TVloop Blog

Hello everyone!  This being my first crack at writing a post for this blog, I find myself both excited yet cautious, honored but also humbled by the magnitude of the great responsibility bestowed upon me, knowing full well that the consequences of my actions will shape the history of mankind forever.  This is probably not unlike what President Barack Obama (then President-Elect Barack Obama) felt yesterday in the moments leading up to his inauguration as the 44th president of the United States (though admittedly I don’t claim to be his equal in influence or jump shooting).

Eyes and ears across the nation were glued to the television, radio, or as was the case this year, the Internet, for the most comprehensive and engrossing election coverage in the history of the Presidency.  In fact, the Internet coverage of yesterday’s events broke all kinds of records.  Apparently, our friends in the media market also got the memo, as what normally should have been a bustling day for the Watercooler Sales team, chock full of frenzied Q1 wheeling and dealing, took a decidedly subdued tone in the face of the historic occasion.

Luckily for us, the spike in Internet coverage of the Inauguration coincided with a sharp increase in the number of users on our Barack Obama app, which had been seeing steady but unspectacular growth since the election passed.

Whether one event has a direct correlation to the other is debatable, but one thing appears safe to say: even for an application seemingly inconsistent with Watercooler’s traditional TV and Sports offerings, our users are real-life fans first and foremost who will naturally engage with their favorite team, TV program, or even political figure as long as they are given a platform to do so (in our case, social media).

In hindsight, America’s renewed passion and energy surrounding the inauguration is probably an indication of good things to come in the long run.  I’d definitely trade one underwhelming day of sales for building towards the type of economy and infrastructure that will jump start the massive growth of the online media industry that many experts predicted before the recession left them frantically covering their tracks.  Oh, and hovercars.  We were all promised hovercars.

Let’s just say I’m grateful that our servers were capable enough to handle the sudden boost in user traffic, unlike some other two-bit operations out there.

Go America!

TechCrunch has great post today about the growth of Friendster in Asia.  According to Comscore numbers, the trailblazing social network has roughly 30 million unique users worldwide - 28 million of those are in Asia while just under 2 million are in the US.  The company moved it’s headquarters to Australia, and is now staffing up in its offices in Asia in preparation for a big monetization push.

One thing that we don’t talk about much around here since we’re fairly focused on our Facebook and MySpace applications in addition to our TVLoop.com, is that we have sizable number of users on Friendster.  Of the 16 million or so registered members of TVLoop apps, just over 2 million come from Friendster.  Here’s a quick look at the Friendster Top 10:

• Heroes - 363K fans
• Friends - 203K fans
• Gossip Girl - 162K fans
• Prison Break - 161K fans
• Grey’s Anatomy - 161K fans
• America’s Next Top Model - 135K fans
• Smallville - 130K fans
• The Simpsons - 120K fans
• Sex and the City - 97K fans
• CSI - 87K fans

While we haven’t specifically looked at monetizing our users in Asia, it will be interesting to see how Friendster’s monetization efforts progress.  If they’re successful, we’ll definitely take a harder look to see if we can follow suit without impacting our US or European efforts.

While Grey’s Anatomy’s Nielsen Ratings continue to defy gravity, fan engagement within the TVLoop community is definitely down.  Based on the latest data from AppData which tracks monthly usage of Facebook Applications, Grey’s Anatomy has not bounced back from its Holiday Season hiatus.

And it’s not just that current members appear to be visiting the app less, they’re also inviting their friends at a much slower pace than when the 2008-2009 television season started in September.

And then there’s the question of what Grey’s Anatomy fans are doing once they’re in the application.  Those numbers are also trending down across the board with fewer fans rating photos and episodes, taking quizzes, creating trivia questions, etc.  So what’s going on with Grey’s Anatomy which used to be our most active fan based in the TVLoop community? Well for starters, the plot-lines have become fairly ludicrous with Izzy dating two men, one of which is the ghost of the man she inadvertently killed while trying to save his life via an impossible surgical procedure.  Then there’s George who seems to have slept with everyone on the show except for the chief.  And last but not least we have the incessantly whiny character of Meredith who can never seem to catch a break and is not above telling us about it 50 times per episode.  Even the head of programming at ABC has to defend this stuff.  No wonder cast members are leaving in droves. Are fans of the show next? Grey’s still has its ardent supporters ncluding numerous blogs and fan sites like Grey’s Anatomy News and Grey’s Anatomy Insider, but for how much longer.

So what do you think?  Has Grey’s Anatomy officially jumped the shark or will fans re-engage with the show as the season progresses?  Selfishly I hope it’s the latter as it is one of the larger TVLoop communities.

Hitwise recently announced their top ten list of network TV show websites and it’s dominated at the top by reality shows. Below is the chart courtesy of MarketingCharts.com.

The above chart measures the market share in terms of visits for network TV shows for the week ending 1/10/09.  It’s interesting to see the dominance of reality shows as we’ve always been surprised that our users have not embraced that genre more in the TVLoop community.  In fact, the only reality show from the list that we’ve had enough interest for to create a community is American Idol which has ~44K total members across all platforms.  However, that community did show an increase of 1,751 users last week, a 4% increase and good for the #15 spot on the TVLoop Movers and Shakers list.  Conversely, of the five scripted shows on the Hitwise list, four were also on the Movers and Shakers list: Lost, 24, House, and The Office.  And with the highly anticipated premiere of Lost coming next week, we fully expect that community to move up in the weekly rankings in terms of new users.

So the obvious question is why reality shows have not performed as well within the TVLoop community despite their continued popularity on broadcast TV.  I think there are three primary reasons:

1. TVLoop communities are a way for users to express their fandom and they don’t always want to admit to watching reality shows.

2. TVLoop communities are used for a variety of activities, but discussion forums and posts are very popular.  Scripted shows lend themselves to that sort of activity while reality shows do not.

3. TVLoop communities grow virally through friend invitations.  Since reality shows don’t appeal to everyone, friends are less likely to invite their friends to the Survivor community than they are to the Lost community.

We’ll continue to track how TVLoop community data matches up against Hitwise and other stat providers over the course of the second half of this TV season.

FX recently pulled full-length episodes of it’s show, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia from Hulu with little explanation regarding the reason.  That of course then impacted the ~30,000 TVLoop fans of the show.  The rationale is likely due to revenue protection as the perception within big media is that online video cannibalizes broadcast viewers which in turn leads to a decrease in advertising revenue for those broadcasts while also leading to lower DVD sales.  Whatever the case, the show has now temporarily returned to Hulu, but for how long no one seems to know.  As Silicon Alley Insider points out, this inescapable reliance on content owners is a key downside for Hulu as it strives to service the needs of its visitors.  I suppose the assumption can be made that Hulu will never lose FOX or NBC content, but the risk is there nonetheless.

The biggest question that Silicon Alley Insider ponders is whether the lack of official online episodes increases the likelihood that consumers will find other means for consuming that content.  From what I’ve seen within the TVLoop applications, the answer is a resounding YES.  While we currently offer users the ability to stream full episodes from ABC.com, Hulu, and Joost which basically gives us content from the four main networks, those videos are only available to US users.  And trust me, we hear a lot of “feedback” from international users that they most definitely are not pleased with that arrangement.  Of course if it were up to me, the episodes would be available worldwide immediately.  But given the complexity involved with negotiating international copyright as well as the sheer amount of dollars involved with said negotiations, I don’t anticipate that problem being solved anytime in the near future despite Hulu’s assertions to the contrary.  So does that mean our international users are out of luck when it comes to watching their favorite American sitcom?  Not hardly.  I see forum posts daily  within TVLoop applications with recommendations and tips on where said content can be located.  By no means do we advocate piracy, but TVLoop is a user-generated community and people are more than willing to help their fellow fans get access to the content they so desperately desire. My recommendation to content owners is to solve this problem sooner rather than later or the revenue fears will become a self fulfilling prophecy.