Network TV Twitter
What is old is now new again and what used to be the glittery shiny thing now feels dull. I’m not talking about JNCO jeans making a comeback among the cool kids downtown along with other late 1990s fashions.
I’m talking about the Internet. Everywhere feels like its pre-08 crash. Blogs that get sent to you via email. Federated social media. People HOSTING their OWN servers. What!?
Most interesting for me was finding out Elon Musk is hiring a big network / legacy media ad executive to lead Twitter.
With Tucker Carlson announcing a new show via Twitter and Musk tapping Linda Yaccarino of NBC Universal to lead the company, it feels like cable and network television is coming home to Twitter.
Is Musk just trying to make TV on Twitter?
I am not in the business of making predictions, but I can see trends.
One is that old school institutions love to cannibalize former hot young things. The network television takeover — even if not structurally, but culturally — of Twitter would feel in line with a longer history of buy outs and delayed trend following that just, makes sense.
Cable, tabloid, and network personalities are finding home with the outrageous, dramatic, “made-for-TV,” style of professionals who know how to create a weekly, daily, hourly, now minute-ly stream of palatable-enough content that keeps people on the platform. Bringing corporate TV sensibilities to social could actually mean creating a kind of interactive news and entertainment network (or rather, social network)… even while Twitter increasingly is losing relevancy among the formerly-blue check talking heads that made it culturally powerful — Twitter fights just aren’t that cool anymore.
There is also the play that Twitter will just go by the wayside of other “channels” on television and become a porn pay-per-view. Also an option according to Elon.
Regardless, even as Twitter sends in the “adults” to maybe save this ship, it feels too late to make Twitter what its was ever again. But I’m sure there is a way to make it sell pharmaceutical ads for ED and high blood pressure just like network TV… while also selling the content that gives hypertension. This time, you just get the interact with the content creators directly at the source.
