Andrew Klass: "Why do we need a crowd?"

Andrey Klass ( ankl ) is the director of the NTV channel site and the creator of the re: vision project.

The management of the site of one of the country's leading television companies implies not only greater responsibility: in this work, you must simultaneously be an Internet professional and take into account the specifics of the “offline” media. On the specifics of the work, about the features of NTV.ru and the promotion of traditional media on the Internet, Andrei tells in this interview.


NTV site - time consuming project? Many people work in your team?
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No, only 14 people. If we consider that half of them are editors, it turns out that not so much. There is a programmer, coder, animator, flash programmer, designer, technical designer. These people are enough to perform the tasks that we set ourselves.

Attendance is big?

It is difficult to say ... If I am not mistaken, about 200 thousand a week. The fact is that I don’t follow this indicator especially: the number of visitors is not so important. For us, the quality of the audience is more important - and it is for her that we make all these videos, widgets ...

And the “quality audience” is who?

This refers to the target audience with a certain level of income (above average) ... According to the ratings prepared by Gallup Media, the audience of NTV airtime is adults, men with incomes above the average level. The main product is being prepared for this audience, so there is a lot of news and crime in the program grid.

On the NTV TV audience, we count on the Internet. Our goal is to draw her attention to the air. We make the site not for those who do not know about the channel; NTV website was not created to attract an additional audience. We work for those who watch TV; on the site they can see what they may have missed, announcements of future programs, broadcasting schedule, etc.

But is it possible for the thousands of visitors who come to the site every day to identify the percentage of "high-quality audience"?

No, to be honest - not real, because we simply do not conduct surveys on this topic. All this is revealed indirectly: we can talk about the number of people using our services. These services are designed for our audience using modern technology, able to pay for a normal Internet. It is known that the site is viewed both from a mobile phone and from pocket computers; It is known that many people use RSS, download podcasts ... From all this, one can conclude that a certain amount of “quality audience” is 30-40%.

For this audience we make, for example, a widget: the work on its second version is now being completed. At first they wanted to do on flash, but Apple does not support flash. As a result, Windows will have a full version, and for Mac OSX it will be somewhat trimmed.

And the change of the podcasting site — from rpod.ru to the iTunes Store — is also caused by targeting a high-quality audience?

No, in fact, we initially posted video podcasts in the iTunes Store. Rpod.ru is more likely for those people who do not use iTunes. When there was an opportunity to be placed there, we used it, but in general, the statistics of Rpod.ru is too small compared to the iTunes Store.

Although the latter also has problems: for example, it is impossible to place a podcast if the file is located abroad, so you have to keep the RSS through Feedburner.

What other sites are used to distribute content?

Dirty.ru. :)

We do not have a task to use any third-party resources for promotion, therefore we work only with those services that are themselves interested in working with us.

Rambler, for example, offered to publish NTV video news on Vision - but we refused. It seems to me that this is a kind of dead-end branch of development - to publish your news on other people's websites, because there is no traffic generation here. The correct concept is with Yandex.News: they publish a headline and an announcement, and the user, if he is interested in learning more, goes to the “parent” site.

Video is another matter: we are interested in video news being broadcast on third-party sites in the format in which it is convenient for us. Therefore, the possibility of publishing on Dirty.ru, Liveinternet, LJ was made: on these sites a normal video player with the NTV logo appears, with the possibility of switching to the site.

It turns out that in RuNet it is almost impossible to find sites where you can “hook” the desired NTV audience?

The audience is normal on most sites. I do not take into account blogs on Mail.ru, Rambler or something like that. The audience is interesting to us if it is interested in our product.

The size of the audience, ratings - this is generally a slippery thing. “I have so many users, that's why I'm cooler” - a strange philosophy: if the response from 10 visitors is more than 100, then why is this hundred needed? On Habré and Dirty the audience is much smaller than in LiveJournal, but it is interesting to achieve some specific goals: people are adequate, there is a normal dropout system. There is a crowd, there is an organized meeting. Why do we need a crowd?

If the widest audience was interested in NTV, then we would start making cartoons, entertaining talk shows, and the NTV team would engage in attracting new masses, but we are not independent in this regard.

That is, the site is not included in the development strategy of the channel?

Well, why - it’s inscribed, it’s just that it’s not yet a tool to achieve certain goals. At the moment, it performs a purely service function, not being an independent media, which has some strategic plans, etc. Our strategic plan is to support the broadcast.

Is there a desire to bring the site to the "new heights"?

The management periodically thinks about it. But ... Each team performance indicator is a result, for example, profit. NTV is important profit. Those revenues that we can receive through the Internet are too small compared to what the television company receives from the air. There is not a single site that can argue with the TV channel in terms of audience coverage and profit - this is a fact. If the Internet direction starts to bring substantial income, of course, a business plan will be written and it will be clear where and how to develop. Now it is not interesting. After 5 years, maybe ...

Through the website it is enough just to establish feedback with visitors. In the case of NTV.ru, one could try, for example, commenting on news and podcasts. So far, I have met a rather interesting section - ordering tickets for recording television programs. Any further steps in this direction are planned?

Of course, NTV.ru does not stand still and we plan to increase the number of services for visitors. It is difficult to say whether commenting on the news will be open: comments are a rather subjective thing. We can not control commenting, but a certain percentage of crazy still exist. It is better not to add this opportunity than to introduce a deliberately controversial and hardly necessary.

We have a forum in the end; an inquiring mind will find it and write something there.

This is not Web 2.0!

Web 2.0 is a good thing, people like it, so we will follow this path. But in general, this is a rather strange concept.

NTV.ru has RSS - is it Web 2.0? I think not. There is video publishing on third-party sites - and this is also not Web 2.0, it’s just a service. There are technologies, a set of services that make up the concept of "Web 2.0" - but individually they can not be denoted by this term.

Web 2.0 is something social, interest clubs with the n-th number of participants who can share information with each other using some service functions. NTV does not have a task for people to exchange information through the site; NTV's task is to give people information in a convenient way. If you need elements of Web 2.0, we will implement them for the convenience of users.

People absolutely differently define this concept for themselves. For some, Web 2.0 is a pop-up divich, gradients, for someone it's a complex system like Google. Google can be called a “Web 2.0 project”, because there are a huge number of services, they are all intertwined - and users can not leave Google, getting all the necessary information. The rest most often just use some elements. We have, for example, the site of the program “Their morals”, on which a flash-card used to be hung; it marked the places where the shooting took place. Creating this map is a time consuming process, so we just took Google Maps. It is better, it is more convenient for everyone.

Can podcasts be considered “webdwantsal”? If yes - well, we use the concept of Web 2.0, but still it’s just a service.

In RuNet, this is a funny situation: they took this new concept in their own way and began to directly copy Western websites, all sorts of bookmarks. It is logical, of course, that you should not “reinvent the wheel”; YouTube, for example, proved that video is most convenient to watch in flash. We can upload video news in a variety of formats, but why? Flash installed on all.

We do not have any special innovations, we are just the only ones in something. We are the only among Russian TV channels who make podcasts, who normally distribute video. We distribute our main product - and we make the main stake on it. Its quality will improve, new sorting options will appear, search, for example ...

And copying Western ideas is generally normal, what do you think?

It depends on what project ... I would be glad if someone could copy Google. Yandex is trying, but not yet working; What are they missing - servers?

Why no one has copied MySpace yet? Apparently, because this is a purely American project.

I just would not be interested in copying personally. If we are already engaged in the creation of similarities of sites, it is necessary that there be some kind of "trick" on the new site - and then it will find its audience.

Are there any websites or websites in the West that you could call an example for yourself, the best or the like?

A super site is probably the BBC site. Although I never focused on him when working with NTV: it’s foolish to navigate the West, we have a channel for Russia.

In most cases in the West, the site operates on a par with the ether, i.e. it is not a continuation, a means, a tool for attracting an audience to the on-air “picture”. The general with the channel at the western site is a brand and an editorial policy, that's all. There is a media carrier, we have - while the tool.

Because of the narrowness of the audience?

Yes. This is the main reason for which we can not "rise."

Channel 2 has a few Internet projects (TK Russia), but all their visitors are not the channel's audience: they come to the site for information from online media, the site gets some kind of profit. NTV is uninteresting.

NTV has enough money.

In general - yes, enough.

Russia has many projects, but they are unlikely to ever unite into a super-network, into a kind of information portal. And now there is a blurring of the brand - and it is not clear why a person should watch the air when he can read everything on the site.

We are trying to go the other way: we are trying to support. If a person for some reason could not watch the broadcast, he can turn on the computer and see; he can do it on the way to work, standing in a traffic jam or somewhere else.

There is the concept of prime-time, when the most expensive advertising is spinning, when the most interesting films are shown. Why? Because at this moment, the TV - the most viewers. With the help of the Internet, we can somewhat push the boundaries of prime time.

A good headline is “Pushing the boundaries of television.”

It is loud ... Rather, it is: we help television, using modern technology, to acquaint the user with what we can give him.