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Social media needs its own content ID

We need a better way to track social media content.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the trajectory of content on social media - particularly the inability to properly track how far a piece of content actually travels online.

While I’m thinking about it mostly from the music industry's perspective, it’s an idea that affects creators everywhere - that we’re able to track what might only be a fraction of the total audience consuming our content on social.

As a result, social media could really benefit from its own content ID system.

This newsletter highlights:

  • Why social media needs its own form of content ID

Let’s dive in ⬇️ 

What is content ID?

When it was first introduced, YouTube’s Content ID functionality was groundbreaking and immediately helped solve a huge need. According to Google, “Content ID is YouTube’s automated, scalable system that helps copyright owners to identify YouTube’s videos that include content they own.”

It’s essentially YouTube’s internal system for recognizing and identifying content and attributing that content back to specific owners. YouTube’s Content ID system helps its creators monetize their content as well as allows YouTube to keep track of how that content is being used.

In many ways, it’s similar to the metadata of a song, particularly the ISRC code. An ISRC code is a unique code or number assigned to every song released on streaming services that helps track the earnings and royalties associated with that song as well as the number of streams.

The problem

We all know we’re in a content-driven world (especially the entertainment industry and particularly music) - content is a big focus of marketing and promoting music. With how much emphasis the entire music industry places on creating and distributing content (not just music videos but short-form content, memes, etc), it’s fascinating that there’s no real way of tracking the true trajectory of individual pieces of content despite so much effort being made to create them.

For example, how can you tell how far something organic really travels? Let’s say an artist posts a piece of content on their Instagram to promote their music. One can look at that artist’s tagged posts as well as other videos using the sound (official or original) on Instagram, however it’s very difficult to tell how many other pages reposted that same piece of content.

How do you know what accounts, if any, are reposting your content if they don’t tag you?

The same concept applies to paid campaigns - let’s say an artist is running a meme campaign to promote their song.

It’s easy to see the pages you’re paying to promote your content, but how do you know how far your content really travels beyond that?

For all you know there’s a random Instagram account with millions of followers in another country posting it and if they don’t tag you (even if they do it can be hard to see), it’s almost like it never happened because it’s so hard to be aware of.

It’s kind of a funny thing - so much time, energy, and money is invested into creating content and putting it out into the world, but we are really only able to track a fraction of it based on a few metrics like comments, tags, etc.

The same idea applies to every type of creator - creators can track the trajectory of their content on YouTube in one place because all of the views accumulate on a single upload however once you start trying to track the trajectory of content on social media it becomes very challenging.

Partly because there’s no system in place but also because there are so many different platforms…each with its own guidelines, rules, algorithms, etc.

What does a solution potentially look like?

Hear me out though…if there was a content ID for social media content, what might it look like? It’s a complex and challenging thing to create (and truthfully may not be possible) but it’s interesting to think about.

Maybe it looks something like this:

  1. A platform (let’s call it XYZ) is created that becomes the official destination for assigning metadata to content - video content is uploaded to that website and as part of the upload, a unique code is assigned to that video file for tracking purposes.

All the major social media platforms integrate and use that platform (IG, X, Facebook, YouTube, etc) for reporting purposes.

  1. Anytime a creator wants to post a fresh piece of content on social media, they upload it to XYZ to “register it” and create the metadata. The creator then posts to social media.

  2. Anytime that piece of content is used on any of the social media websites registered with XYZ, it attributes back to that initially registered piece of content by identifying visual elements in the video, duration, and audio.

  3. The creator can log into the account they made on XYZ, click on release upload, and view the analytics, by social media platform on how that content performed. Some potential metrics could be:

  • Total views on each platform (aggregated by posts using that content)

  • Links to posts using that content

  • Total comments

  • Total shares

This particular solution might be impossible but there is a gap in the marketplace for something to help track the trajectory and journey of content. Being able to understand the full picture would help every single creator in the world make more informed decisions and understand how far their content is going.

Feel free to reply to this email and let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

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