Gauging the Couric Effect
Important Details: CBS News scored one of the biggest coups of the US election season in late September, as anchor Katie Couric’s series of interviews with Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin swept across America. The coup, though, wasn’t on CBS’ native turf. Yes, it pulled in about a 10% higher audience than a week earlier, but the network still ended up a distant third in the traditional ratings, behind its traditional competition, NBC and ABC.
Couric’s coup therefore wasn’t accomplished on TV sets across America. It began there, but gathered force throughout the week, at odd hours of the day and night, in email in-boxes, search boxes and weblogs. Call it time-shifting, call it place-shifting, call it whatever you want: Americans are learning the value of digital news video, as the interviews caught the popular imagination. It’s hard to compare the broadcast and web metrics. The newscasts drew about six million viewers. Through the weekend, we can see that about 1.5 million viewers saw the videos on CBSNews.com. It looks like another 6.5 million, though, downloaded the Palin interviews through various YouTube intermediaries.
Implications: Outsell believes that the Couric-Palin interviews are a great example of how news values, both monetary and journalistic, are shifting. We can look at the monetary value of broadcast news itself, estimating that CBS takes in $40,000 for each of its 16 or so 30-second ads, or about $640,000 in total for each night’s show. (Typically, 30-minute programs carry eight minutes of commercials.)
On the web, it’s harder to estimate. Consider a $30 cost-per-thousand rate a good average for a pre-roll on a nationally branded interview. If CBS had monetized each of those 1.5 million viewers on its own site with a preroll (it runs spots before some news videos, but not each one), it would have earned about $45,000. If CBS could have monetized all eight million or so views, that number would increase to $240,000.
Looked at one way, that potential $240,000 compares decently to $640,000. The Couric-Palin interviews, though, were a once-in-a-year coup, so being able to fully monetize one series of videos that highly is clearly an exception. In broadcasting, as in publishing, each legacy viewer is still worth a lot more than a transient internet user. Still, the spread appears to be narrowing in some interesting ways — if legacy media can really harness the commercial power of great content.
Of course, CBS didn’t monetize all those views. Along with all legacy media, broadcasters are still sorting out the legal issues on fair — or not-so-fair — use, in negotiation and in court. If they can monetize what is essentially pirated video, the heft of web video-based ads on news stories will become more meaningful — and vital drivers of the new business.
For content creators as large as CBS News and as small as city-based news start-ups, there are several lessons here:
- In advertising, content creators are no longer selling time (broadcasters) or space (publishers) but attention. It’s the new attention economy.
- “Secondary” usage is becoming much more than an afterthought – and in some cases will be more valuable than “primary” usage. Forget the long tail, or the mid-tail. Media – courtesy of digital media – is now a bouncing ball.
- There are new piracy solutions out there. While CBS seems to have lost a majority of its potential Couric-Palin pageviews, NBC says it kept about 99% of its own campaign-related videos (the Tina Fey/Sarah Palin parody) on its own site, and cited new technology that helped do that.
- It’s time to think of content in stand-alone units, not just as parts of a 30-minute news broadcast or a whole, daily newspaper or weekly magazine. Ideally, content creators should stamp each piece of content with a stock-keeping unit, an SKU, like retailers do, and attach their own ads to it as it traverses the digital universe. We’re not there, but we can glimpse that world in creation. There have been numerous content marking schemes, with ACAP being the latest, but none has yet sufficiently addressed this issue and gotten traction. Per-unit content tagging in anticipation of this brave new world is becoming essential.