Jericho wrote:...The viewing public is now spread so thin over all the channels, it's a miracle they are able to accurately collect data on all the shows (Are they able?)..
Nielson is still doing fine:
http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/solutions/ ... ision.html
And, with television broadcasts mandated being digital, no worries there, either. All the cable companies are laughing their way to the bank, since they collect all the data needed. And sell it, of course. Everyone gets in on the deal, too, from Hulu to Roku to Amazon.
I don't quite understand why TV PEOPLE didn't see this coming. Didn't we all? If you endlessly increase the number of channels, there are a finite number of viewers and a finite number of advertisers (who are not happy about the ever decreasing number of viewers).
Advertising isn't the end-all-be-all of all media. A great deal of money changes hands in channel sales to providers and agreements between distributors. Channels like CNN don't make their money from advertising, for example, but from selling the rights to offer its channel to cable companies who know, without a doubt, that if they don't have it, they'll lose subscribers.
While advertising is the lion's share of the revenue stream, technology and market conditions, with the rise of "media conglomerates", have broadened the spectrum of opportunities. Channels/media want quality shows to attract viewers to leverage all of their opportunities, not just advertising. And, in the absence of quality programing, one model has proven successful - Crap.
Look at
The WB. It was always crap. It specialized in pushing crap to teens, who aren't very discriminating anyway. But, where did everything go when it couldn't sustain the crap-push?
The CW snapped up the biggest pieces of poo, incorporated them into its philosophy of "people like their guilty pleasures when it comes to watching crap[/url] and has become one of the largest distributors of crap on television, gaining national attention whenever it introduces yet another "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" that mated with "Dawson's Creek" and added "superhero powas" to create... really big pieces of poo that sell all sorts of products and make money from more than just advertising.
It's a bit like selling TVs. "Let's sell everyone a giant plasma screen! Look how well we've done!!! Oh crap!! How do we sell new TVs now that everyone has a giant plasma?"
You can polish a turd and people will buy it. "Content is King" and nobody truly cares if it's good, they only care whether or not they can sell it.
There are many formulaic shows out there and they all draw from the same sorts of foundations, even if they may seem to be very "different" from each other in terms of setting or subject matter. The problem isn't coming up with something that will sell, it's getting it in front of people faces. If you can hold something shiny in front of enough people's faces, you will eventually get enough people to buy it to make that effort worth your while.
And, all of these media outlets focus on maximizing their monetary efforts. A hit media show will be gang-raped by as many people as possible in order to maximize its returns. Why is there a friggin "Walking Dead" coffee mug? The last thing I want to think of while drinking my morning coffee is "dead human flesh." Yet, there it is and it's there because people will buy it.
Companion media is rampant, from fan-pages, Twitter and Facebook groups, youtube channels hosting talks with the stars, Comic-con rallies and news-media blitzes..
Even if it's not all about advertising, think of how you, as an advertiser, feels about the possibility of buying some time for a television lineup that includes shows that are constantly in your face, on coffee mugs, in the news, making the front-pages of all the media mags, blogs, etc... And, if your kid loves the show, even though you know it's a piece of crap? You can't escape from it, so of course you'll buy some time.
It's not all bad. Not everything is crap. Sometimes, something decent floats to the top of the bowl. With the number of media channels available and the many ways a show can be monetized, even if it's just to fill dead airtime, some decent entertainment still has room to be successful. In fact, if anything has been shown in this latest evolution of "entertainment content", the many different ways a show can be brought to consumers has allowed some good quality shows to gain support.
Those shows would not have been possible, otherwise. And, with increasingly deep pockets, media distributors are betting on their ability to produce their own entertainment content. By owning the production and distribution of a show, they can fully control all aspects of "making money" from it.
