As regular readers know, I think a whole lot about the evolution of content. I have considered it for a long, long time, writing 'The Death of Cable TV' in 1999. This is particularly important to me simply because Polymaths are all about knowledge and ideas which almost exclusively will be monetized by converting it to one of several forms of content.

So, CNN, which has been suffering from the dynamics that I discussed in that article so long ago, decided to augment its Cable content with an Internet service called CNN+. They allocated about one billion dollars to its launch. After just one month and an estimated three hundred million dollars, it is being shut down. It is difficult to imagine a bigger failure. Didn't they do any market research at all? Typically, with any product launch, the market is identified, it is surveyed and focus groups are employed to get a deeper understanding of the likely response to the product or service will be. Clearly, if they are willing to shut it down after one month, reality deviated dramatically from what their Marketing Consultants expected.

The news, analysis and commentary segment of the 'Intellectual Dark Web' is still formative. The teams operating in the segment are still trying to figure out the best way to provide their services to their target market. It is not surprising that CNN would consider a format similar to what has apparently succeeded with Blaze TV, The Daily Wire and Fox Nation. The obvious differences between these successes and the failure of CNN+ is that they appeal to a Conservative audience and CNN+ was appealing to Liberals. The other major difference is that the Conservative outlets offered IDW personalities, most notably, Tomi Lahren, Michael Knowles, Candace Owens, et alia. They have a different presentation style that has been honed by the IDW, itself.

We don't have this completely figured out because The Young Turks seems to be successful. However, its business model is actually somewhat different and, unlike CNN and Fox that require a corporate attitude toward profits, may be more ideologically driven than profit driven.

There is an advantage to free floating shows (not associated with an aggregation service) such as Dr. Steve Turley and The War Room with Steve Bannon, in that brand loyalty tends to be stronger. However, aggregated services have the very significant advantage of spreading traffic acquisition costs over several shows with very similar markets. How it will all shake out in the long run is not yet clear. However, CNN clearly got it horribly wrong.

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