Another day of skirmishes on the front lines in the battle between traditional media and social media. Yesterday Viacom president and CEO Philippe Dauman bragged to analysts on a conference call that Web traffic at the company's sites had exploded since it ordered YouTube to pull down clips of Jon Stewart et al. An important validation of our strategy, Dauman called it.
Lost Remote questioned the evidence-increased traffic at the Comedy Central and MTV websites for January 2007 compared to the prior year.
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Astute Lost Remote readers will remember the Viacom purge began on February 2nd, and Dauman doesn't release February-over-January numbers, so it's unclear if the sites' growth rate accelerated or remained the same.
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LR also linked to an excellent bit of analysis by LeeAnn Prescott at Hitwise showing YouTube traffic up 14% during the initial two weeks after Viacom's video there went dark.
Matthew Ingram at Social Media Today offers a contrast between Viacom's strategy and that of the BBC:
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The Beeb has signed a deal to host several channels at YouTube, with short clips that the broadcaster says it hopes will drive traffic back to the BBC hubs. Since the Beeb is financed by a TV licensing fee (which it polices using high-tech "TV detection vans"), there will be IP blocks for anyone located in Britain.
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I'd hardly call the BBC strategy a loving embrace of social media. In fact it sounds a lot like the one Mark Cuban offered yesterday: flood YouTube with teaser clips and links back to the mothership.
But my favorite story on this whole matter is this one:
Viacom Demands YouTube Pull 400,000 Ex-TV Viewers From Its Site
Some link love:
Facebook Extends Lead As Fave Young Adult Site
Duh!, as my 15-year-old daughter would say.
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Social Networks Can Drive Traffic - Case Study of ASOS and TopShop
A nice case study of social networks and ecommerce out of the UK.
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