Dave Donohue: nerd-in-residence

Like many music fans - especially those of us trying to avoid heat and humidity - I spent much of Saturday trying to tune in what I could of the Live Earth shows being held around the world. Even on Charlottesville’s relatively archaic cable system, I was able to juggle performances in London, the US, Sydney, andTokyo via Bravo, CNBC, NBC, and the Sundance Channel. I understand that US-based satellite customers and those with the means to hack into Intelsat’s feed actually got to see quite a bit more over the course of the day.

On Tuesday, I was shocked to see how poorly the event fared by conventional broadcast standards, at least in the US and UK. Here in the US, it came in dead last, beaten handily by Fox Networks’ reruns of America’s Most Wanted, of all things. While the US live broadcast pulled in less than three million viewers, MSN is claiming that it streamed the Live Earth feed more than 10 million times over the course of the day, surpassing by far a record set by Live 8 in 2005.

Those numbers are by no means apples to apples. Streams misfire, users log off and on, you name it. Clearly, however, they indicate that a sizable portion of the lucrative audience of youngish music consumers was watching Saturday’s happenings via their MacBooks, laptops, or something other than their TVs. If they even own TVs.

I’m no broadcast expert and rely on some brilliant colleagues to help me understand the mysteries of radio and TV, but as far as I can tell grand-scale events like Live Earth are finding their true audiences on the Web. That has an impact for advertisers, for sure, but for PR people it creates a huge opportunity to extend the shelf life of a broadcast. Some users will rewind their TiVo’d hours of NBC coverage for some finite amount of time, but you can still watch Live Earth days later right now via the Web, and that will continue to be the case for weeks, if not months.

Simultaneously, the page view - the metric that we all used to use to benchmark the success of, well, everything - was more or less laid to rest this week as well. Online video was specifically cited as one of the drivers behind that decision. It’s not just Google/YouTube that is causing this sea change; upstarts like Revision3 are helping push individual program even as social networks like Facebook make video sharing available to millions of enthusiastic members.

I’m glad I’m not in the advertising game. They have to figure out how to monetize content. We, on the other hand, have a huge opportunity to create it for a lucrative audience that is unmistakably moving towards online platforms.  Elinor Mills at c|net is promising a short-term analysis that should educate all of us.

The fun is just beginning :)