Commentary
Get Some Content, Call It Premium
- by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, October 8, 2015
I notice Stephen Colbert is getting some props for not denigrating YouTube stars.
Last week, he had a thoroughly respectful and funny conversation with Felix Kjellberg, the Swede who is PewDiePie on YouTube, and has 39 million subscribers. Nobody has more.
That was in contrast to Jimmy Kimmel, who was roundly criticized for making fun of the new YouTube Gaming site a few weeks before, though really, Kimmel’s a comedian and the whole gamers-watching-gamers is hard to be real serious about.
Still, those contrasting approaches suggest a question advertisers and publishers and viewers should be asking about the quality of what they see online. Right now, the buzz phrase is “premium content” — and everybody wants it. The definition, obviously vague to start with, has gotten even more elastic as more clients demand it.
It reminds me that when the Chicago White Sox were building a new stadium, allegedly they theorized a lot of people wanted tickets “behind the dugout.” So the team owners made the dugouts about twice as long. Problem? Solution!
Premium content can’t be just star power or budget. Some of the best and most popular YouTube videos have neither. And it certainly can’t be length. Some pretty miserable half-hour comedies and hour-long dramas have been made for television, and calling them premium because of their heritage is crazy, too.
If the definition is, “content my brand wouldn’t be ashamed to be next to,” that’s close. But for advertisers and publishers, maybe it’s “content that hits a target audience, in sufficiently large numbers and basically reflects a similar, agreeable style.”
As AOL’s Tim Armstrong said to Financial Times, “If you’re in our industry, your definition of premium content is where you work.” I'm sure he meant that as a joke, but it's really true. Your "premium content" is a reflection of what your bosses want. So it depends.
“Premium content” falls into that giant pit of vague concepts that includes “pornography” on one end and the phrase “serving the public interest” on the other. Broadcasters never buttoned down that idea, probably for their own good, too.
I wonder because as prime time sputters through this fall season--it may be setting a record for inspiring a record number of “Is This The Worst Season Ever?” stories--it gets a little dangerous and a lot hilarious to believe streaming video is, in poundage, any better or any more premium.
It may be far less so. Is where all the viewers are going really an improvement, or just more portable? What do you think?
The brevity of online video is often its salvation. “Funny or Die” videos are often funny, but quickly head toward death. There’s a lot of that going around. The short videos produced for publishers often serve as a click bait, a whole industry churning out material that will be welcomed at Taboola and forgotten everywhere else.
pj@comcast.net
P.J. Bednarski has written for MediaPost since 2012 on media and marketing topics. He can be reached at pj@mediapost.com
The definition of "premium" as it applies to TV is fairly simple at present. For a TV network like CBS, it starts with programs aired at 7AM and ends with late night fare sometime after midnight. This does not mean that suddenly available, "distressed merchandise" time in any daypart might not be considered "non-premium" and placed on a "programmatic" auction block for fast disposal. Also, unsold time in certain low rated early AM, daytime and late night shows could be included. But, otherwise, it is wishful thinking to speculate on a much tighter definition of "premium", thinking that it applies only to primetime programs.
The cable situation is far less clear for several reasons. First, the ratings for many shows in all dayparts are very low and, I'm sorry to say it, but in the TV buyer's world, audience size, not the quality of the show or the audience's engagement with it, is how "premium" is often defined. Big is good, small is bad.
Second, many cable channels have much lower sell-out rates than broadcast TV networks and time, which is perishable, is almost always available in most shows. Even if this is not the case, a cable channel can simply add commercials, if there is suden increased buyer interest, up to a point---without getting into trouble over being temporarily over-commercialized. Often, nobody is watching.
So, in the case of cable, almost anything might fall into the non-premium category at some point in time, though most of the time it's the same old story---low rated shows in marginal timeslots predominate.