Crude Technologies

The noisy disruption of media business models by the internet in the past decade has obscured a profound demographic transformation. Whether they are buying music, listening to the radio, reading newspapers or watching television, media consumers are ageing even more quickly than the overall population. Rather than trying to reverse this trend by attracting younger people, many companies are attempting to profit from the greying of media.

As your audience ages, approachability matters more. Kids see a new technology like a video game: a challenge to figure out. Their elders see it as work.

But the greys have money. As the article notes, "people aged 60 or over spent more on pop-music albums in 2009 than did teenagers or people in their 20s".

This is a strong—though generally overlooked—incentive to make new technologies feel comfortable and familiar.

According to analysis seen by The Times, increasingly popular video-on-demand (VOD) is challenging the business model of commercial television.

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the accountant and business adviser, suggests that consumers’ growing appetite for VOD could lead to broadcasters losing a further £280 million from annual advertising revenues if they continue to focus their efforts on cost-cutting and fail to cash in on the boom.

PwC suggests VOD services needs to sell ads at 3x the CPM (cost-per-thousand) of television to break even. Coincidentally, The Simpsons pulls in $20 per thousand on TV and $60 per thousand on Hulu.

Back in June, Bloomberg reported CBS's David Poltrack saying, “The reason people are paying such a high premium for these ads on the Internet is they do have a captive audience,” Poltrack said. “You know you have eyes on the screen.”

After all, the point of video on the Internet isn't to replace TV. It's to have a two way, and measurable, dialog with each viewer.