More on CNN.com changes
Cory Bergman May 22nd, 2007
Couple interesting follow-ups to the big news at CNN and Internet Broadcasting:
- Pipeline will be free beginning next month, and CNN.com plans to repackage all of its video offerings (likely dumping the Pipeline brand) by July 1st.
- To clarify the CNN-IB deal — which was the source of a lot of discussion earlier — a source tells Lost Remote that CNN.com will link directly to IB local stories and vice-versa. In effect, it’s a preferred aggregation approach that’s designed to boost unique users for both partners. IB stories will be linked on CNN.com on their merits, which will appear on CNN.com’s home page and U.S. and weather sections.
- IB will sell banner ad packages in select CNN.com inventory and IB inventory, according to Joe Dugan, SVP CNN Digital Ad Sales. “Both companies will continue to work with our respective clients and we will work closely with IB to avoid sales conflicts when contacting new clients. We see this relationship as an extension of our sales team,” Dugan said.
Press release on the partnership follows below…
PRESS RELEASE — CNN and Internet Broadcasting, the nation’s largest publisher of TV station Web sites, have entered a strategic alliance that combines Internet Broadcasting’s network of local news content with CNN’s global newsgathering resources, it was announced today by Jim Walton, president of CNN Worldwide.
As part of the relationship, CNN and Internet Broadcasting will also create a unique advertising opportunity that leverages CNN.com’s national audience with Internet Broadcasting’s local reach. To reinforce the strategic alliance, CNN will acquire an equity stake in Internet Broadcasting, joining Hearst-Argyle Television, Post-Newsweek Stations, McGraw-Hill Broadcasting and Split Rock Partners as investors in the company.
“CNN’s global reporting attracts millions of online consumers to CNN.com for domestic and international news every day,” Walton said. “Partnering with Internet Broadcasting adds another dimension - enhanced coverage of local news and events - and brings CNN reporting to significantly more people online.”
As part of their agreement, the companies will share local, national and international content important to online news consumers. Leveraging its network of TV station Web sites, Internet Broadcasting will supply local news content to CNN.com, which will appear on the home page as well as in the “U.S. News” and “Weather” sections. In turn, national, political and international content from CNN.com will appear on the home page and national news pages of Internet Broadcasting sites.
“Our partnership with CNN provides tremendous benefits for our online news consumers, station partners and advertisers,” said Reid Johnson, founder and president of Internet Broadcasting. “Our visitors expect the most up-to-date coverage of news that hits home from our award-winning online journalists who sit in the newsrooms of our partner stations. Now, our visitors gain access to one of the most trusted global news sources, CNN, on their local TV station Web site. Our advertisers also benefit by getting the best of both worlds - national reach and local relevance.”
The companies will create a new and distinctive online advertising opportunity that will offer relevant, new ad platforms for clients on both a national and local level by leveraging the broad national reach of CNN.com with the local and regional reach of Internet Broadcasting’s sites. Internet Broadcasting will offer select CNN.com ad placements as part of its nationwide, regional or market-by-market advertising packages.
5 Comments Add your own
1. discreet_chaos | May 23rd, 2007 at 3:41 am
As a Pipeline subscriber from Day 1, I’m glad they’re going to pro-rate me out, but I’m kind of concerned about how they’re going to incorporate advertising.
It’ll be easy to stick ads into the overnight simulcast of CNN-I, it already goes to filler during their commercial breaks and it’ll be equally easy to stick them into Pipe1 or the headline service, but what concerns me is the live events.
You can’t really interrupt a press conference with advertising and though they could pile commercials in-between events, that’ll only cause people to flip to another pipe. And, if they aren’t going to go with video ads, but instead do banners, then I have to wonder if it’ll affect the size of that little window which I pin to a corner of my screen.
Sure, I can understand the logic of opening-up the service, but as someone who is tuned-in for much of the day, I have to say that I’m worried the quality of the product might suffer.
2. Steve Boriss | May 23rd, 2007 at 7:19 am
This is a desperate move by CNN and a victory for Fox in their so far unnoticed, behind-the-scenes efforts to replace local newspapers and local TV news on broadcast network affiliates. See my post “CNN outfoxed, makes desperate deal for local news. Fox alone will prey upon newspapers & local TV affiliates for local news domination” at http://www. thefutureofnews.com.
3. fleetwood mack | May 23rd, 2007 at 7:28 am
pipeline free?
what happened to the game-changing business model CNN promised in all those press releases we all wrote so much about it?
one more dead subscription model.
doesn’t anyone get the message yet?
free and ad supported is the answer.
4. thedetroitchannel | May 23rd, 2007 at 7:36 am
yes, but this “cnn/ib” (or as the fine folks in boston viewed it “ib/cnn) news managed to take the sting off the announcement.
and if you happen to clickon steve boriss’ blog and read the entry he mentions, please take a minute to scroll down and read why the “news veteran” swipe leveled at yours truly regarding my asking “why no one at broadcastandcable put their name to an editorial there” was more of a statement of the internet times than lack of knowledge.
swing and a miss, justobeclear.
5. thom | May 24th, 2007 at 6:46 am
This is a sad day for CNN.com. Not because they made this decision to end Pipeline, but because of all the resources wasted on Pipeline. Imagine how great the CNN.com site could be now if they had taken a real stand to innovate and integrated video into the Web site or improved the core features of their site (instead of developing a stand-alone downloadable application for watching a third-tier online-only network.)
This seems like some executive’s multi-million dollar vanity project. I’m sure many lost remote readers could have looked at this business model two-and-a-half or three years ago and determined this wasn’t going to be a mass-market long-term success. I wonder why people inside CNN.com couldn’t see it.
CNN use to be the #1 news Web site, now it is well behind both Yahoo! News and MSNBC.
My expectations for this redesign are sky high — partly because of those comments from David Payne more than a year ago that it wasn’t going to be a redesign, it was going to be bigger. It was going to be a “relaunch.”
I fear he is setting up to over-promise and under-deliver.
The features they have launched in the last 18 months– while conceptually matching Web trends (like ireport, blogs) — have been so poor in execution and implementation I can’t imagine the relaunched site will be much better unless they outsourced the entire thing and started trusting people who have more expertise in the Web than they seem to have.
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