Keynote 3: Saturday AM: Andrew Baron   Rocketboom.

Ah Rocketboom,  another show that  I'm familiar with  but not one that I make a point of watching, there's only so many hours in the day and video's a little harder to consume when driving  and  to be honest I'm not in their target audience.

What was billed as two keynotes became one, a long one.  In short,  they are succesful, they are succesful because they are actively involved with their audience, can  pick their sponsors based on that knowledge and have created. What are they?    A videoblog based in NYC that  averages above 200k viewers. To put this in perspective many cable news shows don't sustain that kind of audience over their hour and have production costs  on a daily basis that could buy you a "rocketboom"  ( in terms of hardware and infrastructure) . You can't really buy the audience though , not conventionally  and much of the keynote was his explanation of  this  backed up , and this is often a rarity in this nascent media  with figures from the real world. 

Ok so he suggested that Godaddy's French Maid  TV wouldn't be well received by an audience that couldn't distinguish the funding from the produced item (  A show of  hands negated this viewpoint with maybe only  one or two people  unware that it wasn't created specifically for a client and not an  attempt to surrepticiously insert an advertising message, it -WAS- the advertising message.   I.e it's possible for more than one company to "know" their audience.   

Anyway do we have a chicken and egg situation here?  Mainstream media is inefficient way to target a niche audience   more coming up on tautaulogy for Thursday  after these messages.... . Beeep

"my computer blew up and ...." Dad  7000 miles away in Scotland

beeep

"This is Bell Road Suzuki calling you back  .." Ha that never happened  I must be dreaming...

I don't think we're seeing the demise of the Mainstream media ,a decline certainly ,  yet reports of its death are exaggerated . The mass isn't going anywhere soon, dying out?  for sure  but you have to consider where they get their worldview from and how they've allowed  consumption of media to be a verb  to be turned into a pronoun.    Rushkoff   in his book  "playing the future" or  maybe "Media Virus"  points out this generational attitude towards media using Pong as an example.   ".
 
"The TV screen was the holy and inaccessible realm of newscasters and movie stars, a magical place where things just appeared. But, just as the remote control deconstructed television’s stories, the joystick demystified its technology—making it an accessible medium, and rendering it safe."

It's not that MSM is not interested in the niche, they are, it's just that the delivery mechanism is incapable of supporting it and the regulatory  straitjacket imposed by the FCC make it impossible to address them in their own voice even if they could.   I'm going to post more on this part and why niche audiences are so damn attractive, it's pretty obvious stuff but  seemingly it's news to many people trying to make money out of this space.   
 
Reality is what you can get away with. RAW