Cragislist TV – A World of Options

Craigslist TV

Not so many years ago, Craig Newmark brought down just about every newspaper in this country with his Craigslist.

In one simple act, he and a handful of employees working out of a garage in San Francisco stole away the underpinnings of the classified section of newspapers by turning over that act to the public – who it turns out, did it better and more cost-efficiently than the papers could.

If you had been at, say The New York Times when Craigslist was launched in 1995 and said, ‘hey, look, over here. This is going to eat up your paper” you would have been looked upon as an idiot.

OK.

“Hey. Look. Over here! This is going to eat up your TV network.”

Hello?

Crickets.

Too bad.

Let us consider, for a moment, reality TV, the staple of the industry.

It is made by independent production companies that charge about $250,000 per half-hour to make it.

The ‘ideas’ (and I use the word loosely) are thought up by execs at those companies, mostly in NY and LA.

One minute they’re brainstorming a concept for The Food Network, the next, TruTV.

They don’t care.

And then they go pitch the ideas to the execs, who sit in, for the most part, windowless cubicles and stare at their bulletin boards.

Now, suddenly, Newmark has ‘crowdsourced’ Reality TV.

He’s opened the door to millions of people to come up with their own concept of ‘Reality TV”.

Does it work.

Watch.

Naah, you might say.

Just as you might have said when his first apt for rent in SF ads went up in 1995.

Don’t be too sure.

There’s something here.

Crowdsource the concept, marry it to cheap production techniques and you’ve got a very cost effective machine for creating Reality TV shows about, hey, real people, done by, hey, real people.

Who is the new head of NBC?