Message From Michael - Jan 26th - White House Technology

SO, HOW MANY WATCHED

INAUGURATION VIEWING SIDE NOTES

FROM XBOX TO ATARI

THINK GLOBALLY; ACT GLOBALLY

THE 600 POUND GORILLA

WHO DO YOU BELIEVE

FROM A KING TO A JACK

SUPER BOWL COCKTAIL CHATTER



SO, HOW MANY WATCHED: As we noted in last week’s MfM, we may never know how many people watched the inauguration. According to Nielsen Media Research, an estimated 37.8 Million Americans watched the event across the 14 broadcast and cable networks airing the coverage throughout the day. Nielsen should release the Live +7 viewing shortly. Regardless, that puts it just behind the Ronald Regan inauguration viewing in 1981 (which, if I read the numbers right, was about 41 Million). Of course that doesn’t take into account online viewing. Nielsen Online reports that visits to Current Events and Global News sites jumped significantly on Election Day, and based on my addition of just the top ten sites, that puts another 48.5 Million unique visitors into the mix. The top three sites were CNN (11 Million), MSNBC (10M) and Yahoo News (9M). After that it drops dramatically to the number four spot with Fox (4M). Further add into the mix viewing on YouTube where CSpan’s video of the inauguration and address drew 3.2 Million views and CNN’s coverage another half million. And that’s to say nothing about the record 2 Million people who actually turned out in person.

INAUGURATION SIDE NOTES: Five of the top ten videos viewed on inauguration day were directly related to the events of that day. No surprise there, but a little surprising is that his actual inauguration address came in at seventh place. The most linked-to video on inauguration day? Martin Luther King’s I Have A Dream. Two of the other popular videos that day were The Presidential Pledge produced by celebrities Ashton Kucher and Demi Moore on MySpace; and on YouTube, it’s will.i.am’s Yes, We Can which has had more than 16 Million views. An oddity in the mix – even with all the political hoopla of the day, the third most linked-to video was the YouTube Street Fighter video game. The biggest beneficiaries of the Election Day coverage were the digital networks of ABC and CBS which nearly doubled their unique audience on that day. And despite all the furor surrounding the dominance of Google and the decline of Yahoo, the actual Yahoo News website drew five times the unique audience (9 Million) of Google News (1.8M).

FROM XBOX TO ATARI: That’s how White House spokesman Bill Burton described the media technology he and others in the Obama administration used to have, compared to what they found waiting for them at the White House. In an article headlined Staff Finds White House in Technological Dark Ages in The Washington Post, reporter Anne E. Kornblut says the tech-savvy “iPhone” Obama people found themselves in a rotary dial world. The Macintosh-toting Obama-ites found themselves working with Microsoft products and six year old Microsoft products at that. Of course, the reporter notes the Bush transition team arrived in 2001 to find computers with letters missing from the keyboards, and that in 2005 Bush’s Internet director didn’t get a PDA or even a computer for a week. The WhiteHouse.gov website has undergone a transformation, with a cleaner, more Web 2.0 design. In my usual anal retentive fashion, I saved the WhiteHouse.gov site as it looked under the Bush administration and compared it with the Obama administration site. (More analysis on that later.) Much more telling though is a report by WebProNews that the Obama administration has un-blocked the website, allowing access to search engine spiders such as Google. They did a test of the site Monday when it was still in Bush administration control and found the robot.txt file, allowing search engine access, was ‘disallowed’ more than 24-hundred times, even though the information was public information, not just about defense and budget issues but things like African American history and the First Lady’s initiatives. After the Obama administration took over the amount of such ‘disallows’ was basically reduced to zero.

THINK GLOBALLY; ACT GLOBALLY: And that’s what more people are doing every day as the Global Internet audience passes a milestone of sorts with more than One Billion visitors worldwide. China confirmed its position as the country with the largest online audience (179.7 Million unique visitors, comprising 17.8% of the total Worldwide Internet Audience), according to comScore World Metrix. The U.S.A. came in second (163.3 Million and 16.2%). Rounding out the top five are Japan (60 M and 6%), Germany (37 M and 3.7%) and the United Kingdom (36.6 M and 3.6%). China’s economic rival, India, came in seventh behind France, with a lowly 32 Million unique visitors comprising only 3.2% of the world internet audience. Despite its huge Internet audience, leading Chinese website Baidu.com came in 14th in the list of worldwide properties (with a worldwide reach of ‘only’ 15.1%), well behind Google (77%), Microsoft (64.2%) and Yahoo (55.8%) sites.

THE SIX HUNDRED POUND GORILLA: That’s what the print version of The New York Times is to the online version, or at least it seems that way based on an analysis of revenue projections by digital content research firm ContentNext Media. And that is not good news. In order to meet the ‘offline revenues’ projected for the fourth quarter of $300 Million, the Times would have to boost its monthly page views to – get this – 1.3 Billion a month; and it would have to get a CPM (cost per thousands) of $25. At present it averages about 173 Million page views a month, according to comScore. Do the math. That translates into a six or seven fold increase in page views. Just to confuse the mix even more, let’s add some more figures into the mix. The print product has a subscription base of about One Million people daily (1.4 Million on Sunday). BTW, the ContentNext analysis assumed a print CPM of $58. On Inauguration day, NYTimes.com scored 2.4 Million unique visitors, up from the average of 1.7 Million daily uniques. Also, remember the difference – page views versus unique visitors – a point that raises questions about online measurement metrics. And just to confuse you more, let’s do some more math. According to Nielsen Online, the average person goes online an average 57 times a month and views an average of 2,345 pages a month. So, the uniques times page views ‘might’ indicate the Billion-plus page views is do-able, and, of course, Yahoo News and AOL News both do just about that number monthly. But most analysts are not counting on it. Lastly add into the mix the fact that the Times has about $1 Billion in debt and $46 Million in assets, according to an article in The Atlantic which raises the question whether the venerable media icon may be facing a quicker and more painful online transition.

WHO DO YOU BELIEVE? Two reports with apparently contradictory conclusions raise questions about viewing. According to online video tracking site TubeMogul, the vast majority of people watch online videos for only a few seconds at the most. The folks at TubeMogul said they did their own study because many online video sites, such as YouTube, count it as a view even though it may only be a few seconds. They looked at 188,000 videos, streamed 22 Million times on six video sites (YouTube was not included.) Nine out of ten people watched a piece of video for less than ten seconds. Let me repeat that – 90% of those videos were 10 second snackables. About half (46.4%) were watched for a full minute, but only one in ten (9.4%) got a full five minutes viewing. The folks at TubeMogul say that raises serious questions about the effectiveness of post-roll ads. Meanwhile a survey by increasingly popular video website Hulu.com (which, BTW, was not included in the TubeMogul study) found that, when given the option, the vast majority of people (88%) SAY they would prefer to watch a two-minute commercial rather than four 30-second spots.

FROM A KING TO A JACK: Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ve got the country song lyrics backwards, but there’s a reason. Country music has officially fallen to second place behind News/ Talk as the number one radio format in the country, albeit by a slim margin. According to insideradio.com and M Street publications, there were 2,056 news/talk stations on air at the end of last year, compared to 2,027 country stations. The next most popular format? Religion, with 1,288 stations labeled as “religion.” BUT if you add the other associated formats (Gospel, Black Gospel, Southern Gospel and Contemporary Christian), the total stations would be 2,861. In actual fact, there are 31 different formats listed, ranging from Classic Rock (483 stations) and Classic Hits (568). And how they differ from Oldies (728), I don’t know. Add to that Adult Contemporary (676) and Adult Standards (361); Alternative Rock (378) and Modern Rock (173); Classical (179) and Jazz (127). Some of the least popular formats are Easy Listening (25), Modern AC (Adult Contemporary – 22), R&B/ Adult (39) and Rhythmic AC (22). And, no, I don’t know what Rhythmic AC is.

SUPER BOWL COCKTAIL CHATTER: Last year’s face-off between the Patriots and Giants was viewed by 97.5 Million people nationwide, making it, as usual, the most watched TV event of the year and in actual fact the highest rated Super Bowl of all time and the 2nd highest rated telecast of all time (just behind the MASH special of 1983). Super Bowl Games account for 17 of the top 20 telecasts of all time. The highest rated commercial minute in last year’s game was the Victoria Secret spot, seen by 103.7 Million viewers. Last year a spot cost $2.7 Million and total spending for the game reached over $195 Million. This year the spots run $3 Million. Under NFL rules, networks carrying the Super Bowl are restricted to five minutes of air time for promotion, according to TVWeek. Super Bowl advertisers saw a 24% jump in Web traffic after the game while half-time performers Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers saw sales of their album jump 196%. The Super Bowl is the 8th largest beer-selling event each year, according to the stats provided by Nielsen Media. More than 60% of the U.S. population (138 Million adults) claim to be NFL fans, and those fans are more likely to be in the higher income, higher education bracket AND (as Nielsen points out) more likely to have a “softer side” to them – buying 74% more skin products than the average American.

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