Comments on: MTV digital strategy includes web ‘assembly line’

By: j.ray

j.ray — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:12:41 +0000

It’s a good strategy in that it eliminates redundancy from consumer messaging by pointing to specific content, rather than a single company domain. Re-skinning is another efficient strategy. But if the underlying infrastructure is lacking in stability of performance, feature sets, and portability, then the user experience will be diminished along with monetization. MTV and other companies that decide to employ this assembly line strategy should build Hummers, rather than Yugos. Either can be painted different colors.

By: Renee

Renee — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:12:21 +0000

Even the hit and miss efforts are worth it in the long run. Users expect this kind of ever changing content on the web, especially from a network like MTV.

I’m sure we’ll be seeing this assembly line strategy from tons of others networks.

By: Rick Ellis

Rick Ellis — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:36:49 +0000

I’ve long advocated that local news sites should consider this strategy. Not launching 30 vertical sites, but perhaps launching standalones for high school or semi-pro sports, local politics or anything else that someone at your station has the passion and/or expertise to pull off.

It makes sense for both strategic reasons and for SEO reasons. And it certainly makes sense from an advertising standpoint.

As for MTV, if you look at their efforts so far, it’s a bit hit-and-miss. Which is always the problem with this strategy. It’s relatively easy to launch sites, but it’s a lot tougher to integrate them together and figure out ways for the audience to find them.

Yahoo launched a number of standalone sites, but they only managed to keep an audience when they were linked from Yahoo’s main page.