Is TalkTV actually a secret success?
Also: can you work in digital media from anywhere in the world?
Earlier this week, I published a blog on Medium called “What’s your podcast’s potential audience?”.
This was basically written off the back of two things. Firstly, my long-standing frustrations at having to temper the expectations of both corporate and editorial clients about the potential reach of podcasts. This conversation comes up so frequently that I am considering having business cards printed that say: hundreds of listeners is a good result; thousands of listeners is an unlikely result.
But also, I have been watching – like a sicko hawk – the emergence of the UK’s two new conservative news channels, GB News and Talk TV. It is important, when discussing these channels, to note that most of the people who would describe themselves as ‘media watchers’ want these projects to fail. Not to prove any industrial point (indeed it would be a better sign for the health of the media landscape if they succeeded) but because of the schadenfreude of watching right-wing, reactionary punditry meet its maker.
And while it’s far too early for both projects (although, CNN+ lasted only a couple of weeks) it looks increasingly like they’re going to fail. As I noted in my blog:
“Here in the UK, there are about 67m people knocking about, of which about 20% are under the age of 18 and about 5% are over the age of 80. So we’re down to about 50m people at this point. Now to apply some vaguer criteria: let’s say that half of those people have ready access to free-to-air TV (I, for example, don’t have any live TV these days), and only a quarter of them have an interest in news programming. That brings us to about 6m, which is roughly the number of people who watch the evening news on the BBC. The question, therefore, is if the maximum potential audience is, say, 6 or 7 million people, and some 6 or 7 million people are already being served content, what is the reality of your potential audience size?”
A source of particular glee, with regards to the release of TalkTV (a spin-off of TalkRadio, where I’ve done a number of shifts and which constitutes my entire understanding of live radio) is the failure of Piers Morgan to deliver consistent viewing figures. On Wednesday last week he was down to an average of 24,000 viewers (with just 10,000 by the end of the programme), though the next day the figure had bounced back to a healthier 74,000. Bearing in mind that the show started with nearly 400,000 viewers (despite my one-star review in The Independent) the drop-offs have been calamitous. But more interesting, to me at least, has been the defence of this decline.
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