Can Mainstream Media Drive Web Video Consumption?
Does television have the power to drive web video consumption? If last night’s episode of How I Met Your Mother is any indication, TV’s influence over the web might not be nearly what people would expect.
The CBS sitcom featured highlights from Robin’s past, when she was the Canadian pop one-hit-wonder, Robin Sparkles. We’d previously seen the video for her breakthrough hit, but at the end of the show, there was a teaser for the “Sandcastles in the Sand, ” her follow-up single, music video on MySpace.
The show airs at 8:30pm, and as of 10pm last night, there had been roughly 17,000 views of the video. However, this morning, after the show aired in all time zones, there have only been 35,500 views. According to an article in the LA Times a few weeks ago, the show draws an average audience of around 8 million viewers, and had 10.6 million viewers during a recent episode featuring Britney Spears. That’s a paltry .35% of the audience checking out the additional web content in the 12 hours immediately following the broadcast.
Yes, its a bad spoof of 80s videos from Tiffany or Madonna, but you’d have to watch it to find out.
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
I thought it was a good spoof. But then I’m ha’Canadian.
Check the viewer count now.
April 22nd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
The important thing is TV is driving these users online, once that happens it has to build up momentum a second time around - if it’s worthy of spreading.
April 22nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm
The counter currently showing 40k views at 2:30pm, so I’m not seeing a whole lot of momentum for this one. Also, I agree with you, Ben. This one may not be worth of spreading, especially if you didn’t watch the episode. But I’d have thought that there’d be more views of the video on the site, even if it wasn’t spread virally.
I’d have assumed, wrongly, that a TV show with such a sizable, regular audience would at least have hit the 1% mark. Maybe people were watching other things last night and catch HIMYM on the DVR the next day or later in the week.
So I put it out there…what’s a reasonable percentage of your audience that you can expect to drive online to view additional content? I’m sure there is a wide range depending on the content and what the user can get in return (win $1million vs. watch a fake music video), but in a broader ROI and marketing perspective, does this even help spread their brand? Pick up new viewers (maybe in Canada?)? Is this a valuable “brand extension” or just something the writers thought would be fun to shoot now that they are all back to work?