By Bill Carter, Feb 26 2014
The traditional television ratings have been impressive for the first week-plus of the new “Tonight” show hosted by Jimmy Fallon, but they do not include what amounts to a giant secondary audience that has gathered online to watch carefully crafted and curated highlights of the show on YouTube and other sites.
In the first week of the show, clips of Mr. Fallon with his guests have amassed more than 37 million views on YouTube. (They also are uploaded daily to NBC.com and Hulu.) The top clips include one on the evolution of hip-hop dancing with Mr. Fallon and Will Smith, the latest in Mr. Fallon’s series of “History of Rap” duets with Justin Timberlake, and a special teen-girl dance party sketch featuring Michelle Obama with Mr. Fallon and Will Ferrell.
“We see it as a branding play,” said Gavin Purcell, one of the show’s producers, who is also in charge of its digital efforts.
Mr. Fallon and his staff, beginning in their years on NBC’s “Late Night” program, have been intensely aware of the marketing opportunity attached to exposure online (as have other stars in late night television, like Jimmy Kimmel on ABC and Conan O’Brien on TBS). But none of the views being racked up on YouTube have generated a dollar of additional revenue for the show; they appear there without any commercials.
“Right now our strategy for YouTube is really about marketing and building audiences across all platforms,” said Rob Hayes, the executive vice president of digital media for NBC Entertainment. Mr. Hayes said it was NBC’s choice not to seek to make money from the exposure on YouTube — yet. “If we want to monetize the clips in the future, it will be our choice.”
The same clips on both NBC.com and Hulu do contain commercials, but the number of views (which has not yet been officially tallied) is far below what YouTube accumulates. Mr. Hayes said it was essential for the clips to be available on YouTube. “If we weren’t on YouTube, those clips would be pirated and put up by other people,” Mr. Hayes said.
The consistent question about making a show’s best material available outside the television version — which asks advertisers for thousands of dollars for each 30-second commercial — is whether the free online clips limit or expand the show’s audience.
“The holy grail of digital has always been that the more people that see something online, the more people that tune in,” Mr. Purcell said. “That connection has been hard to prove, but no one has disproved it.”
It would be hard to argue that the views on YouTube had damaged Mr. Fallon’s ratings so far. The show continues to exceed expectations. Tuesday night’s show averaged over 5.6 million viewers, still well above the level for late-night shows. But notably, it scored a 1.9 rating in the audience NBC sells to most advertisers, viewers between the ages of 18 and 49. That was a better rating than any program on network or cable scored in the 10 p.m. hour of prime time.
The Fallon show posts its clips early, Mr. Purcell said, the better to encourage fans to post their reactions on Twitter. The clips are put up on the “Tonight” YouTube channel exactly at the time they go on the air on the East Coast. Fans on the West Coast can see them three hours before the show is on NBC in that time zone.
At a minimum, Mr. Purcell said, “We’re reminding you the show exists — every clip you see is a tune-in reminder.”
