Social media are eroding television day by day.
Actually considering YouTube as a social channel too – despite its being more a search engine –, just take a look at the latest Digital in 2017 Global Overview and you’ll see that online users are irresistibly attracted to that particular form of on demand television that YouTube provides us with.
Which is why all social media are following this trend, slowly becoming TV channels tout court.
The TV of the future will be increasingly “social”
Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter have all a project concerning television:
– according to the British news agency Reuters, Facebook has just signed an agreement with Vox Media, BuzzFeed, ATTN and Group Nine Media to produce exclusive video content for its users;
– on the other hand, according to the economic magazine Fortune, Snapchat would be literally “reinventing the television for the Millennials” through a few agreements with Discovery Network, Vice Media, ABC News, BBC and NFL;
– even on Twitter, which doesn’t look healthy at all, there are rumours about TV projects, both in partnership with Apple (a new feature within the iOS application has just been added to allow direct reception of programs on Apple TV), and by upgrading Periscope TV channel.
In short, all major social media are investing enormous resources in TV content.
Why? Because social media companies basically gain from advertising.
How big digital companies make money
Just look at the turnovers of both Alphabet (the owner of Google and YouTube) and Facebook and you will see that whatever they do, at the end of the day money comes from advertising:
– 88% of Alphabet revenue comes from the sale of advertising space;
– Facebook accounts for up to 97% of its revenue from adv.
Crossing data with investment in advertising in the US, both on traditional and digital TV channels, it is crystal clear that advertisers are spending bigger and bigger budgets, already exceeding the TV ones (please read the excellent analysis by eMarketer).
Groundhog Day is about to end
Let’s go back to the starting point: social media are eroding television day by day. What is this for us? Well, it is all about price increase…
Prices on social media follow the irrefutable law of supply and demand as well. Not surprisingly, as we’ve seen last week, the relationship between social media turnovers and the organic visibility of our posts is inversely proportional.
Practically we will therefore be less and less able to promote us for free and more and more compelled to pay for advertising our content. With a huge difference: rack rates will no longer be those – rather low actually – that we are accustomed today to, because they will progressively get to be aligned to TV commercial rates.
So, we’d better hurry up! We are still “imprisoned” in a sort of temporal loop, as in Groundhog Day. But what starts off every morning is not Groundhog Day here – it’s a perpetual Black Friday of adv rates.
Beware: sooner or later Saturday will arrive.