• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, December 6, 2006

Weeks before he takes the helm of Discovery Communications, David Zaslav suggested Tuesday that he will look to attract more passionate and devoted viewers to the company's fleet of channels, but not necessarily more viewers. The theory goes that advertisers will pay higher CPMs to reach a well-defined audience--bringing in more revenue than higher-rated but lower-priced programs, he said.

"You have to evaluate what your brand is and sometimes it's not about getting the highest ratings--if you try and make some of these niche channels too broad, then you get outside of who you are," he said at a UBS investor conference in New York.

A should-be niche cable channel appealing to a mass audience "doesn't make that much sense and you start to lose your CPMs and become a commodity," Zaslav said.

Some industry observers have raised the question of whether networks at Discovery such as its namesake flagship and TLC have stumbled by failing to strike a balance between niche and mass appeal. Zaslav signaled that he would pursue an inverted-pyramid strategy, where a network builds a strong, core audience and then looks beyond.

Still, the need for wide appeal for a linear cable network may be in decline because of the changing landscape, he said. Instead, opportunity to drive revenues lies in building a strong brand that can appeal to an audience as well as advertisers--either the same or different--at multiple touchpoints such as online or in the mobile area.

So for Animal Planet or the Travel Channel, he said he will look to "build those brands and execute on those brands and libraries across multiple platforms."

Zaslav, who heads NBC Universal's cable operations, will become the new CEO of Discovery next month, and called the position "a special opportunity."

He said a growth area for online revenue for both NBCU and Discovery lies in looking for deals with the Googles and Yahoos--not to mention YouTube--that gives the content owners some compensation for the content the portals lead people to. "There will be a more rational model that gives more consideration to content owners," he said.

Addressing the issue of whether cable operators might rebel against content owners' push to perhaps bypass them by increasingly making programming available on the Internet, Zaslav said the potential exists for a win-win by helping the distributors build up their own Internet properties.

He said, for example, that NBCU would be eager to make a deal to place "The Office" on Comcast.net.