Conversant Media

Will TV audiences return after summer?

Zac — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 04:27:04 +0000

Each year, for some bizaar reason understood only by free to air TV executives, the TV stations go into a ‘non-ratings’ period. Over the summer, audiences aren’t officially ‘rated’ or tracked. As a result, the free to air brigade fill our airwaves with B quality content. Think: Hogan’s Heroes repeats.

Consider this: the top 10 shows in Australia are currently attracting as few as 700,000 viewers nationally compared with over two million for Packed to the Rafters last month (during ratings season). This is a decrease of almost 3 fold.

This scheduling insult to TV audiences may have been acceptable in an age without choice. But the internet has changed this. Consumers now have serious amounts of choice.

Hulu.com is leading the charge. Hulu hosts more than 1,000 shows with over 130 content providers - not only NBC and Fox, but Sony Pictures Television, MGM Studios, Lionsgate, Paramount Pictures and PBS. The site also offers full-length films.

Hulu’s unique visitors for October was 24 million according to ComScore. On average, a visitor watches 10 videos on Hulu each month. These are impressive numbers indeed. While not yet available in Australia, the impact of the Hulu model will be felt strongly within the TV industry.

Executives can no longer take for granted a return of eyeballs once the summer period is over.

While they may come back this summer, sooner or later there will be a dramatic moment where the free to air numbers fall of a cliff. At that point, the convergence of your TV device with your PC will come together at a rate of knots.

Until then, I’m off to catch some Hogan’s Heroes on TV. “Hoo-oo-gan!!”

Is Google becoming our collective brain?

Zac — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 00:00:17 +0000

By some estimates, Google has over half a million servers that each month crunch the equivalent of all the data in the entire library of congress 240 times over. Well over half of web users go to Google for answers to their questions, asking the machine over 400 million queries per day. Slowly but surely, Google is becoming our collective brain. Consider this: Google can now predict flu outbreaks weeks in advance simply by monitoring searches for flu terms (’sore throat’), and aggregating this based on location. They’ve launched this service as Google Flu Trends. ‘From a technological perspective, it is the beginning’, says Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive. So where is this is all heading?

If we accept that Google is becoming the repository of all our information (via its enormous web archive of over 25 billion pages), and the collector of all our questions (via our 400 million search queries a day), it’s not a such big step to argue that by owning the input and the output, it’s becoming a collective world brain.

If Google can predict flu outbreaks, presumably its engineers can also pull back our collective mood (the world is ‘grumpy’ based on search terms), hopes, dreams and more.

Should Google become a collective asset for the world to harness in non-commercial ways?

Judging by Yahoo’s top searches for 2008 (with Britney Spears at number one), Yahoo is its teen sibling.

[Note: I first published this over at Lost At E Minor]

We’re hiring

Zac — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:00:18 +0000

Conversant Media are looking for a world class Commercial Director and a Digital Marketing Manager to join the team. Key to the roles will be growing our ad revenue and traffic as well as working with the team to build a new division which will increase the inventory we have to sell and position us [...]

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Go on, drink your Stolli!

Zolton — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 18:30:01 +0000

We have some cool campaigns running across the sites at the moment, including flashy (yes, literally) ones from Stolli and Scion Installation Five, the art series that will soon be taking Miami’s Art Basel by storm. The Sydney Festival are running a nice series of spots too, calling out some of the more interesting events taking place in this major artistic celebration in early 2009. Later this week we begin a new campaign for Jamesons, a fine drop, if we do say so ourselves. So, all up, these are busy times. No wonder we seem to have alcohol on the mind so often. Hmmm, now where is that shot glass of mine?

My Secret Playlist features Katy Perry

Zolton — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:10:14 +0000

We were lucky enough to get hold of (not literally, I might point out) the delightful British chanteuse Katy Perry to compile a Secret Playlist for our My Secret Playlist website recently, and it’s an awesome collection of songs that she’s written about for us. Any clues? Well, no actually. You’ll just have to go [...]

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Some exciting Roar developments

Zolton — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:50:32 +0000

Two new high profile columnists join the Roar writing team
Geoff ‘Henry’ Lawson has joined The Roar as a new columnist. As a former Test cricketer with 46 Test caps, a Fairfax columnist, and currently Pakistan coach, Henry’s sure to add some great cricketing insights for our readers. Read Henry’s first article: Playing cricket in Pakistan is the safest of occupations

We’re also delighted to announce that Stuart MacGill, a 44 Test veteran, will also be writing for The Roar starting Wednesday. Having played with the current team in India, MacGill will bring deep insight into the Aussie team over the summer.

These high profile writers join our growing list of expert columnists and ‘Roar of the crowd’ amateur writers which make The Roar the leading sports opinion site in Australia.

Fancy a new flatscreen TV anyone?
For those sports lovers looking for a brand-new LG TV - simply tell us your favourite Australian sporting moment. The best entry will win one of these beautiful flatscreens provided by our friends at LG.

Enter here: Tell us your favourite sporting moment and win a LG TV

My Secret Playlist

Zolton — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:23:28 +0000

We’re seven issues now into our latest email newsletter publication, My Secret Playlist, where we invite a different guest musician each week to write about their favourite eight songs. It’s been a lot of fun putting the issues together and seeing the reactions we’re getting from our readers. So far we’ve had the likes of Zia from the Dandy Warhols, The B52s, The Presets, and Moby compile issues, amongst several others, and we have some quality acts still to come, including … wait for it … Ms Donna Summer. Yup, she of glistening sequines, mirror balls and moonlit disco. Oh yeah! Who said polyester was dead?

Technology We Use

admin — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:38:04 +0000

We’re huge supporters of open source and use open source technology whenever we can (which is most of the time). We serve our publications to over a million visitors each year using Wordpress, which is an amazing platform for publications and websites. We’ve some clever things with it, including building profiles and sports tipping competitions for The Roar. Profiles group an authors articles, comments, favourite content into a single place. An example can be seen on Spiro Zavos’ profile.

Need some advice on creating your own successful website or publication? Just give us a shout.