• by Wayne Friedman , December 8, 2006

Viacom is serious about business expansion. To make up for slower growth networks, such as MTV and Nickelodeon, the company is creating a new division, MTVN Entertainment Group, to house its male entertainment businesses.

MTVN Entertainment pools together traditional networks Spike TV, Comedy Central, and TV Land along with male-targeted Web sites, such as IFilm, a video-sharing service; Atom Films, a short-films site; and video-game areas XFire and GameTrailers. The goal is to utilize the cross-platform combo to collectively increase the reach--and ad support--for venues that target the elusive male 18-34 demo.

A story in The Wall Street Journal suggests the change was necessary.

For years, MTV and Nickelodeon were the lead cable networks; they powered all the MTV Networks, as well as Viacom. But now, those networks have lost some steam, and MTV is looking to other areas to push future growth.

MTVN touts that it reaches more male TV viewers than all of ESPN's networks. But media executives say you should read between the lines.

"You know networks are in trouble when they start to quantify other ways to look at things more favorably," says Doug Seay, former Starcom Media executive, now a senior advertising sales executive for Eclipse Television. "For MTV, this is probably a non-duplicated audience--because the ratings are definitely much higher on ESPN."

The MTVN announcement could be an ongoing move to quickly revamp its businesses, given its inability to gain major traction in the Internet arena. Viacom lost out to News Corp. in a race to acquire MySpace, which has become a major force in social networking. That loss was significant enough to have cost chairman/CEO Tom Freston his job.

Early in the week at the Credit Suisse Media and Telecom Week conference, new Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman promised Wall Street that the company would soon achieve healthy 10% to 15% profit-margin gains from the company's international cable networks. He told the participants: "If we can't achieve it, I think some people will have an issue with me."