For Broadcast August 05, 2010

Fixing itv.com is a priority, but it will have to move fast to catch up.

This just in: ITV is getting serious about the internet. It’s expecting much more revenue from online real soon. The majority of a special £75m fund will go to spruce up itv.com in advance of the launch of Canvas next year, and the appointment of a new boss for itv.com is days away.

Adam Crozier - 12 weeks into his job as chief executive - has made fixing itv.com one of the centrepieces of the new three-phase, five-year transformation plan to diversify ITV’s revenue base, ramp up ITV Studios and maximise revenue from the broadcast business.

The idea is to move away from ITV’s dependence on TV advertising (which represents 74% of its revenues today) tap into the £3bn UK internet ad market (where it has very little presence) and the £6bn UK pay-TV market (where it has none at all).

But didn’t Michael Grade previously target a couple of hundred million in non-TV revenues by 2010? And Grade’s predecessor, Charles Allen, talked about “profitable content”, which would show up on multiple platforms. How to achieve this is still a bit vague.

So how far behind is the ITV internet wagon? Well, all of Crozier’s plans and actions are either obvious, long overdue, or both - and the figures prove it. ITV’s internet audience was down 14% in the first half of the year compared with 2009. Yes, there are some geo-blocking issues, but how many major video websites do you know that have fallen at all, let alone by this much?

Also, itv.com had an 11% average monthly active audience reach in the first six months of the year, representing the proportion of UK internet users who accessed the website each month. This is miles behind the BBC website’s 54% and only comparable with Channel 4’s 10%. “We’re not punching our weight,” says Crozier, and he’s certainly got that right.

Online revenue may have grown 20%, but from a low base - and at £12m, it is a drop in the online ocean.

Some 3.4 million unique users visited ITV’s World Cup site and there were 800,000 downloads for ITV’s World Cup mobile phone app, but itv.com still needs to figure out how to grow and monetise its online audience better.

Which brings me to micropayments. This is another to-do item on the Crozier list, and rightly so, given that even the likes of hulu.com in the US are embracing payments over ad-funded alone.

Key people are being added to the itv.com arsenal as well - signing its first chief technical officer, Peter Dale, is a very good idea, added to ex-Yahoo! and GCap executive Fru Hazlitt as ITV marketing/online supremo and the planned new head of itv.com. The bad news: this is a new team, again.

Perhaps ITV needs another Susan Boyle internet phenomenon to test Crozier’s new online theory. It’s thought ITV left anywhere from £200,000 to £1m on the table when Ms Boyle’s I Dreamed A Dream hit YouTube without an agreement with ITV.

Crozier admits that there’s no silver bullet, no quick fix for any of ITV’s problems, but the internet is the fastest-moving piece of the communication world. It would be nice to feel the new boss was moving at the same speed in this domain at least.