The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman

Deadline.com’s Nikki Finke and The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman have not been all that shy about feuding in public.  Finke must’ve been miffed that Waxman more or less got the Comcast/NBC Uni story correct since  Finke initially called out Waxman for having it wrong.  The burning question now is if and when the deal gets done whether Waxman will bust out a big fat TOLDJA! headline.

Finke rapped the well-funded Wrap’s relatively small web traffic.   Indeed, trying to cash in on web traffic is a dicey proposition these days.  The Wrap would likely have a hard time paying its bills  even if it increased its normal traffic by more than an order of magnitude.

But I wouldn’t write Waxman or The Wrap off  yet either.  Web publishing might be pretty iffy, but if The Wrap can figure out a way to make money off of conferences, who knows?  Conferences are where the money is! Unfortunately I am not a big fan of even attending conferences, and though Bill doesn’t loathe attending them, I don’t think he has any interest in trying to run one.

Anyway, we regularly look at the Quantcast data for sites that directly measure like The Wrap, and Deadline.com.

I was looking at the numbers for The Wrap, and they had a big spike on Tuesday!  Perhaps not quite a TOLDJA! moment for The Wrap, but it had to bring them some joy nonetheless:

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Hurray!  The trade publications are finally getting around to writing about “TV Everywhere” and now at least mentioning that the plan is to include the same ad load as on TV.

Advertising Age has a good primer on it, including juicy nuggets like this:

What’s the ad model
A TV-length commercial ad load disables fast-forwarding, due to increased frustration among programmers who are selling top-tier TV shows with a third of their on-air ads online. Jack Wakshlag, chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting, said a typical on-air episode of “The Closer” runs 18 ads*, which is why it makes little to no revenue sense for the network to run the same episode online with a third of the same commercials against it. “If I can get 4.5 times my TV CPM online [the cost to advertisers to reach 1,000 viewers], I’d be happy and wouldn’t need to do anything,” he said. “But nobody’s getting four times TV CPMs online. Nobody at Hulu’s getting twice the TV CPMs. If people who already watch the show see it with a full commercial load, it’s still a chance to catch up on shows they miss.”

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all prose and data via Experian Hitwise: 

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Update: my simple methods of modeling might overstate the number of ads by as many as 4-10 commercial spots, depending on what percentage of the ads are typically local rather than national spots, and what percentage is allocated to network promos.  The local ad load (even if the ads are for national brands) would  likely not be included.  I’m not sure what they will do with network promos.

We recently learned that the television networks’ plans with all the talk of  Nielsen competitors and convergence measurements were based on a pretty simple philosophy: for the first 3 days videos of shows are available online they will carry exactly the same national commercial loads as on television. The networks want to be able to charge for them online as well as offline.

So what is currently five or six spots when you’re watching Heroes on NBC.com or Hulu would balloon to around thirty-two thirty second spots if things go according to the plan.  That’s more than five times the commercials you currently have to endure online.

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Video and audio streaming from sites such as YouTube and Hulu now accounts for about 27% of the Internet’s global traffic — up from 13% in 2008 — while consumption by peer-to-peer applications has dropped as a percentage of the total, according to a report by network-management systems vendor Sandvine.

Peer-to-peer file sharing represented 20% of all usage on the 2009 survey of 20 Internet service providers worldwide, compared with 32% in 2008. Even though the amount of traffic consumed by P2P applications continues to grow on an absolute basis, video-on-demand applications are growing more quickly, Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo said.

more on MultiChannel News

Comcast Corp.’s chief operating officer, Steve Burke, issued a warning to those content providers who sit by idly and complain about online viewing without doing something to change the TV business model. “An entire generation is growing up, if we don’t figure out how to change that behavior so it respects copyright and subscription revenue on the part of distributors, we’re going to wake up and see cord cutting.”

He said the current OnDemand Online trial – offering viewers access to cable channel shows in exchange for identifying themselves as subscribers – was not an effort to “change the advertising model or get a minute back from content providers,” rather it is a way to “get in front of the biggest social movement I’ve ever seen. Online video consumption is off the charts.”

[...]

“I’ve yet to meet a content provider who doesn’t worry about cord cutting and doesn’t see the wisdom of trying to get ahead of that. Stop talking about how hard it is and start figuring it out,” he said.

Much, much more from Broadcasting & Cable’s Claire Atkinson

Robert nailed it yesterday when he cautioned against overreaction to recent remarks about Hulu.com going to a paid model.

A spokesman for Hulu is already “explaining” the recent remarks:

“Hulu’s mission has always been to help people find and enjoy the world’s premium, professionally produced content,” the rep said. “We continue to believe that the ad-supported free service is the one that resonates with the largest group of users and any possible new business models would serve to complement our existing offering. There are no details or timelines to share regarding our future product roadmap.”

via MediaWeek.

Reports out of the Broadcasting & Cable “OnScreen summit” yesterday quoted News Corp deputy chairman Chase Carey saying Hulu could begin charging for services as early as 2010.

People don’t need to get too worked up about this if they read all his comments.  The big problem Hulu has is it can’t charge for stuff that ABC, NBC and FOX online properties are giving away.  If that happens, they might as well fold up shop because people will just go directly to the networks web sites and watch for free.

But Carey seems to understand this according to Broadcasting & Cable’s Claire Atkinson:

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