aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, February 09, 2007

Viacom plans for ComedyCentral.com

Old BIG media thinks it can beat new BIG media. Let’s watch:

Viacom representatives have been quietly telling industry insiders this week that they plan to aggressively promote their revamped ComedyCentral.com Web site. Viacom executives here at the Media Summit Conference won’t say exactly what they plan to do, but it’s already apparent they plan to put some power behind the promotion.

The company recently began offering so-called embed code that allows fans of popular programs such as the The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to post clips to their MySpace.com pages or blogs. That embed code duplicates one of the more popular features of YouTube: the ability to easily post videos on other Web sites and blogs.

The idea behind the strategy, experts believe, it is to find a “workaround” to YouTube.

Their “work around” lacks community - rate? favorite? share? comment? They ain’t got it. And it takes more than technology to get it. What they want is to make their cake and eat it too:

That Viacom is essentially encouraging its Web audience to repost its materials is also the latest indication that big media companies are trying to glom onto Internet concepts such as viral marketing and community sharing while still maintaining some control over the shows they create.

Tone deaf:

By allowing people to post their shows on their MySpace pages and blogs, Viacom is convinced it will generate just as much interest in funny snippets from the company’s shows as someone posting a clip on YouTube.

“We definitely feel that video on the Web is a huge tool,” Flannigan said. “It drives word-of-mouth discussion about a show.”

Offering the embed code also allows them to generate advertising revenue, and some of the clips on Comedycentral.com already feature 30-second advertisements.

30 second spots???

These guys have no clue about the new audience dynamic. Those 30-second spots are a glaring indication. Steeped in their oligopoly practices, they imagine a fan loyalty that is not there and that they do not deserve. They arrogantly presume the audience is theirs to own and that they can just port it right over to the web.

Chad Hurley has long resisted the commercial interruption; it will be interesting to see the impact of Google but the hope is that together they will have more ad savvy than that. I love advertising, I’m happy to have ads. I don’t want clutter, interruption or irrelevant ads and I don’t value old BIG media content anywhere near what they do.