While CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox dominate broadcast airwaves, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Google make the Internet play for viewership and advertising dollars.
The clicking of the remote control may be replaced by the click of a mouse button. That’s the hope of several Internet sites and the advertisers who buy space on them.
To keep the ad revenue flowing in, sites need to keep their viewers hanging around and delving into more pages. It’s like the broadcast TV model where the TV companies try to get viewers to tune in at 8 pm and stick around through prime time.
But more users have made a change in their households to broadband Internet access, giving them the means to handle richer online content than in the past. With that adoption taking place, web sites have turned to a variety of places to fill the need for content.
Yahoo, with 100 million visitors per month, has brought on a music show called Pepsi Smash from the WB. Yahoo CEO Terry Semel formerly worked at Warner Brothers, so this addition may be the first of several from that studio.
AOL, after years of keeping its content tucked away within its subscriber-based service, spent a year and thousands of dollars changing the way it codes its content. Now, AOL is poised to make virtually all of that content freely available online, with a web site loaded with video feeds.
Also, AOL has 15 Web shows in development, according to USAToday.com, overseen by former ABC programmer Lloyd Braun. Much of its Silicon Valley-based staff now works in LA at the former home of MGM Studios.
MSN and Google haven’t become big video sites yet. MSN offers some MSNBC highlights on MSN Video, while Google works on its Google Video service. Both services want to broaden their video horizons.
Video programming isn’t the only component to these sites, of course, and it may not be the most important driving factor behind their traffic. E-mail, instant messaging, and search all have something of an interactive aspect to them, and those are the pieces that sites think will keep a visitor connected to a site.
But with advertising revenue expected to balloon from last year’s $12 billion USD take to $26 billion in 2010, according to Forrester Research, the players on the Web need to do all they can to keep those eyeballs on their sites for just one more click.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
