This is the column I never wanted to have to write
Allow me, this one time, to peel back the curtain. My editors for this column wanted me to write about Channel 10's announcement this week that the sun would set on The Project after 16 years, nearly 14 of which have involved me. I didn't want to do it.
What would I say that was of any use? Would I identify the things I felt made the show special, perhaps accompanied by a catalogue of highlights? Too self-serving. Would I detail the full maelstrom of emotion which engulfs you in a moment like this? That gets dangerously close to self-indulgent pap; a glorified journal entry, not an opinion piece. And anyway, as a general rule, I don't commentate on my own work. So, no, I'd write something else. My editors urged me to reconsider, then left me to it.
Improbably, then, here we are. But only because there are bigger things at stake than the fate of this or that television show. That matters to the people involved – often viscerally – but shows have always come and gone. The difference now is that this is happening in the context of an industry staring into the abyss, trying desperately to find the formula for its continued survival. Of course, that is not entirely new, either: industries too, have always come and gone. What matters in this case – what is of genuine social concern – are the reasons for the collapse.
Some of them have been frequently rehearsed. The rapid emergence of streaming services and social media has cannibalised free-to-air television audiences. Hereabouts you will find endless statistics about declining television ratings, year on year. Some shows might periodically buck that trend, most don't. Some moments in time might disrupt things, such as when television ratings exploded at the onset of the pandemic, but they end up as aberrations. Whatever exceptions you wish to adduce, the direction of travel has long been clear.
But ratings have only ever really been an indirect measure of television success. To the extent television is a business, what really matters is revenue. You could be forgiven for thinking that's the same thing because, roughly speaking, that's been true for about 50 years. Higher ratings means greater demand from advertisers, which means more expensive ads, which means more revenue. The fall in television audiences, felt most sharply among younger viewers who may never have watched free-to-air television in their lives, is therefore a direct attack on revenue. So far, so obvious.
The twist is that now, revenue is falling much faster than ratings. Indeed, there are tentative signs that television audiences are beginning to stabilise, but revenue has continued to plummet. Hence the reports this week that commercial television networks across the board are poised to ask many of their stars to take pay cuts. They may not be losing viewers as fast as they were, but that doesn't mean the money is there to keep paying them.
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That's not because social media provides superior content to television. The quality of the content is mostly beside the point. What matters is the quality of the advertising product. And social media companies like Meta or Google, having harvested frankly unconscionable amounts of their users' personal data, offer a far more sophisticated, better targeted advertising product than free-to-air television can. That will remain so for as long as television doesn't turn the camera on you and monitor your every move.
What has inevitably followed is a flight, not so much of audiences, but of advertisers to these tech giants. This, I think, is a major problem. Not because free-to-air television is uniquely precious, but because that amount of data collection in the hands of a select few tech moguls simply shouldn't be allowed to exist. We've seen the dangers this poses for democracy, in the form of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for instance. And that's to say nothing of the algorithmic destruction of people's physical and psychological health as lots of us are filtered towards a wild west of misinformation spanning everything from news to beauty, to health.
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