What many media companies do not understand about the audience

Tai Ahmad-Taylor (Ty Ahmad-Taylor) is the founder and CEO of FanFeedr, a custom sports news service. Prior to that, he was senior vice president of product strategy and development at Viacom, and before that at Comcast.

I worked in two large cable TV networks. And both believed, and continue to believe, that they work in the television business.
It seems logical, but the problem is that this is not true. And so everywhere in the media industry. Most companies are confident that their business is distributing content through certain channels. Such a misunderstanding often leads to a weak strategy and its useless implementation. (Read on, I'll give you fresh examples).

If you produce television shows, movies, or music, your business is an audience. The same goes for books, magazines, newspapers. Michael J. Wolf, former president of MTV Networks, described the problem in a conversation with me: “The television company is a question of the brand and what to show. Look at networks like Syfy, Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon. They are not without reason. ”
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The TV distribution business is the domain of distributors: cable networks, satellites and optical fiber. In contrast, the business audience is built on how to recruit as many people as possible who will watch certain content and then make money either through direct pay-per-view or by hanging the content with advertising.

In short, the television business is based on audience reach and frequency of viewing: how many people watch a show, and how often they watch it.

In trade, you open the store as close as possible to the buyer. A similar strategy of one source is applied by most media companies. I repeated this comparison endlessly while working for my former employers. We spent a lot of time building a single radiant brand temple in Paukipsi in New York State, while most of our customers were on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, on Ginza in Tokyo, on Bond Street in London.

The main misconception was that we needed to own a buyer in our “land”, because only in this way could we control its consumption. But when you are a content producer, who in essence is most media companies, you need to think about the content, and not about controlling the way the consumer gets to the content.

Moreover, the most valuable piece is not the banners around the video, but all the ads that are “embedded” in the video, or embedded in the video player on top of it. The viewer is watching what the proprietary player is showing, this small piece of code that downloads and plays the video. He will easily reproduce it on any third-party site.

The obvious way to grow a media company is to actively pursue a consumer where he is used to grazing. (And what is the Fifth Avenue of digital content? Of course, social networks. Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have more visits per month, per day, per year than any media site.)

Yes, of course, many companies use the opposite approach - they introduce fees where they never existed, complicating access to their content, creating new barriers for consumption where there were few. In this strategic miscalculation, companies of all stripes are guilty: The New York Times (also my former employer) introduces paid access to most of its content, most cable network shows are almost impossible to watch on the network legally, and for a fee on iTunes - please, movies in the spread of the network, and Sony has developed a whole concept of "digital lock".

All this is a bad idea. Literally this week was another example: Warner Bros. We decided to show our DVDs via Netflix. Such a decision will narrow the audience of Warner Bros. films as soon as they leave cinemas.

If you do not take into account Hulu, then it is almost impossible to find examples of sound strategy. Another rare exception is one of the smallest broadcast networks - CW. In 2007-2008, this company refused to show the last five episodes of its little hit “Gossip Girl” on its website. She made it possible to view them only through iTunes. As a result, CW discovered that the site had lost traffic, and the overall potential audience had declined.

CW tried to get everyone to move to Spookies. Now she shows the series simultaneously on the air and on the network, recognizing that the audience is interested in content, not in the distribution channel. At a time when the company was experimenting, showing the series only on TV, the number of illegal views increased by 45%.

Distributing content across real-time channels — and even to the detriment of existing tracks — is not just the right way. Time will tell that this is the only way. The key point that media companies need to keep in mind: the value of a consumer who is not watching your product is zero.

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Translator's note.
See additional materials on this topic:
To hell with your site! We must use someone else's sites.
Using Twitter as a distribution channel
How do the media use Twitter? (Review of Western media practices.)
How can content producers benefit from pirates?