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Hi this is Frank Radice and we're here at the Skullcandy booth with our continuing series
on The Future of Content with Matt Sanders, who is the general manager of Deseret Digital.
Thanks for coming Matt, tell me a little bit about what Deseret does. Deseret Digital began
4 years ago as a new offering out of our traditional media platforms deseret news, KSL, KSL radio
as a digital only organization. It focuses on the online experience and reaching to audience
via digital. So KSL if you don't know, is in Salt Lake City and as a station you guys had
some astounding numbers as far as reach for digital content. Yeah, so KSL.com as a broadcast
media website ranks number 1 in the country with over 300 million page views per month.
deseretnews.com has grown dramatically over the last 3 years, almost doubling in size in
the last year reaching about 40 million page views and 4 million unique visitors, 70% of
whom come from out of state so it's really grown a national voice over the last 3 years.
To what do you attribute this great success because I know that having been in the station
business for a long time and in the network business for a long time those numbers are
phenomenal. How do you reach numbers like that? What is it that you do that the other
guys aren't doing? Well primarily, initially, we focused on organizational design where
we pulled all of our digital assets into a single organization so that all of our efforts
are going toward a digital audience rather than being split in our attention between the
traditional platforms and the digital platforms, that's helped a lot and then secondly, we really
narrowed down our voice to speak to a specific audience so we specialize in reaching a national
audience made up of families and parents that make decisions on behalf of their family and
their communities emanating from a religious or moral tradition and that we've discovered
through research and through practice that there's a huge vacuum in the market among
media organizations that can be filled by an organization like ours to reach into those
households. I think it's very interesting that you've tapped into this sort of secular
way of doing things because I mean that's a large large group and now I know that you're
involved with a new organization that you recently acquired, ok.com. Tell me a little
bit about that. ok.com was a brand that we launched a little over 2 years ago. So it
wasn't an acquisition? We launched it, we acquired the domain ok.com 2 years plus and
in ok.com we've taken what we know is the best of the internet and that is taking the
knowledge of crowds and communities to rate and rank and give feedback on things that
matter to them. So movies matter a lot to people and they matter a lot to families and one
of the things that we've determined through the research that we've done is that families
desire better information than what the MPAA rating gives and better than what Rotten Tomatoes
gives them which is a thumbs up thumbs down, they want the MPAA rating more attenuated or
more adjusted for age appropriateness. So ok.com allows our community to rate a movie
by if it's PG-13 a community can actually say well it's more appropriate for a 16 year old than
a 13 year old and then they can give it a thumbs up and thumbs down on rotten tomatoes.
So what is the business funnel on this? You have the site you have the content do people
subscribe to it and then drag it in or do they just go to it as a website? They go to
it as a website currently, we also embed this utility on other partner websites, so newspapers
and other media organizations have lost a lot of their cache in the entertainment world
to enuviate pure plays like Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster and so we've taken this media
guide and allowed other media partners to embed it directly on their sites and try to
clog out some of that traffic and that audience to make themselves more relevant in their
local communities. So i'd say maybe 20 years ago, Al Gore got involved and created the V chip,
it seems to me like. I think it was before he invented the internet, busy guy. Certainly
before he invented then mollusk current TV. Do you find that there is so much that has
changed in network television that you absolutely need a product like this now more than ever?
I mean i'll say a show like Two Broke Girls, it's recently been in the news for being just
completely over the top sexually and not the kind of program that you want your 10 or 11
year old daughter to be watching. Well I think as a society we've slid into a trap, in that
we allow ourselves to label things as appropriate for different segments of the society. So we
label things adult only, well turns out that we found that hyper violent content, *** content
it's not good for anybody, right? and we've trusted the regulatory bodies over time to
kind of be a watchdog on those things and they haven't done it. Traditional news organizations
haven't been a watchdog on that. Turns out that the best watchdogs for that kind of content
are families, parents who are concerned about their children. Here at this conference I've
talked to dozens of people who are out here, hyper innovative individuals building the
best TV's in the world. We talk to them about what they're doing and we say what we're doing
and they say oh i've got two boys I would love to.. I love this offering. So the traditional
mechanisms this society had to kind of put a backstop against some of the content that
now is flowing on even network television it's kind of gone away so we look at this
as a tool that the community can generate to give advice to one another. I think it's,
ya know, what is admirable to me is the fact that it does something that the government
used to think it could do, but not only no longer does officially but it actually just no
longer does it at all. Correct. and listen, as Americans we always found a way, the markets
always found a way to do things better and faster and more innovatively and so we think
that this is kind of an electronic lean over the back fence, hey did you see that? Yeah
I saw it, it was great! except for those two scenes. And those are the kind of recommendations
you get from your neighbors anyway about movies and is a way to do it via, some of the tools
we've learned about from social networking and some of the things we've learned about
how people like to interact online. We're trying to accumulate that power of advice and of
review in this utility. So do you utilize social media experts that are professionals
as well as some combination of the media experts who actually live out there and are consuming
the content like moms and pops or is it all about user generated content? So what we found
in all of this is people trust people more than they trust experts, and this unlocks the
power of community to give reviews of media that matters most in the living room. Thank
you very much, that's Matt Sanders from Deseret Digital. This is Frank Radice with the continuing
series The Future of Content.