Will Holllywood figure out how to use the Internet to generate the big bucks? You have to go way, way down this Fast Company article to find much revenue to speak of. As comedians like Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, and Michael Cera start production companies to develop and sell original content to digital distributors like Yahoo!, Hulu, and Netflix, they’re finding (as any publisher could tell you) that buyers in this new medium just don’t pay that much.
Stiller’s Red Hour Digital is making money, but so far almost all of it is coming from product placements. Unless he sells his equity stake to some digital behemoth, Stiller will hardly get anything like the $20 million he commands for a single movie anytime soon. And when he does, it’ll likely come the old-fashioned way, as Paramount’s InSurge division, which has a first-look deal with Red Hour, plans to sell the first three seasons of Stiller’s on-line series Burning Love to international TV markets.
Good News from the Sustainability Front (Foreign Affairs)
Some 153,000 square miles of the Brazilian Amazon has disappeared since 1988 — an area larger than Germany. But deforestation rates have slowed dramatically, in part because of a controversial international climate-change prevention strategy known as REDD, short for “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation.” REDD puts a monetary value on the carbon stored in forests and then has developed countries offset their emissions by paying developing countries to protect their own forests. Preliminary results suggest the REDD model can be a cheap way to produce quick results. Brazil has used the funds (well, at least some of them) to enforce land-use regulations, create new protected areas, and maintain the rule of law — reducing its rate of deforestation by 83% since 2004.
More Bang for the Health Insurance Buck (Stanford)
A new study from a trio of Stanford researchers argues that people with chronic illnesses should be charged more than healthier people for health insurance. Why? To steer them toward the less-expensive HMO option. People with chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease, the study found, were the least likely to opt for HMOs, in the belief that what they needed was control over their choice of doctors. But they’re the people most likely to benefit from HMOs, which provide the kind of coordinated care their conditions require. Not only does that care cost less, it produces better results since HMO doctors are less likely to work at cross-purposes and more likely to provide a well-thought-out course of treatment.
Inquiring Minds
How Millennial Are You? Take the Quiz (Pew Research Center)
Who Really Invented the Smiley Face? (Smithsonian)
The Case Against Reviving Extinct Species (National Geographic)