CLIP Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens

During the Super Bowl last Sunday, Alec Baldwin appeared in an ad for Hulu, which shows TV programs online.

By RANDALL STROSS

Published: February 7, 2009

SUBSCRIBERS to print newspapers have gone missing, as everyone knows. Book publishers are also wondering where readers have disappeared to.

And yet television stands out as the one old-media business with surprising resilience. Though we are spending a record amount of time online, including a record amount of time watching video, we are also watching record amounts of very old-fashioned television, according to Nielsen Media Research. Our attachment to the medium, of course, is obscured by the splintering of our attention across so many cable offerings, in addition to the major networks.

Why is the newspaper business losing readers at an accelerated rate while television viewership is stronger than ever? Here’s a speculative idea: A tipping point has been passed in the competition between print and screen that has been under way since the beginnings of broadcast TV and now continues with video and other media.

Consumers are increasingly avoiding newspapers — and books, too — because the text mode is now used so infrequently that it can feel like a burden. People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention.

The video mode has been reinforced by the rise of YouTube. In December, almost 100 million viewers in the United States watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos, according tocomScore. Tellingly, YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership — it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen.

As enamored as advertisers are with the interactive potential of digital advertising, they know that online is a complement to offline, not its replacement. “With television, it’s easier to get a large audience in one fell swoop,” said Shane Ankeney, an executive with the advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day.

Consider that the average American household consists of 2.7 persons and contains 2.9 television sets, in front of which we sit for record-setting spells, according to Nielsen figures. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, the typical American watched 142 hours of television monthly, up about five hours from the same quarter the previous year. Internet use averaged more than 27 hours monthly, an increase of an hour and a half, according to Nielsen.

We are so smitten with screens that we often can’t bear to choose one over another: 31 percent of Internet use occurs while we’re in front of a TV set. We are also taking an interest in watching video on our phones: 100 million handsets are video-capable.

You now hear talk in the advertising trade of our “three screens”: television, the Internet and mobile devices. When I asked representatives of major ad agencies about how they chose the optimal mix of media for clients, I was led back, again and again, to television. That’s not just because it remains the one place where an advertiser can gather a truly mass audience for a single commercial message, but also because it provides what advertisers call an “immersive experience.”

We used to speak of reading a book as an immersive experience, too, but “immersive” now seems shorthand for “video on a screen.”

We can also see how the expansion of screen culture entails more than just moving text from a printed page to a screen. It also means less text, more video, less reading and more watching, online or offline.

Television is not wholly recession-proof. As results for the fourth quarter come in, we’ll see ugly numbers. The Walt Disney Company reported its earnings last week, and the news was nothing but bad for ABC, whose operating income dropped significantly because of lower ad revenue. But this seems to be more a result of the disappearance of car dealership advertising in local TV markets than permanent abandonment of the medium by national brand advertisers. .

Advertisers follow viewers wherever they happen to be. Online, of course, the healthiest category of advertising is search-related. Google’s revenue, most of which comes from search, was $21.8 billion in 2008, up 31 percent from 2007.

But once that special case is put aside, online advertisers have a stark choice: The first option is placing display ads at very inexpensive rates, thanks to an overabundance of supply, but these disappear in the vast ocean of the Web: some 4.5 trillion display ads were shown to United States Internet users in 2008, according to comScore.

Or advertisers can use ads that resemble television commercials and match those to the online content that most resembles television — because it actually is television programming. Hulu, which was created by NBC and Fox, offers many TV shows online and had a 57 percent increase in viewership in the last six months of 2008.

Greg Kahn, a senior vice president for the advertising agency Optimedia International, said news Web sites must sell their advertising space at low rates because “you can get news anytime, anywhere.” Hulu, on the other hand, commands rates that are higher per thousand viewers than those paid for the same programming offline, he said.

“Online, the amount of professionally produced video is limited,” Mr. Kahn said.

MARKETERS often cite a quote generally attributed to John Wanamaker, the pioneer department store merchant: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In the absence of hard data on how many people actually saw an ad in predigital times, advertisers were willing to give print media the benefit of the doubt. That’s no longer the case.

Even if print media could give advertisers all the metrics they desired, they would still struggle to hold on to readers who are required to, well, read. Or perhaps that requirement can be eased. Last week, HarperCollins released its first “video book,” a presentation by the author Jeff Jarvis about his just-published book, “What Would Google Do?” The downloadable, unabridged audio version of the book runs nine hours and costs $27.99, a bargain compared with the video, which is only 23 minutes and costs $9.99.

An audible book, however, requires the listener to mentally visualize the narrative. A video, even if no more visual than an author facing the camera, offers the appealing prospect of relief from such heavy lifting.

In screen culture, video rules.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

CLIP MySpace Begins Monetizing Music Videos With Impressive Results

by Jason Kincaid on February 6, 2009

In an effort to monetize the growing number of music videos on its site, MySpace has just launched a new pilot advertising initiative that places attractive overlays at the bottom of some clips, allowing users to buy the song they’re listening to or immediately jump to the artist’s homepage.

The new initiative stems from MySpace’s partnership with Auditude, a content detection and management company that can identify copyrighted content and serve relevant advertising, even on user-submitted video. Now Auditude is applying the technology to music videos, which in the past have largely relied on banner ads and static text links to music stores for monetization.

On Wednesday the site, in a partnership with Warner Music Group, placed an overlay ad on a video for My Chemical Romance’s cover of Desolation Row. Users were presented with the option to buy the song either on Amazon, or (in an interesting twist) on a vinyl disc. Over the 24 hours that the ad ran it posted an impressive 1.2% click-through-rate (significantly higher than rates seen on typical banner ads), encouraging MySpace and Auditude to expand the program to more videos. Today the site began displaying advertising on U2’s new single Get On Your Boots, with plans to expand the program more broadly in the near future.

Much of the overlay’s success probably stems from the fact that it doesn’t look too much like an ad - it actually shows informative content like the album the song came from, the year it was released, and a link to the artist’s profile. I wouldn’t say I like having it there, but MySpace could have done a lot worse. And frankly in the current economic climate it’s encouraging when companies can find advertising methods that actually work without being ridiculously annoying.

YouTube launched a similar program three weeks ago, allowing content owners to insert overlays for products into their videos (MySpace’s overlays are significantly more attractive, but they both serve the same purpose). YouTube wouldn’t provide any exact numbers, but a representative confirmed that in general the site has seen significantly improved clickthrough rates when ads are embedded in videos themselves, as opposed to appearing in surrounding banner ads.

CLIP ReadWriteWeb Guide to Following The Grammys

The music industry and the Web industry have always had a contentious relationship. But it's hard to resist the drama of awards. This Sunday, the music world will be focused on the 51st annual Grammy Awards, the annual recognition of artistic achievement in music. And the Web is sure to be chock full of opinions and criticism about the final choices. We've worked to grab some resources to help you get the most out of the event, no matter what your musical tastes.

Sponsor

For the basics, you can peruse the official Grammy site. It feels dated (and we're slightly confused by the poll "sponsored by Waste Management") but it's up-to-date on all of the Grammy info. And for as low-tech as the site looks, they have released a Grammy iPhone app.

Fortunately, we found some beautiful and compelling content buried beneath the surface: artist tag clouds. While they might not be entirely accurate, they're still an interesting - and artistic - visualization of the musician's work.

If you're interested in a little more interaction, you can follow TheGRAMMYs on Twitter where they're retweeting Grammy mentions and sharing trivia. Or you can always tune in to see what the Twitter crowd is saying about the event.

Given its predilection toward musicians, you'd expect MySpace to be a veritable treasure trove of Grammy info. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Apart from an official Grammy page and Katy Perry's call for videos to show during the CBS broadcast there's little beyond individual artists mentioning their nominations. Although something tells us the users Grammy and Grammys are getting irregularly high page views as of late.

Not to be outdone, Facebook is offering two Grammy-oriented areas, the official 51st Grammys page and the page for the Recording Academy.

Rolling Stone has ongoing Grammy coverage. If you're interested in their take, see their Grammy predictions or take your turn with prognostication and fill out your Grammy ballot. If you're into the new artists, the LA Times has a write up on the nominations for Best New Artist. Or, if you're interested in a more cutting-edge perspective, reading Spin's predictions might be more your speed.

For some history, Time has gathered videos of the Top 10 Grammy Moments. Or spend some time with a beautiful infographic detailing who the music industry has rewarded with Grammys throughout history.

Finally, if the awards themselves don't provide enough drama, you might want to dig into the accusations about song stealing. Currently, there's the ongoing Coldplay-Satriani saga and recent allegations of Bruce Springsteen stealing tunes from KISS. (Yes, you read that right.)

For many, the Grammys aren't half as interesting as other artists who receive far less recognition. So if you're interested in finding some new tunes, why not thumb through some of the music services ReadWriteWeb has reviewed recently? Check out our tips on music recommendation services or take a look at the 50 most blogged about albums from 2008.