In response to their declining male viewers, Viacom (VIA) has created a new division built for the purpose of recapturing the 18-34 male demographic.
There strategy is to bring together various properties like their regular networks Spike TV, Comedy Central, and TV Land, along with their Web sites that target the young male; Atom Films, XFire and GameTrailers. The idea is to extend their reach across the platforms, and make it more favorable for ad support targeted to this specific audience.
While MTVN is saying they're reaching a larger male viewership than ESPN, that's generally considered an overstatement.
Doug Seay, a senior advertising sales executive for Eclipse Television says, "You know networks are in trouble when they start to quantify other ways to look at things more favorably. For MTV, this is probably a non-duplicated audience--because the ratings are definitely much higher on ESPN."
Seay, and others are right. Making that comment shows that they are in real trouble in this area. Viewers have been leaving MTV for years. It remains to be seen if these moves are what will not only plug the holes, but start to reverse the trend and start gaining market share again.
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