Week of August 25, 2008

Social Networking: It Ain't Easy

Friday, August 29, 2008

Yahoo, which owns probably the largest unofficial social network in the world with their Yahoo Groups platform, along with similar social networks included in Flickr and Yahoo Messenger, still can't seem to get the whole big picture social network correct. It's first attempt was Yahoo 360, which was a full blown social network that was poorly connected to Yahoo Groups and Yahoo profiles. After that failed, Yahoo tried again with an even lesser known product called Yahoo Mash. Now, Yahoo Mash members have been informed that Mash is closing.

This is instructive in the difficulty in building a social network, even when you have massive online traffic and built-in networks of fans already, but it is also an indicator to just how poorly Yahoo has been doing at integrating its suite of category-leading products. If Yahoo were able to just move a portion of their Flickr, Yahoo Groups, and Yahoo messenger users to an integrated social network, it would almost immediately be on the scale of Facebook and Myspace. The large number of executive defections, the Microsoft unsolicited offer, and several other things indicate seem to indicate that this failure is more due to Yahoo than the concept, but still--it's clear that building a compelling social network is not easy.

Internet To Surpass Radio Worldwide

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Internet advertising reached a milestone in the US last year when its revenue surpassed that of radio, $22 billion to $21 billion. Now it appears that the same thing is about to take place worldwide. The Carat Group, a media communications company predicts that this year Internet will garner 8.6% of worldwide advertising revenue (up from 7.3% last year). Radio's revenue is expected to drop a hair, from 7.5% to 7.4%, pushing it down to #4 on the list of most popular advertising media. TV still ranks #1 with over 41% and print is second with about 16%

Fox To Stream TV Shows For College Students

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Fox, having discovered that a disproportionate number of its online viewers are from colleges, has decided to play to that audience. The network has decided to stream two of its premiers, Fringe and Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles, this year, live over the Internet simultaneously with their on-air broadcast, to anyone with a .edu email address. The rest of the world will not be far behind. Both shows will be available on demand after midnight the night of their over the air broadcast.

NBC Olympics Online Revenue Tiny

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

As reported yesterday, NBC can point to a successful Olympics on many levels. Although there were the usual complaints about some events that were delayed for prime time, NBC tended to get high marks for the amount of coverage across various platforms. Also,

Overall, financially, it was also a big success. The network made a report $100 million profit on $1 billion dollars in ad revenue. However, many commentators have noted that the revenue generated from the online portion of the coverage was barely in excess of $5 million. While that number is just a tiny part of the overall revenue, it also seems true that it didn't come at the expense of TV revenue. This means that the issue in the future will not be turning actual dollars into virtual cents, but making a stronger sales effort in the online arena.

NBC Online Olympics Coverage Smashes All Records

Monday, August 25, 2008

NBC's TV coverage of the 2008 Summer Olympics dominated the ratings and set all time viewing records on the US. But the network's online coverage also set a few records. In fact, the online page views and video streams were more than double the total for 2004, according to the New York Times.

This means that NBC, which offered more than 2200 hours of coverage online, as well as multiple channels of HD coverage of live and recorded-for-prime-time events, did not suffer cannibalization of its TV ratings by offering love and on-demand video on its website. In fact, anecdotal evidence shows that the two platforms complemented one another very well, enabling enthusiastic viewers to have with multiple viewings of the same events.

The biggest implication for the future is how Internet rights will be handled in the future. Odds are that, in future Olympics negotiations, Internet rights will be a separate deal from TV rights, possibly including two different rights holders.