Small stations best positioned for growth?
Cory Bergman January 28th, 2008
Former AOL President and co-founder of MTV, Bob Pittman has some interesting things to say about small market television, both on TV and the web. Pittman’s Pilot investment group has been buying up smaller stations. “We have focused on small market television, where local advertising is the predominant revenue stream,” Pittman explains in an interview with VideoNuze. “We have done that because we believe national advertisers will slow down spending in economic downturns, whereas in local market when you’re dealing with a local retailer he still has to sell everything that’s on the shelf, come good times or bad. And we believe that in small markets, newspapers and yellow pages are getting wildly disproportionate share of the revenue, so we think there’s a great growth opportunity as well.” And online, Pittman says his stations have been setting up “what are in essense newspapers online.” He explains, “In our smaller markets, we’re not competing with Google or MSN, so we can get large local audiences, which allow us to better serve our advertisers.”
6 Comments Add your own
1. ? | January 28th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
What’s with his eyebrows? They’re freaking me out.
2. tdc | January 28th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
hate to be an alarmist, but it appears there is trouble in googleland.
we’ll see.
3. Dan | January 28th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I started in small market TV in the 70s and no one
wants local stations to get their act together more than me. The article says some very positive things about what they are trying to do.
But I don’t get this quote:
He explains, “In our smaller markets, we’re not competing with Google or MSN”.
In what way are small market stations
not competing with Google or MSN?
This seems like an odd premise to me.
Anyone got the answer?
Dan
4. Rob | January 28th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Which one has a better shot at reaching out to the masses (and monetizing their efforts)?
Gary Gannaway: User-generated content is “a fad”.
Bob Pittman (Talking about User-generated videos): “I think it’s great. Probably 99.9% of it is crap, but the rest of it is brilliant. If you have a way of editing it down to the brilliant stuff and also allowing people to discover it easily, then it can be very appealing.”
5. Cory | January 28th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Yeah, it’s really disappointing that many media people — even web-savvy ones — still don’t understand that user-generated content isn’t a mass media thing, but a personal media thing.
And it’s just getting warmed up.
6. Jason | January 28th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Cory, I agree but I think that you need an integrated solution to make it work for the station. Having a stand alone UGC application is very limiting. Stations need to have the ability to turn functionality on and off by section and type of UGC interface.
Then stations can get creative on a number of fronts on how to make it work for them. This will vary on site size, demographic profile of the site and more.
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