Death or dying and the network model
The early days of the Internet saw the rise of great portals – Amazon, Yahoo, eBay – mighty all-in-one stop-and-shops designed to attract and hold great chunks of the Internet audience. In today’s much more crowded and saturated environment, it’s nearly impossible to repeat such a feat.
The network model seems to be a smarter play these days: roll out a bunch of sites, each of which is specifically designed to attract some niche or piece of the fragmented marketplace – and see which ones “stick.” And FunnyOrDie.com, an edgy-ish comedy site that is part of Or Die Networks, has done pretty well as the centerpiece of a network of sites based on the “or die” brand. ShredOrDie.com for instance, a skateboarding and extreme sports site backed by legend Tony Hawk, seems to have as good a shot at gaining traction in the crowded original content space as anyone else.
FunnyOrDie.com made a big splash thanks to the help of comic actor Will Ferrell, whose video short called The Landlord is already a modern Internet legend, racking up some 58 million views and counting. So attaching celebrities to original video content and aiming it at niche audiences seems to be a pretty reasonable starting place for future success in 2008.
But the trick with celebrities and producing original content is that they’re expensive. Today we learn that one of the ODN sites, BlueCollarOrDie.com, is shutting down in part due to the expense of keeping the new content rolling. Of course, the kind of content that Blue Collar emphasized – down home comedians such as Jeff Foxworthy, Larry the Cable Guy, Ron White and Bill Engvall – may not have been perfect for the Internet or the ODN brand.
But my overall takeaway is that the network model works in that you roll out a bunch of sites and see which ones succeed. Inevitably if sadly you shut down the ones that aren’t doing as well. It’s the Internet content business as magazine business, and it makes a lot of sense. The challenge for video-based networks like ODN is to figure out how to get the cost of producing original video in line with making money from video ads, sponsorships, and traditional banner advertising.
