Assembly line

13 February 2008

Over on news.com there’s an interesting article on MTV’s web stratergy. Interesting I guess because I’ve always thought of MTV’s web presence – up until about a year ago – as pretty poor; scrabbling around, trying to come up with immersive experiences around their content but ending up with flash based junk that no one wants to use.

However, all that changed with the re-launch last year of MTV.com. Gone was the flash monstrosity that came before it – all sizzle, no steak – and in came an HTML-based site packed with easy to access content. As an aside, that MTV blog post linked to above has 8174 comments, which is fairly staggering.

This re-launch seems to have triggered a bit of a sea change at MTV and they’ve really focused themselves on the web, and creating sites for their content properties. However, I’m not sure – for all this focus and good intentions – that they’ve been making anything good. The article mentions that they’ve launched 32 sites in the last year, which seems to sound impressive but I’m not sure if it actually is; MTV have both a) a huge amount of content and b) a large budget to throw at promotion and marketing (which is all these sites are – promotion for their TV shows).

Having done a quick count, at work we’ve launched at least 26 sites in the last year, and we’re nowhere near the size of MTV; there’s 3 of us building sites, ranging from a small content heavy mini-site to a large interactive band site. Now, I’m sure the MTV sites are more complicated then the ones we launch but quite frankly I’d be surprised if they weren’t launching this many.

MTV, with the right focus and people, could be a huge web force. There’s absolutely no reason why MTV.com shouldn’t be the premier site for music on the web, and while it gets a large amount of users at the moment it really could be so much more important. Move away from the assembly line and focus on innovation and what music lovers really want. Of course, that’s assuming that MTV is still about music, which is quite probably a faulty assumption…

From: Articles

13 February 2008