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> Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience? I think it was purely a business decision. The way the US cable model works is the cont

> Furthermore are cable customers really Al Jazeera's target audience? I think it was purely a business decision. The way the US cable model works is the content providers get however many cents a month per subscriber that has the channel. The individual amount isn't great, but the cable company does all the hard work of collecting the money and giving you a single nice bigger cheque. It also helps with advertising, because they can now give aggregate demographic information to their advertisers such as income levels, locations, and others based on correlation (eg age). Advertisers really don't want to pay for non-target users. For example if targeting women in their 30s, they aren't going to pay for ads going to males in their 60s. The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information, especially if you don't already have it (eg Google and especially Facebook do). This can be somewhat addressed by requiring accounts to view, but that is a big burden for getting new viewers (who wants a new account to view something you have never seen before?) Ben Thompson of Stratechery (good site and reporting BTW) has a nice overiew article on the US cable tv ecosystem: https://stratechery.com/2015/changing-unchanging-structure-tv/ https://stratechery.com/2015/changing-unchanging-structure-t...

lbotos 11y ago
>The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information Is this a problem in 2016? I'm pretty sure you can get _MORE_ data from internet tracking vs. otherwise.
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  The cable channel only decision was made in 2013. In 2016 they could just shut down Al Jazeera America, and stream the main channel. (It looks like that is what will happen.) You do get data from internet tracking, but it is based around your activity and some correlation (eg geoip). Note that Al Jazeera would only get information about their own activity. There are various services that aggregate at a higher level, but they do cost money. I can't find any now, but there were a few companies that had a service you could ask about the current user and they would return likely demographic information. That all matters if you are trying to sell the advertising yourself. If someone else higher in the user visibility chain sells the ads (eg google, facebook, yahoo) then they already have the comprehensive tracking and demographics. But advertising isn't that profitable and those guys will take a big chunk of the revenue, while you remain beholden to them.

lbotos 11y ago

>The problem with Internet streaming is getting any demographic information Is this a problem in 2016? I'm pretty sure you can get _MORE_ data from internet tracking vs. otherwise.

rogerbinns 11y ago
The cable channel only decision was made in 2013. In 2016 they could just shut down Al Jazeera America, and stream the main channel. (It looks like that is what will happen.) You do get data from internet tracking, but it is based around your activity and some correlation (eg geoip). Note that Al Jazeera would only get information about their own activity. There are various services that aggregate at a higher level, but they do cost money. I can't find any now, but there were a few companies that had a service you could ask about the current user and they would return likely demographic information. That all matters if you are trying to sell the advertising yourself. If someone else higher in the user visibility chain sells the ads (eg google, facebook, yahoo) then they already have the comprehensive tracking and demographics. But advertising isn't that profitable and those guys will take a big chunk of the revenue, while you remain beholden to them.