Reality TV Meets The Internet

October 5, 2007

Love it or hate it, reality TV is a new media phenomenon. It is obviously huge business for the television industry. It was only a matter of time before reality TV came online. And it has.

Next Internet Millionaire

The Next Internet Millionaire is a new web-based reality television show. As far as I know, the show is only viewable over the internet. They are using Revver as their video host and embedding the videos into their website. The shows are incredibly well produced. Great editing. Same quality you would expect of any TV show. The show was created by Joel Comm and Eric Holmlund, with Joel hosting the show. The premise is very similar to most reality TV shows. Take 12 people and make them compete. In this case, it is taking 12 entrepreneurs and getting them to try to become a millionaire on the internet.

Joel Comm is an internet entrepreneur. He is one of these guys who goes where the buzz is. He’s written books selling “secrets” to networks like Adsense, Kontera, Chitika, etc. Without having read any of them, this strikes me as a way to cash in on the obvious by making it seem mysterious. But, hey, a lot of business people do that. Put the word “secret” in front of something and it’s liable to sell. It also seems these guys had some potential dishonesty in the works regarding Adsense templates that they ripped off from somebody else. But, I don’t know the whole story.

This reality show is, of course, a way to bring in viral traffic and to position Joel as an internet entrepreneur and to sell a coaching program. But, it’s a damn good idea. I don’t know how much viewership they have, and their site is unfortunately almost all Flash which makes it very SEO unfriendly for them. I found out about it from the Revver homepage and that’s probably about the only place they have any decent visibility.

Do I think reality TV can work on the internet? Mostly likely it can. The only obstacle is going to be viewer impatience. When people sit in front of the TV, they do so with the intention to vegetate and watch. When they are online, usually the intention is to get around - quickly. Viewer patience online is much less than on TV. Next Internet Millionaire episodes are long, the most recent being 45 minutes long. According to Revver, they have 36,000+ views on their latest episode. That’s not groundbreaking. It seems to me that for a reality TV style thing to really work online, it needs to combine the good production with shorter, videoblog style posts. In other words, post often and shorter.