We shouldn’t worry too much about this moderately alarmist story that shows overall awareness of Hulu.com, the streaming programming site that’s co-owned by Fox and NBC, stands at just about 15 percent. After all, that 15 percent is made up early adopters and influencers. The average age, according to the research, is 32 years old and male, the an income that is 22 percent above the U.S. average. So it’s actually quite a big number, when you take the right perspective on the numbers.
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CBS says that its’ online streaming programming brings in 46 percent of its TV audience. CBS has been among the most aggressive in syndicating its shows on other sites as a way to meet the audience where they are instead of putting so much energy into getting the people to come to their site. More importantly to some extent is that watching the shows online does not seem to be something that turns people off of watching the shows on TV.
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The CW thought that by pulling streaming episodes of “Gossip Girl” from its website the audience would be forced to go to the TV broadcasts to see it. Turns out what actually happened was that the audience just continued to disappear anyway, leading the network to concede defeat and put the episodes back online.
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Streaming video site Qik is now out of private beta and has moved into public beta testing is especially popular with people who like to produce short video because it allows you to send it to the web directly from your video-enabled mobile device. The public beta launch brings with it support for devices from a number of different carriers, meaning the number of people who could potentially use this increases dramatically. There are other players in this video-from-mobile-to-web space but . QikQik has a lot of credibility among early adopters and could be the one that breaks through into broader usage.
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Wikipedia, one of the most consistent points of discussion in the life of a social media marketing practitioner, is toying with the idea of adding an editorial layer on the top of its “anyone can edit anything” philosophy. That would drastically change the landscape and more or less completely violate one of the site’s core principles. But that sort of organization and management is likely necessary if Wikipedia intends to continue its dominance and become more respected.
The move would also make the site and its entries, if not friendly to, at least slightly less hostile to marketer’s involvement. If there were factual inaccuracies or other quantifiable and identifiable problems with a company’s entry there would at least be an authority of some sort to turn to in order to address the problem and settle any disputes.
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At the same time that’s happening, Google has officially launched Knols, their self-edited “knowledge” pages that allow people to create information hubs on a topic they have some sort of expertise in. It’s being positioned as a Wikipedia competitor but I’m not seeing that in any regard since they seem to have more in common with Squidoo or someone’s “About” page on their own blog. I’m spectacularly unimpressed.
