Hugh Hewitt wants to marry his talk radio audience to the blogs. From Newsweek
On July 4, Salem Communications, one of the country’s largest radio-station owners, will relaunch an old Web war horse called Townhall.com as a hub for its stable of stars (including Bill Bennett, Michael Medved and Hewitt himself). The hope? That “Web 2.0″ wherewithal can transform what was once an op-ed clearinghouse into a single nerve center serving the separate conservative communities of talk radio and the Internet. To Hewitt, a valuable White House ally, the math is simple: add 6 million Salem fans to Townhall’s 1.4million unique monthly visitors and you’ve got an audience six or seven times the size of liberal site Daily Kos, the Web’s biggest political blog. “We will overwhelm them,” he says.
The assumption here is that the whole is greater the sum of the parts. That is a big assumption. The progressive blogosphere is marked by individual contributions. There are thousands of progressive blogs and they actively check each other. The progressive blogs allow comments and many of the current blogs got started by commenters sharing with each other and finding common ground. The progressive blogs are a genuine roots project of self starters working together. Conservative blogs, have until this point, restricted comments and have not tried to build a community. Conservative blogs have often repeated the Republican talking points without question. The key difference between conservative and progressive blogs is that progressive blogs function as a many-to-many form of communication while conservative blogs function as a one-to-many form of communication.
There are many failed assumptions that Hewitt is making.
- the radio audience will cross over and become a blog audience.
- the audience will go to the blog to get a rerun of the talking points from radio
- that there is enough going on to hold the audience
The modes of communication are sufficiently different that the radio audience will not cross over. Most people listen to talk radio in their cars. That does not translate into an audience that will rush to the computer when they get out of their cars. Progressive blogs exist in part because there isn’t a progressive radio market. Conservative blogs have carried the same talking points as the conservative radio and televisions shows. While there may be some people who need to hear the talking points again, it isn’t clear that people will go en masse to get them from a blog. For progressive blogs, there has been a nonstop parade of corruption and legal cases to fuel the growth. It isn’t clear that progressive blogs would have become this big if Democrats had been in power. Conservative blogs could have had their day in the sun while trying to chase Clinton from power, but things are different now. They don’t have enough grist for their mill.
The big issue for this is to ask why the numbers count. They count because it is media. What Hewitt doesn’t talk about is this: it is about the advertising. The current advertising market is being turned on its head. With the rise of Big Media, advertisers were presented with numbers that instantiated their market. An advertiser would seek to reach a certain percentage of likely customers in a certain market segment and the media sales team would give them numbers that would prove the case. But Google is doing something different. When people advertise on Google, they know they are reaching a potential customer because the customer is searching for some information related to a product or service the advertiser is selling. The big lie being told by Hewitt is that his radio advertising market will translate into a web advertising market.
It won’t.
Here is another possibility: Hewitt’s real numbers will be unmasked. His advertisers will discover that his market isn’t as big has he has said it was and the value of advertising on his show will go down.