Opinion: TV’s Mark Twain moment

Mark Twain famously said that reports of his death were exaggerated after a New York newspaper claimed he was dead and if TV could speak, it might say the same after Google chairman Eric Schmidt described the medium as ‘already over’.

Talking to advertisers in New York last week, Schmidt used the fact that YouTube had hit the 1 billion unique users a month mark to fire a shot at TV.

Well, yes, we all know YouTube is huge and bulking up continuously. And no doubt Google’s plans to add more professional content from established content makers will accelerate the trend.

But what’s really going on here is the start of a land grab for more advertising revenue. It won’t be long before we will hear Google say that because ‘YouTube commands X per cent of viewing time it should get X per cent of ad revenue’. We’re now hearing this almost weekly with mobile.

I wish people would stop this simplistic nonsense. The sense of entitlement grates.

Life, and certainly ad budgets, don’t work like this for YouTube, mobile or other media. It reminds me of that piece of graffiti: ‘eat shit – a million flies can’t be wrong.’

There’s a lot more to allocating ad budgets than just eyeballs – impact, engagement, response and so on. Before any medium can increase its share of ad revenue it has to prove itself. And that’s what YouTube – and mobile – have to do before things change.

Taken from this week’s article on Newsline by weekly columnist Dominic Mills – Epic fail by the PepsiCo numpties.