As we talked about yesterday – the Wall Street Journal noted ABCNews has been having some trouble getting traction for its World News webcast. For one day earlier this week, only 150k pageviews out of 7.8 million total went to the webcast. A Lost Remote commenter pointed out that the webcast is often in the top 5 of “newscast podcasts” and says this is how many people watch the webcast.
Right now, the webcast is #76 overall on iTunes. Among newscast podcasts, it ranks #18 – and sixth among video newscast podcats. The other five video podcasts that beat it are all comprised of repurposed material. This further illustrates that dropping money into an original podcast isn’t a good use of resources.
An MSNBC.com spokesperson tells me the Wall Street Journal’s notion that broadcast networks can’t move their viewers to the website “in part because they are older,” doesn’t line up with NBC’s experience.
“It’s about not about ‘moving’ viewers to the Web,” MSNBC.com’s Gina Stikes wrote. “Many are already there. It’s about engaging them on their own terms, on their own turf.”
In May, MSNBC.com served 15.7 million Nightly News videos, up 71% year-over-year after a massive video-centric revamp of the Nightly News site.
But this isn’t about how one site is doing better than the other. It’s about approach. NBC takes a sledgehammer to its content each night, breaking it into a ton of bite size pieces – and makes it easy to digest as much or as little as you want. Having a talking-head throw to videos doesn’t seem to be an approach. Providing as many little individual nuggets as possible has more potential success in the long run.