The Challenges with Online Original Programming – Viewership

There are a great number of producers, from huge studios like Warner Bros., to individuals with camcorders, out there becoming increasingly fascinated in the development of branded original online entertainment. Quarterlife and In the Motherhood are online poster children with the latter heading to television and the former having already debuted (and subsequently failed) in primetime. With all the focus on bringing entertainment to the web, it is somewhat ironic that the existing end game is to eventually remove it from online world in favor of traditional media. Following the money trail, it is because the sheer scale of the economics in traditional media has yet to be approximated online. Well to be fair, big numbers do exist in the digital space, but there are few ways to aggregate such a fragmented market. On our TV at home we have only 500 or so channels vying for advertising dollars, online, 150 million.

Now is the time to discuss the true Achilles heel of the online video, viewership. The Brands require guaranteed views of content (typical budgets target in the millions) and like it or not, we are in battle with efficiency, as the agency will argue it can easily reach estimated scale offline. An average American Idol show on Fox can reach 20+ Million. I am sure we can agree that “actual” online is better than “estimated” offline, but where do we find commensurate views? The challenge here is that currently any specific site will not alone be able to deliver the views we need. The most famous site for online video, YouTube’s top 20 individual videos for this month garnered between 1.5-5.5 million views. Barack Obama’s inauguration speech and Akon’s new video together delivered less than 6 million. For a single video via a single distribution medium, the viewership pipe is just too small.

So what can we do to aggregate reach? We can either “pull” viewers in by placing the content on a few sites, cross our fingers and hope we were lucky enough to create the next Landlord or better yet we can partner with a distributor (like BBE) to “push” the content out to as many sites as possible. We have introduced a new wrinkle into our model, as the “push” method will require us to share some of our sponsorship dollars with the publishers (to encourage them to market and drive views to the property), but the complicated discussion around original programming economics will have to be saved for another day.