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ABCNews.com webcast to be revamped

Posted by Don Day on June 10, 2008

The ABCNews.com World News with Charles Gibson webcast is about to get a major revamp, according to the Wall Street Journal. Why? No one is watching. WSJ said ABCNews.com had 7.8 million pageviews on Monday. The WN webcast page had 145,000 views. Wasting your big name anchor’s time one something thats going to get viewed less than 150k times doesn’t make much sense. WSJ has a line that reinforces one of Lost Remote’s basic tenets of online news: users don’t watch newscasts online.

Network executives and media buyers say that broadcast news suffers online when it is based on the old news model of a strong and authoritative anchor, like Mr. Gibson, escorting viewers through the day’s news. Online news consumers want to click around, reading and watching only the stories that interest them.

Plus: One more interesting nugget from the WSJ piece. Of those 7.8 million PVs Monday, a full 3 million came from slideshows.

Adds “sm” in comments: “Article has a huge hole in it. Majority of webcast viewers watch on iTunes. No mention of those viewers in article. WN webcast consistently ranks among the top 5 newscasts on iTunes.”

  • Anonymous

    Slideshow pageviews are, obviously, deceiving. There was an item recently that said the feature that gave nytimes.com its most pageviews last year was a slideshow of the Oscars, which proves that even NYT readers prefer fluff to substance. Huge logical flaw there.

  • Anonymous

    My Flash stopped woking for more than a few seconds at a time after I installed XP SP3 and I don’t have a backup disc since this was a donated computer. Unless I load 2000 Pro I won’t even bother to upload even.

    It bothers me that the Flash ads work, even next to Flash that won’t?

    QUE???

  • http://www.theindychannel.com Glen

    The online audience really isn’t looking for packaged video content in great numbers. They want raw video and user-uploaded stuff, unless the packaged content has some dramatic elements.

    Slideshow pageviews are just as meaningful as any other pageview, as long as they are packaged in context in conjunction with stories/other content.

  • Rob

    A fellow L-R regular told me a few weeks back why people don’t watch news video but check out slideshows.

    People are checking out news websites from their cubicles at work, and are afraid the volume will start blaring on a video clip which will tip off Lumbergh that they’re not putting cover sheets on TPS reports.

    Slideshows, however, people can check out reliatvely safely because they have no sound. Maybe Charlie Gibson could do a slideshow instead?

  • Ed

    Just another piece of data pointing out that page views are a long dead metric.

  • sm

    article has a huge hole in it. majority of webcast viewers watch on itunes. no mention of those viewers in article. wn webcast consistently ranks among the top 5 newscast on itunes.

  • Workers

    Hello, everyone please read Rob’s comment above because he is absolutely right and eventually other people may realize this.

  • JT

    Another thing to consider…. web users typically like to scan through an article. Video forces the user to scan the news at the pace of the production, rather than the user’s own pace.

  • Safran

    This is because a newcast online is simply repurposed, bundled content – and it’s taken from a show whose demographic does not match the online demographic.

    Slideshows are original content and they are unbundled from a “newscast.” I know that people are watching from work – but news video still gets plenty of good numbers. Clips work. Repurposed, still-bundled, traditional newscasts with Voice of God anchors do not.

  • Liz Foreman

    I’m with saf. The term is UNBUNDLED.

    To bundle something, the whole (newscast) must be greater than the sum of its parts.

    Aside from a few special cases (captive audience or humor,) video newscasts in the form of sequenced news stories are dead.

    By the way, you can add WCPO.com and WXYZ.com’s news webcasts to add to the webcast dead pool.

  • Amanda E.

    Rob’s not kidding either.

    At my last workplace, out of the three stations in town, KREM was the most popular of the three from the aggregated websense reports for lunch-time surfing.

    Since I know the web managers of all three sites I asked why of a few of those lunch-time surfers. The answer was because “I don’t have speakers or headsets to watch and listen to the videos and KREM has slideshows to go along with the stories”

    Which is absolutely right if you think about it. Television may be a visual medium as I’ve listen to one photog in the past yammer on and on about, but its also an audio medium too. That dog lick live shot you posted online doesn’t make any sense if you can’t hear it because your boss says no speakers on your computer. To your lunchtime crowd all it appears to be is a voiceless reporter flapping his/her gums about nothing. But on the bright side, the 99.9% of your photogs are smart enough to gather b-roll that you can yank a dozen or so stills out of in order to tell the story visually.

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