Garbage Moguls

 

Recently, Bruce Greenwald, Jonathan Knee, and Ava Seave published “The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies”.Interesting reading and perhaps we’ll discuss some of their key theses later on.

In the meantime, however, I’d like to relate a much more pressing, if modest mogul-related anecdote of my own.

While flipping by some channel (thought it was Planet Green, but it turned out to be National Geographic), I saw a few tail minutes of Garbage Moguls. I looked up the name, and was directed to the National Geographic website where an apparently not Chrome-friendly page displayed a largely blank screen. 

Thwarted from viewing even a clip, and too lazy to try firing up a couple of other browsers on an already-slow laptop, I moved on to YouTube (a mental flip of a coin vs. Hulu, YouTube won).

At the top of “results 1-20 of about 29” were the only two entries that actually related to the show, as far as I could tell. I watched some of a 2:40 clip, then looked around for actual shows. In the right hand column (“More From: National Geographic”) was helpfully listed “Exploring Oceans: Patagonia” which, as far as I could tell, had absolutely nothing to do with the show I was originally looking for.

Ah, but I noticed near the top of the page a tab-like thing labeled “Shows”, so there we went and did our search again. Oops. “Limited results available in Shows.” So limited in fact, that the two entries that were offered had absolutely nothing to do with what I was looking for.

I think you get the point. This isn’t about bashing YouTube, or NatGeo, or the show that I still haven’t found or watched. It’s about the fact that I, like many viewers, am not going to go to multiple different websites, navigate through three to five layers of menus, hunt and peck my way through a TiVo menu that can only look ten days forward, etc. etc. etc., just to find something that seemed like it might be interesting for future viewing.

And while it’s certainly worthwhile pondering whether “content is still king” and other weighty strategic matters, it’s also worth pondering why an industry that often sees itself under siege or potential distress has so little respect for or interest in its viewers and advertisers, to the point that someone actively trying hard to engage with recently discovered content is thwarted at every turn.