WSJ Discovers MTV Online

It is almost as if Mr. Karnitschnig reads our site…just kidding. WSJ has a page-one story about how MTV is not as dominant online, most of which is true to some extent, but comparison can be a bitch: its broadband service MTV Overdrive attracts fewer than four million unique visitors a month, a small fraction of MTV’s 82 million monthly U.S. TV viewers, the story says, and that’s the basis of the story. Not once does it mentions any revenue numbers from MTV’s digital operations…if only the reporter read the Q2 results: overall Viacom generated about $100 million in digital revenues in first six months of this year, with half generated “organically” in-house by MTVN and other Viacom properties; the rest by acquisitions.
Viacom spent about $600 million acquiring several small Internet companies that specialize in short videos and games, but lost MySpace, something this story brings up again, and that it looked at Facebook, Friendster and passed, and then the Live8-AOL-MTV example.
You get the drift..again, another story in the NYT-Forbes.com vein, though not as bad…the bigger points are valid.
Staci adds: One more point about numbers … the comparison between one part of the Viacom/MTV Networks online strategy and all of MySpace, etc., seems a tad off although I understand the temptation. As also was noted in the 2Q06 call, overall, Viacom reached 30 million uniques across its sites in June, up 22 percent from last year. In May, Viacom delivered 250 million steams รข

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