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Worry Less about Technology – More about Content


The title of the piece in USA Today says it all:  “YouTube spends $100 million to redefine TV.”

Beginning this month, YouTube is gambling $100 million that by seeding professional production firms such as Young Hollywood — whose slate of YouTube-only programming premieres Monday — it will draw more eyeballs for longer viewing sessions.

YouTube is a massive distribution channel, but not a creator of content.  So what to do?  How about invest in content creation!  And so they are.  And name brand content-creators are falling all over themselves to get a shot at the YouTube distribution platform because they understand what some of us in radio too often take for granted:  Broad distribution is scarce, precious, and essential.  YouTube has it.  So does radio.  And if maintaining relevance in the wake of the fast-multiplying choices for advertisers is the goal, you had better invest in content.

USA Today goes on:

Put simply, the word “television” is being redefined. What once was something produced by a network or cable channel for a screen in the living room is fast becoming anything cobbled together by nearly anyone for a range of devices. This is the culturally revolutionary, highly interactive future YouTube is banking on.

No longer the decision of network gatekeepers, “television” is now “video” and it’s as close as the nearest screen.  YouTube has made its living to date aggregating content’s long tail.  Now it wants a piece of the “short head.”  Because that’s where the dollars are.

This same redefinition is transforming “radio.”  Hence all the angst over what “is” and “isn’t” radio, whether or not it lives in an Arbitron ranker.  You can fight this redefinition, or you can exploit it.

Your choice.

YouTube’s move is to build channels rather than shows per se.  In the New Yorker, Shishir Mehrotra, YouTube’s head product manager, explained the rationale:

Advertising will be done at the level of the audience rather than at the level of the show. Content is no longer proxy for an audience—we know who the audience is. We know what your preferences are, the types of shows you like to watch.

YouTube, and its parent Google, know a lot about what you’re looking at online.  Content may no longer be a proxy for an audience but it is obviously the central attraction to building that audience once the distribution channel provides the “tracks” for the train to run on.  YouTube knows that branded content attracts more advertisers than random amateur videos of kittens on surfboards, hence their hefty investment in content creation and professional channels, like Young Hollywood.

This should serve as a reminder to all in radio about the central primacy of content, where “content” means not only the favorite music of an audience where that music could live in an infinite number of advertising-supported forms elsewhere.  It also means “content” with a capital “C.”  The kind that’s unique and compelling, whether local or not. More often than not this will mean non-music programming.

The opportunities to create such programming are boundless.  But it begins with the recognition that this is the spot where radio’s future lives.

As Ford’s Jim Buczkowski has said:

Customers have so many choices. Radio should worry less about technology, as streaming becomes ubiquitous, it’s about content. Consumers will be able to get the same content through an internet connection they are now getting via the antennas in local areas. Content is most important.

Worry less about technology.  Worry more about content.

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