Disconnect Between TV Execs and Their Teen Viewers
TV execs are in trouble. The writer’s strike has helped to reduce the number of people not viewing TV. In some cases, these people may have gotten a life or, like me, they figured squandering their precious waking hours on watching TV content over the Internet is much better than a real life.
As mentioned in this month’s issue of AdAge, one network having a really hard time is the CW. They are so desperate to keep their viewers on TV vs. the Internet that they have pulled the content of one of their most popular shows, Gossip Girl, from the net. For those of you who have not seen the show, it is about the usual mix of beautiful teenage girls and guys attending a high-price high school in New York whose biggest problems revolve around having too much money, too little to do and obsessed with the high school pecking order. All of the characters fear and slavishly follow the web posts of the school’s anonymous rumormonger known only as Gossip Girl.
For a show that is marketed to the tween and teenage set and that uses a gossip web site as a plot device, you would assume the TV execs would have created the show so that it could make money online. But they didn’t. Worse is that this show is the pitch-perfect content for the Internet, and the execs still don’t know how to make money online for it. It just shows that many TV execs are sooooooooo not ready for the Internet.
Any business plan for a TV show that forces its most treasured viewers to completely shift out of their preferred habit of watching on the net to waste time hunting for their show on TV is not going to work. The viewers just will not be happy, and they can easily find what they want elsewhere.
The best part about TV on the Internet is that it is like TiVo for the lazy. You watch what you want when you want. If I can’t find a show streaming from the TV network’s web site, then chances are good that you can find an illegal copy on YouTube. And the CW will make even less money on an illegal copy of YouTube than they would on streaming the content from their own site.
Tags: AdAge, CW, Gossip Girl, TV