The steep decline in traffic to their online tv site Bud.TV has left Anheuser-Busch (BUD) executives scratching their heads as to the problem.
While a lot of things have been thrown around like the age verification process and closed walls, I still think it comes down to content for the most part. For example, the company has also put a number of its videos outside the "closed walls," and haven't done too good with them on YouTube (GOOG). The one exception was "Afterworld," an Webisode of which has attracted more than 184,000 YouTube views on its sixth installment.
In March the site was only able to garner 152,000 visitors, down 40 percent from its debut of 253,000 in February.
Watching the "Afterworld" Webisodes was fun, but right away I saw one of the problems, they requested that the embed function be disabled. I was going to put it up here for visitors to watch, but wasn't able to. I think that's a big mistake on their part.
To me it's way too early to start the panic stuff that's already started to go around the Web concerning the site. It is drawing a lot of interest because its the first try at creating an online TV network on this scale.
They do have a satirical news game show called "Hardly News" in the wings which will feature sportscaster Joe Buck, which brings me to my may point in this: Why isn't there a bunch of sports related stuff on a beer site? The history of beer marketing is integrated with the sports industry. Even if it was stuff they made up, or were comedies or spoofs.
While the age-verification thing probably has some impact upon the numbers, if the content was really good, I think that it would be overcome. To me they need to add some type of sports features to the mix to attract the demographic they're serving.
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