Avoid the "ings". Go for the "ships."

The Panel on "Following the money" provided one of the best reviews of our revenue landscape (public broadcasting online) I have seen at any time.  It featured three straight shooters: Colby Atwood from Borrell Associates, Barry Parr from Jupiter Research, and Rafat Ali, the principal of PaidContent.org.

Atwood is bullish on the local ad market.  Displaying the research gathered by Borrell Associates, Colby likes the picture he sees: money moving into new forms of direct marketing, much of which will occur online.  His chart of projected revenues over the next five years was the first one I have seen which shows some forms of online ad money declining, as dollars move from, say, display ads, to interactive applications that build data bases.

Parr had not quarrel with the broad movement of dollars from traditional media to online--but he feels that public broadcasters are poorly positioned to take good advantage of this trend.  Our traffic is too low and our organizational culture is wrong.  He took much of his mic time to urge that we build on the membership model.  Speaking directly to public radio types, Parr strongly recommended that stations and networks use online service--especially streaming--as a membership benefit.

Rafat Ali weighed in mostly in support of Parr.  He sees little upside in pursuing the "ings" like "advertising" and much more potential in "...ships," including memberships and sponsorships.   He also suggested the pubcasters were making a mistake by looking down our collective nose at commercial social networking sites.  The benefit of social networking, he explained, is in the eye of the user, not in the intention of the network site manager. 

Ali also suggested a proposition that all of us should take to heart: people like Gather.com (and others) are going to build on the social networks that are embedded in the audiences for public broadcasting.  In his view, there's nothing wrong with that.  It's going to happen.  The question is: who's going to own those properties and benefit from enabling those relationships.  If we (pubcasters) don't do it, someone else will.

Talk to you soon,

MF

Comments

[Mike Crane]

I'm not sure I buy the arguement that we should be charging for streaming as a member benefit. Maybe I'm being a crusty old public broadcaster, but I don't think so:

Consider the case of Times Select, nytimes.com's pay-to-read Thomas Friedman (et al) service. Are they making NET revenue on it? See this article:

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?Entry=3271

And what would we have to do to deal with all the unnegotiated rights that we'd have to secure (among other daunting tasks)?

We know we can get people to pay 250 bucks for an Andre Rieu concert ticket and a membership. But requiring a membership before someone can download our video?

Sure, let's try it, if we can get the resources to experiment. But I'd also want to see us offering video (and audio, of course) for micropayments, a la ITunes, as well as other schemes. I liked what I heard about how even the big players don't know what will "take" and so are experimenting on many fronts.

FWIW...

[Barry Parr]

My mantra is "focus". Everyone should know what kind of organization they are and plan their strategy accordingly.

Public broadcasters are membership organizations first and foremost, and their web strategies should be in support of that focus.

[Teri Lamitie]

I see there being an opportunity for essentially what would be a digital premium: download the video/audio instead of choosing the dvd/cd.

We are membership organizations, but that shouldn't preclude us from offering content (web-only content?) as part of a premium package.

Although I do think that requiring membership for an interrupted stream is difficult because we've been offering it for free for years. People will ante up a membership for it (we saw this with the test we performed at 'GBH a few years ago) but we're likely to see an attrition that will simply reduce our reach. And we can't underestimate the value of the extended reach we have with streaming media.

I'm more inclined to test other engagement opportunities for cultivation and "asks" from the streams, and put newly created content behind a membership gate, like in OMN.

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