This week, I’m at the Edinburgh TV Festival. As well as doing two sessions, I’ll attend as many others as I can, and will cherry pick themes and observations to share with you that I believe will be helpful to you all. There is so much coming up - commissioner sessions, the MacTaggart lecture with YouTube’s Pedro Pina, a recording of The Town with Matt Belloni, an interview with Gary Oldman… and far more besides.
However, all that is to come, so I thought I’d share my talk from a session called ‘Beyond the Hype’ which happened yesterday on the first day of the festival. This was followed by a great discussion with:
Ian Whittaker, Founder and Managing Partner, Liberty Sky Advisors and co-host of podcast Unfiltered Media
Dan Jones, CEO of Little Dot Studios Group which includes the creator business History Hit
Manori Ravindran, London Correspondent for The Ankler.
Our goal was to move beyond the headlines and pull back the curtain on some of the realities of building online businesses, and hopefully making the case why it is essential for everyone in TV to understand the economics and conflicting priorities of tech companies, TV businesses as well as advertisers and IP owners. I’ll share some observations from this discussion in a future post.
The reason I pitched this session to the festival team is because I believe at times our industry discussions can end up dominated by several sentiments, which aren’t helping us achieve clarity or build an informed shared understanding of our new, converged market:
The PR talking points of individual companies or technologies become adopted and disseminated (often unwittingly)
Any question marks or criticism is seen as either Luddism, dinosaurism or the protection of established vested interests (and yet this doesn’t apply in reverse despite many people having a lot riding on the success of particular companies or new technologies)
The highlighting of individual success stories as proof that a tech or platform model is universally superior
The focus on vanity metrics over revenues and profitability
The general sense and foreboding that if you don’t get on the train, then you will be left behind (if you haven’t already).
And so, it is important for us all to consciously acknowledge the role of hype and PR, and then collectively push ourselves along this process from hype to normality. This isn’t to say particular technologies or companies are ‘bad’ or ‘good’, rather they should be treated with a similar level of critical thinking as we do for broadcasters, production companies, distributors and so on.
Why is this important? A whole host of people and companies - big and small - are making all sorts of decisions about the future. However this can at times be based on beliefs that come from tech companies, which are in turn part of an industrial culture steeped in hype narratives. Where big subscriber counts or video views are thrown around, but with little flesh on the bones when it comes to profitability and how the money actually works. It is also important to recognise that certain metrics might be great for companies like YouTube, Meta or the streamers, however that doesn’t necessarily translate to being good news for individual channel owners or content producers.
I work with many production companies, and when doing seminars on this theme, there is something of a sigh of relief when you start to pull back the curtain on some of the practicalities of working online – almost as confirmation that they were right to be confused that big audience numbers doesn’t necessarily seem to deliver meaningful income.
Indeed, when speaking with many producers about direct-to-consumer/social video/podcasting, there can be a knowledge gap that platforms like YouTube alone aren’t likely to enable a profitable operation thanks to the economics of the advertising model. And that this is why creator businesses look to other sources of income rather than just advertising, such as brand partnerships, subscriptions, merch, live events and more. This is because running a multi-revenue stream strategy is usually essential to get the economics to make sense.
So with all that preamble, here is my talk. And if you are interested in me coming and talking to your teams on similar subjects (or just a 121 conversation), please do get in touch.
