Gettin’ Nichy Wit It

If you’re a Boomer like me, you grew up in a 12 channel universe.  There were a few commercial TV networks, maybe PBS as well.  Throw in the independent and some UHF stations (remember those?) and those were your viewing options.  If you are GenX, you grew up the same way although there were a few new activities such as Pong and Sega to keep you busy.

Things start to get interesting with my kids’ group – GenY, Echo Boomers, whatever you call them.  By 1992, there were “57 channels and nothing on”, 10 or more times what I had available growing up.  Today, I have 10 times those 57 channels available and that’s just on TV.  There are an infinite number on my computer, and I can view them on the same screen that once made only a handful available to me.  The point?

When we created products as recently as 30 years ago, “scale” was a very different concept.  TV shows and movies everyone had to appeal to everyone to aggregate enough audience to make the business model work (there’s probably a point to be made here about our politics, which seemed more unified as well but we don’t do those here).  Today, it’s a niche world.

The top shows on TV today would have had zero chance for survival 30 year ago based on the number of viewers they receive.  Of course, football is the exception.  The percent of audience watching prime time football hasn’t changed all that much and yet prime time football, which once barely cracked the top show list is now solidly in the top 5 every week.  The TV business model has changed – ad rates alone can’t support it without subscription revenues.  We can count the number of digital products that have achieved what once passed for scale on one hand.  The digital model has changed as well, especially on the expense side.  In mobile, Android is biggest smart phone but dozens of models make up the Android universe. iPhone is still tiny compared to some of the non-smart, feature phones and is only now getting to be carrier agnostic.

Very few products are truly “mass” any more.    Yet how often do we see new brands and businesses developed based on a dynamic that no longer exists?  If you’re not playing to a large enough niche or if your economics don’t let you thrive within a tiny one, maybe you need to be rethinking things.