Week of February 12, 2007

DVR surprise

Friday, February 16, 2007

Much to everyone's surprise, a new Nielsen study shows that DVR owners are not skipping past all the commercials. Users are time-shifting a lot of the programs that they watch (roughly 50%), but they don't always skip over the commercials. The data shows that about 40% of the commercials that could be skipped aren't.

This has major implications for the TV industry, which, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, is about to switch from program ratings to commercial ratings. Other nuggets uncovered in the analysis are that the most-watched commercials are the last commercials in a break, followed by the first one. Furthermore, anecdotal research indicates that some people like some of the commercials and look forward to watching them again and again.

When Desperation Is Good

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Yesterday we mentioned how a recent Borrell & Associates study showed that local newspaper sites generate more video revenue online than television sites. How can that be? This is a question we are often asked: How come the newspaper industry was so aggressive on carving out an Internet presence and moving their business model online?

The answer is simple desperation. While radio and television can point to incremental losses in listening and viewing, the number of people using those media hasn't dropped much at all. Newspapers, however, have faced disastrous drops in readership. Their only real option was to move online.

In this case, the desperate straits that newspapers found themselves in has thus far been a blessing in disguise--th ey are far ahead of radio and television in both generating traffic and revenue from local business via their websites.

Radio Does Video?

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Today's New York Times discusses how radio is moving online with multimedia and video offerings. While this is certainly a way for radio to expand into the true multi-media experience of the web, a much more sophisticated strategy is necessary.

A recent report from Borrell & Associates illustrated how providing video on to your website just isn't enough. In their report, they showed that newspapers pull in more local video advertising revenue than television sites. The reason has little to do with television being worse with video than newspapers or newspapers embracing video; it has everything to do with a content strategy that embraces video as part of a wider solution.

Nielsen Goes to College

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Starting later this year, Nielsen will begin including university students who live on campus in their sample. To this point, these people have been excluded as not being permanent residents, while students who lived off-campus could be chosen.

This has led to a significant under-representation of young viewers in Nielsen's results. Obviously, the lack of on-campus students reduced the real number of eyeballs that were available to watch and contribute to the ratings of programs in a given market.

According to a recent New York Times article, as a result of the change, a number of cable networks are expecting a big change. Networks and shows that target TV's coveted young demos expect to show substantial increases in both ratings and revenue as a result of this change. Next up for all the ratings services should be solving the cell-phone only problem.

Big change at the LA Times

Monday, February 12, 2007

Two weeks ago the Los Angeles Times made a startling confession. In a self-published article they admitted that their web site was not up to the paper's own standards. Recognizing the importance of the web in maintaining a reputation as a major news outlet, the paper admitted in its own report that, "As a news organization, we are not Web-savvy, if anything, we are Web-stupid."

But besides just being a confessional, this announcement included a commitment by the Times publisher to turn the web site into a priority. In fact, he stated that they would henceforth look at the web site as the primary vehicle for delivery of up-to-date news, recognizing that "the paper" will eventually be relegated to the background. This is another example of how the newspaper business is being forced to change their business model to meet audience tastes that have changed faster than the media outlets themselves.

For Times web users, that will mean more breaking news on the home page and more in-depth local coverage online. I'm betting that it will also mean that one of the online edition of one of the biggest newspapers in America will finally decide to that some of their users might want to see the stock market results on the home page.