Chris Meledandri Quotes

I think everybody in news understands that the audience that watches for more than an hour is not your target audience - because those people are on life support.

Pacing has become more important than ever, largely because of other media. I've always tried to start my stories out with a bang, something that will hook their attention.

In a country where people's attention span is short and they are holding the clicker in their hand, and they got a hundred other options, you have to basically understand what the audience is responding to. If you don't, you're going to fail.

In this fragmented world, with such short attention spans, you've got a couple of episodes to make an impression. And if you don't, you start to lose your audience in a big way.

CNN and MSNBC, our primary competitors, are trying to figure out how to beat us. There are some good, smart people at those networks, and even occasionally a blind pig finds an acorn.

Radio has always been a niche business. Cable television has always been a niche business. Magazines have always been a niche business.

It gets harder and harder to succeed and find audiences with the 500-channel universe, the remote control, and people being so trigger happy with that remote control. It just gets harder to get a foothold.

Advertising and content have always been bound together - in print, on television, and on the web. Sure, you can skip the ad - just flip the page, or press 'ffwd' on your DVR. But great advertising, as I've long argued, adds value to the content ecosystem, and has as much a right to be in the conversation as does the publisher and the consumer.

On the Internet, news is consumed a la carte. If someone shows up on the main page of a website and doesn't see anything of interest, they leave. This negatively impacts ad revenues. The solution on the Internet is to pack news websites full of things that will draw people in, regardless of whether they are news or not.

Video will drive the share-shift in advertising.

It's a growing trend. Viewers are our customers, but so are advertisers. And advertisers want different ways to reach our viewers.

The challenges are different to different kinds of magazines. News magazines, magazines that have high frequency and news, are going to be challenged, heavily challenged, not just by the Internet but by the whole 24-hour news cycle which has just been getting enhanced.

I think we have to recognize as an industry that users have a lot more choices and can click away to a lot more media. As a result, the advertising we create really needs to be something users want to see.

Television has supplanted people as the only audience that campaigners are interested in.

Market size, particularly when you're dealing with major media markets, has an impact in terms of gathering attention.

TV is a level playing field, and you're competing for eyeballs.

Because of social media being such a marketable format, things are constantly being released, so people don't pay as much attention because they have a million things being thrown at them. You reach more people, but now there's more content. Before, it was harder to get the people but there was less content.

How Hungama became the top children's channel in India is interesting because we were up against, not just Disney, but also Time Warner's Cartoon Network. It was an illustration of the fact that for any company that wants to grow in emerging markets, localizing content is the key.

I've done some wonderful performance on TV even better than films. But once people watch it, they just forget it. The impact is not strong. So, films and TV are different.

I believe that in today's media landscape, we can create and distribute content on multiple platforms while remaining fresh and relevant.

The literary world has to compete with YouTube, Instagram, PlayStation, Xbox, Hulu.

The competitive landscape for us is very broad. We see ourselves in the entertainment space. We compete with listening to the radio. We compete with watching TV. We compete with social networks.

My definition of media? 'Anything which owns attention.' This could be a game or, perhaps, a platform. Ironically, the media tends to associate media with publishing - digital or otherwise - which, in turn, is too narrow a way to consider not only the media but also the reality of the competitive landscape and media-focused innovation.

In a media landscape that has grown in unimaginable ways, there are more projects that have come along now than ever. While the number of projects has grown, many players are vying for that audience.

Pay-per-views and television are so fast-paced. It's very hectic.