MTV developing ‘hyper-programmed’ online verticals
Steve Safran November 28th, 2006
This is exactly what programmers should be doing: MTV networks is going deep into niches by developing 20+ websites. Each site focuses on a different audience - and each will have its own URL. In addition to several different music sites, there will be sites that focus on games, dance, entertainment and personal development. Local stations can learn from this. Rather than making people come to a “master site” and dig around, you should be developing micro-sites that focus on niche markets. As long as they are using and sharing your content, what do you care what the URL is? Make the content fun, useful and easy to find. Says Brian Graden, president of entertainment for the MTV Networks Music Group, “The one thing that we do know is that these do not represent television on the Web… It’s all about aggregating as many impressions and page views as you can in any numbers of ways.”
8 Comments Add your own
1. adm | November 28th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Hm, I’m not convinced yet, Steve. You could also ask, Why make users guess at a URL when they should be able to just go to a *well-organized* and well-designed master site and find what they are looking for. The new MTV.com is an unusable mess, so I’m not sure I want to take advice from these guys.
2. Irwin Fletcher | November 28th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
and, how on Earth do you market 20 different URLs…
we have enough trouble just marketing one correctly…
3. Safran | November 28th, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Fair enough to disagree. And good points. Let me expand on my point, not out of defense, but simply out of amplification.
People watch shows, not networks. The networks might try to convince you otherwise, but we TiVo our favorite shows. Nobody asks you what your favorite network is.
So if my job as a network honcho is to get as many pageviews as possible, I want to reach out to as many niche audiences as possible. I am no longer constrained by the “lowest common denomonator” mentality of television.
So, the Lost Remote network’s Fitness for 18-24 year old men show should be fitnessurl.com. Not Lostremote.com/network/shows/men/18.24/fitnessurl.html
The Lost Remote network’s Sports for 65 year old + women should be SportsWomenURL.com, not LostRemote.com/network/shows/olderwomen/sports.html.
Here’s another reason: SEARCH. People search out show names. They’re more likely to take a stab at a showname.com, too.
Over at WKRN.com, they have 18 blogs. They could have assigned each blog a subdomain. They didn’t. Each one has its own URL. And combined, those blogs now get more traffic than the “main site.”
You don’t need to sacrifice one for the other. For the people who need that main site, WKRN has all the blogs listed there, too. It’s not a one-or-the-other tradeoff.
Think in reverse: what good comes from steering someone to a master site? That’s not where they *want* to go. They want to go to the show’s site. You’re not promoting 20 sites, Fletch. Each show promotes its own site.
We make the mistake of thinking people want to visit our channels’ and our networks’ websites because, well, “they’re our channels’ and our networks’ websites!” Hooey. They want information. They want an easy RSS address. And they don’t want to have to dig to get it.
4. thedetroitchannel | November 28th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
there’s that one guy who comes around here that’s got an idea how you’d market 20 different sites at once.
5. Gert | November 28th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
Publishers should differentiate between navigators and destinations. Closed navigators (”master site”) needlessly keep the user captive, open navigators should point to any site relevant to the user niche.
Undoubtedly, MTV should be developing navigators alongside its 20 niche destinations. But those navigators should point to non-MTV sites as well (as newspaper movie guide pages, that point not just to the movies that happen to be released by the newspaper publisher’s parent, but to all movies and cinemas possibly available to the reader). Proper (open) navigators, targeted at specific niches, are a natural marketing space.
6. adm | November 28th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
Good points, Steve. As it’s being used by MTV in this case, it seems like these new sites are largely new initiatives, tangentially related to actual shows, if at all. Since they are so completely unrelated to each other, it makes sense to me (in this case, at least) to have them at different URLs.
That said, I’m not sure it makes sense for ABC to direct everybody to desperatehousewives.com, lost.com, etc., and have each of those sites operating in “silos”. I don’t feel strongly whether it’s better to build the brand of the show or the network, but it’s an interesting topic for discussion.
7. Matthew | December 8th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I agree with Safran 100% - it’s all about search. Companies are starting to think like some SEO guys now it appears in relation to conquering a vertical by going after a micro site just for a specific show. At any rate, the show may or may not make it, but by spinning up sites with dedicated content, the networks are in the long run helping themselves greatly in the world of search.
Like adm said too, it might not be quite all ready yet, but in the next few years, why can’t we navigate to the hyperprogrammed site right from our tv to watch the content, or the web. There should be no difference at that point. Any show, special or anything about the show could be related on the site, right from your Plasma or from your PC, all at our convenience
Just my .02
8. Lucy | January 14th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Wow, thanks for the excellent information!
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed