15 Mar 11 How much is your time worth? NBC gives you a price.
Quick: how much is an hour of your time worth?
NBC thinks you’re about $240 an hour.
To promote their upcoming show “America’s Next Great Restaurant” (which, incidentally, sounded like a cool concept to me), NBC recently ran a very interesting video campaign. NBC partnered with LivingSocial — the Amazon-invested Groupon clone.
After consumers completed their order they were given an option: ”Take 30 seconds to watch the trailer for NBC’s newest show and receive $2 off right now on the deal just purchased!”
Thus, NBC values your time at $2/:30seconds –> $4/minute –> $240/hour. That’s pretty good.
What’s interesting to me is not only their “valuation” of you and your time. What I like about it is the novel and creative way to spend online media dollars.
I can’t be sure, but as I see it there are two ways that LivingSocial and NBC priced this out:
- LivingSocial charged NBC a flat CPM of, say, $15 and then the $2 savings to the consumer was essentially a pass-through. (NBC did a similar promotion last month for buy-one-get-one-free burritos at Chipotle).
- LivingSocial considered NBC like any other vendor/client and charged them a $4 CPC and then took 50%, thus preserving their external-facing pricing model (to either advertisers or merchants), and in turn providing the viewer with a $2 savings.
Either way, looking at other forms of digital video, how does it compare? The best comparison to me would be YouTube’s TrueView model, with the payment method being a Cost Per View (CPV) metric, equivalent to the click-to-play that LivingSocial offered.
In both cases, you pay only for opted-in, engaged views. But CPVs on YouTube are much lower than $4. Despite/because of auction pricing, YouTube paid views are generally an order of magnitude or so lower. And with the LivingSocial deal, the advertiser does not benefit from targeting or reach/scale beyond the sales LivingSocial was able to put together that day. While not a raw deal for NBC, I think there are other, more efficient ways to spend those ad dollars. Granted, not all of them are as splashy (or as I said, as creative).
One question remains about intrinsic and extrinsic motivators — would you be moved to watch the video to save $2? Let me know in the comments. Ultimately, I think the psychological benefits are big here: at the end of the day, I’m getting paid to watch that video.
Tags: amazon, america's next great restaurant, bj fogg, chipotle, cost per view, CPC, CPM, CPV, daniel pink, deals, extrinsic, groupon, intrinsic, livingsocial, nbc, trueview, YouTube
07 Dec 09 Today’s take
I found myself reading a number of articles on Ars Technica today. The first was a good run-down of what Comcast already owns in the face of its controlling stake in NBC. The second was an exciting look at the future of WiFi and the 1 Gbps speeds we can soon look forward to. Finally, Ars examined the history of YouTube, not only from a cultural perspective but also from a tech/policy standpoint.
Without endorsing endorsing or distancing myself from Christopher Hitchens, this piece on Palin is notable. I agree that it is absurd to see she has jumped on the “birther” bandwagon and all that, but what I like is the word Hitchens created:
…I pointed out the crude way in which she tried to Teflon-ize herself when allegations of weird political extremism were made against her (emphasis CLT).
In other news, we (the Stanford Cardinal) will be playing in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas on New Year’s eve (yay!) but without star redshirt quarterback, and Texas native, Andrew Luck (not-so-yay). That could be bad news bears. It could also mean that Toby will step up like he always does and account for 900 all-purpose yards. We’ll see.
Politics: Barack says he wants to use TARP money to stimulate the economy and put on some public works projects; the GOP goes all crazy. We’ve already put aside the money…people are looking for employment…Wall Street is in better shape (or at least so it seems): I think the Dems are right to fight for this money to be used intelligently.
CNet compiles a nice list of free holiday MP3s across the Web: 29 of which come from Amazon, including some titles by Lady GaGa and others.
Lifehacker shares a nice iTunes alternative, something I’m always happy to read more about.
I find it hilarious and also smart for AT&T to offer its “Mark the Spot” app in the App Store (iTunes link). It’sfunny because it’s an admission by the carrier that their service is, well, somewhat lacking. And it’s smart because it makes it at the very least appear like they’ll do something about it. Plus it’s a nice little community crowd-sourcing project which I think is a smart play.
But here’s what I don’t get: how it’s supposed to work. Let’s say I’m walking through Manhattan and I get to the corner and — BOOM! — service drops out. The very important business call that I was on is now terminated. I am mad. But, at least AT&T hopes, I fire up the app to report the spot as problematic. EXCEPT WE JUST SAID I DON’T HAVE ANY SERVICE. So riddle me this: how does a location-based app for reporting service dead zones work? I could walk down the street until my little EDGE or 3G icon reappears, but by that point, the whole idea of a GPS-tagged submission is gone. It’s all somewhat funny to me, and unless I’m missing something, AT&T is either going to have lots of frustrated customers trying unsuccessfully to report spotty (get it?) service, or lots of dead zone tags from nearby-but-not-quite-right locations.
Finally, today was a big day at Google*. Two huge announcements of (1) real-time search and (2) Google Goggles.
For real-time search, it’s a fantastic feature and the implementation could not be better, IMHO. There is lots of (far better) coverage across the Web on this, but I think it’s great.
Goggles is also an interesting product, and its launch was kind of buried by in a number of other big mobile announcements. The fact that is basically has augmented reality is also really really cool. This video does the best job of quickly and clearly communicating what exactly it is:
**NB: Just to be clear, none of my comments on anything at Google relate in any way to my employer. I’m just a guy, writing about and commenting on tidbits I find across the Web. Nothing here is an endorsement or Company position. I know you probably know this, but I wanted to put it in writing.
Tags: amazon, andrew luck, at&t, augmented reality, barack obama, birther, CNet, comcast, el paso, google goggles, hitchens, itunes, lady gaga, lifehacker, mp3, nbc, palin, real-time search, sarah palin, stanford football, sun bowl, TARP, texas, toby for heisman, toby gerhart, wifi, YouTube
