A Blog Writes The Obituary Of TV

(From The New York Times -- By Dan Mitchell)

One recent week, the video blog ROCKETBOOM drew an average of 200,000 people a day to watch its short daily news reports on technology, the arts and other topics.

THE ABRAMS REPORT on MSNBC, meanwhile, drew 215,000 viewers to its weekday hourlong show about legal issues.

Does this anecdote -- that an unpopular cable news show and a wildly popular Web site draw similarly sized audiences -- prove that the Internet is upending the economics of the television business?

It does for PRINCE CAMPBELL, a former media executive who runs the CHARTREUSE (BETA) BLOG.

Mr. Campbell wields superlatives in a particularly bloggish manner at Chartreuse.Wordpress.com.

"Broadcast television is dead," he declares. "Just like the Internet killed the music industry, it's about to do the same thing to broadcast TV."

Never mind that AMERICAN IDOL draws about 30 million viewers, that MSNBC is a cable, not a broadcast, network, and that, while the music business may be wounded, it is far from dead. Still, despite the bluster, Mr. Campbell's underlying point is true enough.

A staff of two produces Rocketboom.com/vlog.

"How many people do you think it takes to produce
THE ABRAMS REPORT on MSNBC?" Mr. Campbell asks.

Good question.

But "what about the length of the show?" counters HEATHER GREEN in BLOGSPOTTING, a BUSINESS WEEK blog.

"Is reaching roughly the same audience that's around for three minutes as valuable as reaching an audience that watches" for an hour?

Another good question.

Having declared that TV is dead, Mr. Campbell says broadcast television stays afloat because "the public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old."

"But I wouldn't worry too much about that," he adds.
"Because their business is next."

When Rocketboom sold a week's worth of ads for $40,000 last month, it proved that while there are some advertisers who get it (those who bid for space on Rocketboom), most still do not, according to the blogger JEFF JARVIS of BuzzMachine.com.

Those advertisers "should have been falling over themselves to grab this unique bargain," Mr. Jarvis wrote. "And they should be slinking off with their long tails between their legs now."