Thursday, September 15, 2011

All About the Buzz


In Medias Res staff was asked: "What drives revenue growth in this industry (i.e. more units sold, expanding geographic reach, lower costs for manufacturing, etc.)?"

It’s hard to chart revenue growth in the media industry when only some of the money comes from units sold (i.e. ticket sales, DVD-s, Blu-Rays, CD-s, books merchandise). According to RevenueRecognition.com, “newspapers get their lion’s share of revenue from advertisers.” The same goes for magazines and other periodicals, as well as cable TV broadcasting. A lot of the revenue growth comes from marketing the products on television and the internet and sharing ad-space for other products and industries. The more that the public pays attention, the more they are exposed to advertising. And so, the media industry grows.

But it’s not as easy as just having some well-placed ads. Back in the times of Charlie Chaplin, all you needed to sell out your show or newspaper was a cute, scrappy kid standing on a soap-box, calling all the ladies and gents to attention.

To draw a crowd in this industry you need to create a buzz. Today, many people are very vocal about their preferences- if only because to express views today, all you have to do is click the “Like” option on Facebook. Well, it is this sort of online acceptance that is giving branches of the media industry credit where it’s due.

On Paid Content, a poll is displayed (complements of Trendrr, a social measurement company) showing howoften companies are being mentioned on blogs or on Twitter. They compiled a tidy list of 50 popular companies and brands and how often they have been mentioned in the blogs of hipsters and Tweets of tweens.

This representation of “popularity,” while very non-traditional, seems to be pretty indicative of what’s on people’s minds. Of course, the data doesn’t show whether the comments on blogs and Twitter were positive or negative- which is ok, considering that, in this business especially, all publicity is good publicity! It’s buzz like this that brings in revenue to an industry that relies so heavily on advertisement.

4 comments:

  1. Paid Content is an interesting idea. I'm glad you point out how important advertising is as this will come up a lot during your project.

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  2. Iulia,
    I totally think that what drives revenue has everything to do these days with media. Facebook and Twitter have so much power in our industry and with everyone else’s. You can post music to someone’s wall, you can like a group on Facebook, and you can even tweet about an experience at a concert. I like how you pulled together the old days and now-a-days. I thought that was very clever and interesting.

    -Carolyn Poatsy

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  3. It's crazy how much tweets can contribute in advertising and creating a buzz. An example would be the Royal Wedding where businesses started selling Royal Wedding related products because the publicity was already there. They wouldn't bother thinking of marketing such products because it was already made! And by the way, there's a website that DOES show whether the tweets are negative or positive. It's www.twitcritics.com.

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  4. This is a good overview on how the media industry makes money. Because of the nature of the media industry, they are always finding more and more interesting and creative ways to advertise through the media.

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