something that I do, even though I’m not looking for a job. I do enjoy connecting with people. I am at a Creative COW obviously, and my email, [email protected], always happy to hear from anybody. I, I keep a pretty low profile online. I just, I, I do a little bit of like, pictures of pets and clouds and flowers on Instagram and that’s about it. but, yeah, you’ll, you’ll find me on the usual places, at the COW and LinkedIn. So, and I would, I would truly love to hear from people. So please do get in touch [email protected] and, at LinkedIn. there’s only one of me and you’ll find me
Sarah Marince:
Awesome. Blake, do you have anything you want to say?
Blake Barnett:
Well, yeah, one or two, Sarah had technical diff I mean, Jade had second technical difficulties and she texted me and, but you could find her @jade and jaded.com and she does. I think I was assuming that she was going to put on our globe cause she does, you know, she’s, you know, into saving the planet, which is a good thing. And she does a thing called entertainment for change. and so I just want to, you know, unfortunately she, you know, computer crashed or something, on her end, which is, you know, it happens. and okay, so for me, I’m, Blake and I, with my partner, we run BLARE Media, which is a production company and we also run shoots.video, which is a production community similar but way different than Creative COW.
Sarah Marince:
Cool. Awesome. And as always I’m Sarah Marince, you can find me at sarahmarince.com and on Instagram at Sarah Marince. And thank you again, Tim. This was great. And I hope everyone has a great rest of your Cinco de Mayo. Go eat some tacos now. Awesome. Thanks everyone.
Outro:
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