Jul 09 2007
New rituals for new media pt 2
Getting visitors to sit a spell. A continuation of “New rituals..”
Graeme Newell writing at TVspy:
“There is a lot of panic in the broadcast industry these days..The inexorably slow and steady decline of broadcast TV ratings have all of us looking hard for a revenue savior. For most TV stations, the feeling is that the beacon of salvation lies in the always-on, world-reaching audience on the web…Problem is - it isn’t working”
The big problem is site stickiness. Far too many web site visitors are “one click and out.” They dive bomb into the site, check the weather and are gone. They come to the home page, scan the top headlines, and give up very few clicks. Most TV sites get a lot of unique visitors, but these flighty, drive-by clickers don’t stay long. Far too many of them are on the site for less than a minute. “
link via Cyndy Green. The viewing rituals that allowed TV stations to run a 30 minute news show with five minutes of news are dying. Ironically as the market for folksy featurettes is disappearing, production of them is booming.
A similar phenomenon is impacting newspapers as they move online:
“According to recently released Readership Institute research, the average newspaper reader spends 26 minutes with a weekday issue of a print paper, and 57 minutes with a Sunday edition. By contrast, at 46 of the 50 most popular newspaper Web sites, users average less time in a month than this 26-minute average for a single weekday print edition.” Readership Institute blog link via Andy Dickinson
Speaking about the death of the mini feature or at least its removal from the “news” packaging I was surprised and a little disappointed that the NPPA multimedia summit seemed to focus it’s attention on the production of these sorts of pieces.
It’s a pity because the quality of a lot of them is great. Check out storybridge.tv. I too don’t see much of a future for them on the web. They are not really YouTube material. I think the only people watching them at the moment are journalists who are thinking “If I lost my job I could always do that”. I’m not so sure.
[…] New rituals for new media pt 2. In a look at newspaper use of video, this line caught me eye: “The viewing rituals that allowed TV stations to run a 30 minute news show with five minutes of news are dying. Ironically as the market for folksy featurettes is disappearing, production of them is booming.” Could it be we are still giving readers what we want, not what they want? […]
[…] New rituals for new media pt 2 “The big problem is site stickiness. Far too many web site visitors are ‘one click and out.’ They dive bomb into the site, check the weather and are gone. They come to the home page, scan the top headlines, and give up very few clicks.” […]