Lesson of Quarterlife: The Internet and TV are NOT the same

I've been involved with the Internet for well over a decade, and one of my pet peeves right from the start has been how some people seem unable to understand that the Internet is a brand new medium with brand new rules. It's not "like" something else and really cannot be understood only by comparing it to other media. It's not "like" newspapers, or classifieds, or magazines, or TV, or libraries, or phones, or malls, or the town square... the Internet is all of these things and it's own thing.

NBC learned this the hard way. Seeing an online hit in Quarterlife, the network was eager to offer the show in prime time. The thinking had to have gone like this: Big hit on Internet = built-in buzz and audience = ratings bonanza.

The show premiered on NBC Tuesday night and didn't merely perform poorly. It bombed. Quarterlife was responsible for the network's worst time-period performance in at least 17 years. It was so bad that they may never run another episode, which is quite an embarrassment considering how much heat was being generated by the network's PR machine.

Why did an online hit turn into a broadcast dud? (And is anyone else hearing echoes of "Snakes on a Plane" here?)

The most obvious answer is that the Internet is a place for niche audiences while TV requires mass audiences. A term that is often used to describe Internet content and strategy is "the long tail," which means boutique products and content can profitably find niche audiences online. But if the Internet has a long tail, then TV has a corpulent body--it requires the biggest, thickest content possible to hit the broadest possible audience.

Here's an example of the long tail at work: One of the hottest online videos of the past year is the Jimmy Kimmel/Sarah Silverman/Matt Damon video. It's become a true Internet phenomenon. On YouTube, the video has been viewed 5.7 million times, which is considered quite impressive by Internet standards.

But by TV standards that is just 5.7 million times--and that audience was acquired over the course of an entire month, to boot. On the same night Quarterlife was embarrassing itself on NBC, American Idol was drawing 29 million viewers in a 90-minute period.

While it seems painfully apparent to those of us who know and live on the Internet, this revelation was apparently new to the suits at NBC: An online "hit" only needs to be a hit among a niche audience, while network television hits must cross demographics to a much, much greater extent. In the case of Quarterlife, the niche audience to whom it was laser targeted had already seen it, and the show held absolutely no interest to others.

Of course, there are other big differences between the Internet and TV that help explain why Quarterlife worked in one place and not another.

For example, there's the format--Quarterlife was shorter and quicker to digest online than in its televised version. To people who live at Internet speed, the original format was accessible and digestible, so TV's longer running time and greater commercial interruptions never stood a chance. (Perhaps network TV should experiment with 15-minute shows to see if they will draw younger people back to TV?) (Or maybe the gray heads at the networks may want to take note of the success of Robot Chicken, with its 12-minutes-or-less running time.)

There's also the fact that young people--Quarterlife's target audience--can be more easily found online than on TV these days. And that TV requires planning (to sit in front of the flat panel at a certain time or to program a DVR) while Internet video is always on. And that younger people raised on the free range content available online don't expect TV--with it's FCC fines and mother-loving (a term which CBS is inserting in place of a less appropriate term as it broadcasts cable's Dexter on broadcast TV) censorship--to be as edgy, funny, or pertinent.

I understand why TV execs hope the Internet might provide a treasure trove of content considering the shrinking audiences for network TV, but they're just going to have to find a better way to stay relevant than cribbing from a different media. TV execs are much better off porting their hit shows online than they are trying to do the reverse.