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Thursday, November 1, 2007

Marketing Rules Apply: No Joke: NBC Expected to Shutter DotComedy

The news that NBC is shutting down a small website - Dotcomedy - should come as no surprise. It has nothing to do with the quality of the site, although I don't recall ever looking at it before today, but to classic marketing. There are too many internet sites, many that look like each other, and so has become too fragmented for its own good. The NBC brand is very powerful and to dilute it with other brands that don't connect back to a bigger brand makes no sense. It would make more sense to push the individual brands like SNL in these new spaces, a strategy Comedy Central is employing with its content, including the Daily Show. People know and love these brands and tend to expect them to house their own content.

And what of the content original to the web. They gain by attaching them to those better known brands. It's the Mall strategy; get them to the big box stores and once they are there, encourage them to visit the boutique stores in the space. And so, my advice, make the NBC brand the home page that aggregates all the other brands. Push your viewer inside the NBC mall and from there make it easy to find the content they seek; oh and why they are visiting, check out the other smaller content sites too.