BigShinyThing

The original music video channel is losing out to MySpace and must have been shaken to its soles by the news that YouTube is planning a bottomless music video archive. The music video success story of the 80s and 90s, MTV has done pretty well in the noughties with cheap-but-effective formats such as the Pimp My Ride and Crib formats, but can it survive the convergence revolution?

According to the Wall Street Journal, MTV has failed to migrate its viewers online. Its much flaunted online property, MTV Overdrive, attracts fewer than four million unique visitors a month, a minute proportion of MTV’s 82 million monthly US viewers. In contrast, MySpace gets nearly 55 million unique visitors in the US a month and YouTube draws 16 million.

The really devastating implication of this for MTV and other broadcasters is that its brand can’t seem to save it. In the shiny new world of fan-created and fan-consumed content, users couldn’t give a toss about who delivers their stuff — just that they get it. The other problem is how to keep up with a youthful audience shooting and distributing their own stuff faster than an MTV with its studios, producers, licensing, artist management and the rest.

MTV’s stumble has lessons for major media companies watching the explosion of video on the Web. In the closed confines of cable TV. where competition is limited, MTV has protected its niche by portraying itself as the iconoclastic outsider. But the Web is a free-for-all, and the roster of competitors grows every day. MTV, now part of the establishment and late to the game, wrongly assumed its famous brand name and product would have the same resonance online.

And — as many big media players have also found out to their horror — their big corporate structures and strictures won’t protect them either. The anarchic aspect of sites like YouTube and MySpace is precisely what makes them havens for teens. MTV and other Viacom properties are subject to the kind of censorship of content that saw CBS fined $500,000 for Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction‘ in 2004.

One 15 year old quoted by the Wall Street Journal reasons: “MTV is supposed to be ‘music television’, but they don’t really have the music part, they have a lot of reality shows.” And as we know, if you’re not speaking clearly and honestly in the new emergent world, then no-one’s listening. And, as a teen, if your options were MTV vs. the Land of Do As You Please which would you choose?