TJ Walker breaks down why Al Jazeera America flopped despite reaching 60 million cable homes. The network lost 60% of Current TV's audience and pulled in only 5,000 viewers in key demographics. Walker argues mass media is dead and new networks need either niche expertise or serious money to survive.
Questions this video answers
About 18 months or more.
About 60%.
Approximately 60 million homes.
About 5,000 viewers in the key demo on some days; roughly 14,000 viewers across all ages on some days.
Chapters
The ratings are in for Al Jazeera America and it's not looking good. Essentially, nobody's watching. You may remember it's been a couple of years now where Current TV was purchased by Al Jazeera, the Qatar based news network owned by the Qatari government. Now a lot of people thought, wow, what a relief. Nobody watches Current tv. Al Gore's TV network is no good. Al Jazeera has a well established reputation around the world of delivering straightforward, high production value, high journalistic value news. And here it is on the air for 18 months or more and they've lost 60% of the audience of Current TV, which in and of itself was minuscule. Now Al Jazeera is in 60 million homes on their cable boxes. But just because you're in someone's home these days, frankly doesn't mean much. My voicemail is in the homes of billions of people who have telephones. Doesn't mean they call me in a particular day. Here's the problem. Al Jazeera has some great journalists. Ali Velci, who I think is one of the most fantastic TV journalists around, you may remember him from cnn, you probably haven't seen him on Al Jazeera. And they have John Seigenthaler of NBC News, they have good journalists. But I don't watch Al Jazeera. I don't think it's even on my cable system and I've never heard anyone mention them. Here's the reality. I think we are pretty much at the end of the whole concept of broadcast media, of mass media itself. Everything has become so niched. Everyone has a billion choices. People can just stick to their Facebook feeds all day long if they want to. They can stick to Twitter. There is a website and a blog for your particular interest. Now we've seen this phenomenon time and time again with all the big names who've started TV shows. Katie Couric, show after show has launched, Rosie o', Donnell, I don't know how many times, and it's just gone Nowhere because the TV networks can't get the necessary 2 million viewers per day to generate enough eyeballs to sell to advertisers to pay for all the staff and overhead. Now Al Jazeera isn't going anywhere anytime soon because they have so much oil and gas money from the Qatari government. So they can afford to do this. But at some point with an audience so small, by the way, their audience is 5,000 people are watching in a given day, part of people in the demo. That means not really young people and not really old people, people that advertisers will actually pay for.5,000. I mean, that's embarrassing. There are days when I have more than 5,000 people watching my YouTube channel. So 5,000 is nothing. Only 14,000 of people of every age. By contrast, Fox News channel has sometimes 3 million people watching if you factor in everyone, including all the 89 year olds who are angry at Obama. So to have that small of an audience at some point, it makes you wonder, why bother? So the real message here I think is don't start a new media business unless you really have a highly, highly specialized niche and you can come up with something that people can't get anyplace else. And I don't think any general news network able to do that. The only saving grace is staying power if you've got a huge government behind you that can afford to lose money indefinitely. Now it does beg the question for those of us who deal with PR and going on tv, at what point is it even worth your time going on certain networks? I've always taken the position of just say yes anytime someone asks. But I am increasingly having to question that judgment myself, given how small many audiences have become. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for watching.
