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The secret to instant online popularity was presented in vivid PowerPoint at last week's Online Developers IV Conference in San Francisco. Refreshingly, it didn't involve purchasing Yahoo, dabbling in porn, or Sanford Wallace. Depressingly, the traffic-spewing tool of the future turned out to be beyond the budgets of most hit-hungry webmasters. No matter what the cover of Wired may suggest, it's still pricey to buy yourself a successful television network. And as it turns out, nailing mammoth usage stats requires that very hammer.
Most of the assorted panelists on "Channels of Convergence: Evolving Toward Net-Enabled Television" were fortunate enough to have a broadcast channel or two at their disposal. As they each demonstrated in turn, this provides them with a weapon not unlike a Gatling gun, in that it requires little by way of aim to achieve desirable carnage. Edmond Sanctis, senior VP of NBC Digital, spoke at length about techniques for herding TV viewers online, using as the most memorable example a clip from the season finale of Profiler. Essentially, it was a five-minute montage of screenshots displaying the villain's URL, www.jackotrades.com. As proof that NBC users are intellectually and technically capable of taking a hint, traffic stats showing an immediate 1200 percent traffic spike (that's 200,000 new users in a week) filled the screen.
Before the crowd could wonder what obscure theory of branding would be brought into play to justify the expense of creating and promoting revenue-free NBC Web sites, even widely visited ones, Sanctis unveiled NBC's newest service: promotional Web-site development for their advertisers, presumably for a large briefcase full of cash. Aiming for a 22 September rollout, NBC will create the site to accompany Levi's "They Go On" campaign, developing the madcap slackers from the serial ads as only the creators of Suddenly Susan could. And if the "They Go On" experiment fails to go over, there's always ER Backstage Live. And if the blustering about demand alchemy was more fact than figment - and it's easy to believe it is - NBC had better apply an extra blast of WD-40 to their RealVideo servers tomorrow evening.
As VPs from the Discovery Channel and E! held forth on similar successes, a fascinating undercurrent developed. The converging future they were all predicting seems to have already happened. The common thread of all their case studies was an instant traffic spike upon airing their URLs, suggesting that a healthy portion of their TV audience surf while they watch. And here we thought you and I were the only ones!
A real convergence of television and the Internet, it seems, is being wrought right now, driven most likely by the respective aggravations of each medium. The Web has its wait, television has its Nissan ads - and nobody is overly fond of either. Today, the wedge between the two is about as large as the gap between the screens in your bedroom, and broadcasters are inadvertently leveraging flagging attention spans to great effect. When one of these screens disappears - as everyone on the panel seemed to be hoping for - the promotional advantage will be lost, as the seemingly dual audiences become singular once again. And as the "television vs. the Web" duel retreats from the main stage, "television vs. the remote" will return to its place in the limelight. As with "the Web vs. the mouse," instant solutions may prove harder to come by, and once found, hard to box in.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
