Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Thursday, April 20th, 2023

Don't be the Buzzfeed of streaming video

Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Thursday, April 20th, 2023.

DON'T BE THE BUZZFEED OF STREAMING VIDEO
Buzzfeed has announced it is shutting down Buzzfeed News, which is only surprising to people who don't visit the site or spend much time looking at online news. But Buzzfeed has been struggling financially for awhile and it's difficult to see how it manages to extricate itself from its current death spiral of pressure from investors and a changing business model that endangers its entire reason for being.

This isn't an obvious TV industry story, but I would argue that there is a lot the TV industry could learn from the rise and fall of the once-mighty Buzzfeed. And former Buzzfeed News head Ben Smith - who is inexplicably in the middle of launching another media site - posted some thoughts about the shutdown and still seems to a but oblivious to what the problems might have been:

My old boss and partner Jonah Peretti announced today that he’s shutting down BuzzFeed News, which we built together starting in 2012.

He wrote to staff that he’d been ​​”slow to accept that the big platforms wouldn’t provide the distribution or financial support required to support premium-free journalism purpose-built for social media.” And he wrote that he could have managed the many business challenges that BuzzFeed has faced better.

In other words, "our business model was built around distribution through Facebook and other social media and those darn companies wouldn't help us keep printing money."

Smith admits that he made some mistakes, but he blames the revenue problems at Buzzfeed more on the changing face of the Internet and those darn investors who pushed for increased revenues. Instead of the fact that Buzzfeed raised hundreds of millions of dollars it shouldn't have and that decision forced it into making decisions that were driven more by juicing traffic and short-term revenue instead of building the business for the long term. Which sounds a lot like a certain major streamer I know:

Peretti hired me in 2012 to build a news organization for the exploding social web. For a few years, we felt the wind of Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest at our backs, and we did journalism that treated those sites as the front page of the new internet. At first, we celebrated and immersed ourselves in an optimistic web culture that imagined a reader who cared about which Disney princess she was, and also the worst of how the American justice system treated abused women, who wanted to argue about the color of the dress and also understand the science behind it. That was back when all of it mixed up in your Facebook feed, and it felt novel.....

Peretti had built BuzzFeed into a traffic juggernaut by being among the first to see the rising social web. But BuzzFeed never found a new path when that trend turned against us — when consumers found their Facebook feeds toxic, not delightful; when platforms decided news was poison; and when Facebook, Twitter, and the rest simply stopped distributing links to websites.
So what happens to a guy who was at least in part responsible for making decisions that cost hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in value? Well, like several entertainment executives we know (cough, Quibi), the executives move on to the next stage in their career. Which in Smith's case seems to be documenting all of the mistakes everyone else made in his new book:

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about when the tide turned. I have a book coming out in a couple of weeks, called Traffic, that tries to tell the story of the era — the rise of a new kind of digital media in the early 2000s in lower Manhattan. (As my former colleague Katie Notopoulos noted, what incredibly grim timing.)  Much of it is about that turn, between 2015 and 2017, to a darker societal view of social media, to the platforms’ flight from increasingly toxic global politics, and away from the internet BuzzFeed shaped and thrived on. 

Oh, and of course he is helming another media business, although this time he's sure he's not going to make the same mistake:

As we adjust to a new media era at Semafor, where we have focused on building an audience around newsletters and events, what’s left of the web has endured in those surprising, early places.

Those of us lucky enough to be building from scratch in this new moment have to realize that the old way of thinking about news — based in text on the world wide web and distributed primarily on social media — has passed. But the demand to understand what’s happening in the world hasn’t gone away, and the new challenge is to build direct connections with an audience that’s still overwhelmed by the decaying social web, and eager to find great journalism they can trust.

If these comments sound familiar, it's the type of thing you hear all the time from media executives who find all sorts of novel reasons to explain why they didn't make the wrong strategic decisions, it was that pesky unpredictable business model. Or fickle audiences. Or anything else that doesn't include the phrase "I made a mistake."

THIS IS NOT A GREAT GRAPH FOR PRIME VIDEO
At least in terms of engagement, it's not good that so many of Prime Video's Top Ten shows are ones that wrapped their last new episodes months ago...

WHY MAX'S COLOR OF CHOICE IS BLUE
Joe Adalian's new Buffering newsletter for Vulture includes an interview with Pato Spagnoletto, Warner Bros. Discovery’s chief marketing officer and I was fascinated by his explanation of why the branding color for the new streaming service is a darker shade of blue. It's a great example of the amount of time that is spent of things which most subscribers might not even notice on a conscious level:

I also wanted to ask about the color blue. Your design rationale states that, “it’s a popular color that resonates across genders and age groups.” It strikes me — and people have called this out already — that your competition would probably agree: Amazon Prime, Paramount+, Disney+, they all use blue. Max now uses blue.

Look, I think the name and the color, everything is what you make of it. While, yes, there are other services that are in the blue family, and of course we knew that going into this decision, we thought and believed: One, there’s a reason they’re all blue and it’s because of the consumer psychology behind it and how consumers react to the color. But two, when you look at them and more importantly when you look at Max, just in position to the other ones, it’s a very distinct color, it’s a distinct design. Paramount and Prime are a little bit on the lighter side, Disney+ has more of a gradient. But Max has a little bit more of a dark richness into the blue, which was deliberate — intending to signal not just change from HBO Max of the purple, but a much more sustainable premium version of the service. We think the color that we came up with resonates that.

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ODDS AND SODS
* Fox News has parted ways with Unfiltered host Dan Bongino. The host revealed the news on his radio show, explaining the two sides weren't able to come to terms on a new contract.

* Disney+ and Sony Pictures have signed a deal which will bring six Spider-Man movies to the streamer.

* In case you're wondering what to watch this fall, season three of Lupin will premiere on Netflix October 5th.

* ABC has renewed Station 19 for a seventh season. 

TWEET OF THE DAY

WHAT'S NEW FOR THURSDAY:

Abbott Elementary Season Two Finale (ABC)
A View To Kill For (LMN)
Belly Of The Beast (Topic)
Erin & Aaron Series Premiere (Nickelodeon)
Ex-Addicts Club (Netflix)
Fired On Mars Series Premiere (HBO Max)
Funny Or Die's High Science (HBO Max)
Grace Season Three Premiere (BritBox)
Mike Judge’s Beavis And Butt-Head Season Two Premiere (Paramount+)
Mrs. Davis Series Premiere (Peacock)
Picard Season Three Finale (Paramount+)
Quasi (Hulu)
Snowfall Series Finale (FX)
The Ark Season One Finale (Syfy)
The Diplomat Series Premiere (Netflix)
The Price Of Purity (Vice)
To Every You I’ve Loved Before (Crunchyroll)
To Me, The One Who Loved You (Crunchyroll)
Tooth Pari: When Love Bites (Netflix)
Totally Completely Fine Series Premiere (Sundance Now/AMC+)


Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.

SEE YOU FRIDAY!

If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.