Project Merlin
PBS goal: Turn stations’ sites into Internet ‘success stories’
For a decade PBS’s website has tried to “localize” its visitors — asking where they live so it can show them local broadcast times and fundraising pitches for their hometown stations.
Now it’s trying harder. Over the past year, PBS.org has increased by half the localized portion of users to 12 percent, and it will push further in coming months.
Expanding localization and inserting more local-station material on the national home page, along with the stations’ adoption of PBS’s COVE video streaming technology, are parts of a campaign to show that PBS’s web services are supporters, not competitors, of local broadcasters.
Traffic on the national PBS sites has grown briskly. The general-audience site, PBS.org, attracts about 12 million unique visitors a month, up from about 7 million in 2006. PBSKids.org has 8.2 million unique visitors a month, up from about 5 million in 2006.
Fostering the network site’s growth was the primary mandate of the PBS Interactive unit two years ago when Senior Vice President Jason Seiken took charge, he says. Now the unit’s mandate is broader — increasing usage of all of public TV’s websites.
The effort is called Project Merlin.
Seiken says localization will refer “a tremendous firehose” of web traffic to station sites. Of PBS.org’s 12 million unique visitors per month, about 430,000 are now referred to stations.
In addition, localized visitors will see much more local material on a redesigned PBS home page, put there “automagically,” Seiken says, with the help of metadata.
On the new home page, images from local shows will hob-nob with PBS stills in a slider at the top left, Seiken says. Local videos will join the options in a screen at top right. A ticker will tell what programs are airing locally.
Local productions also will be featured on appropriate PBS.org pages covering topics such as science or how-to. Generic “Support PBS” and “TV Schedules” links will go to pages on stations’ sites.
PBS, like other web publishers, now has a more accurate ability to determine a user’s location, based on Internet address, than in early days of the Web.
In areas where there’s just one PBS-member station, people who go to PBS.org have recently been localized. PBS also has paired people with stations if they’ve visited a local station site that uses PBS’s schedule software. (They’ve been marked by having an identifyiing cookie stowed in their computers.)
Next, PBS will begin the harder job of localizing web visitors from “overlap” regions with multiple stations.
“If you’re in California and arrive at the site for the first time, you will be default-localized to California, and it’s going to feel Californiaesque,” predicts Kristin Calhoun, PBS Interactive’s director of station products and services. Until you declare allegiance to a particular station, you’ll see material from various California stations.
The COVE video portal may be PBS’s biggest boost for local station sites because it makes the sites content destinations for on-demand video, not just promotional vehicles.
COVE is designed “for the express purpose of . . . helping the stations become new-media success stories,” Seiken says.
The streaming technology debuted on the national site this spring and has been tested for months by 14 pilot stations. Now other stations that opt for one of three levels of involvement (Current, Sept. 8, 2009) will have COVE installed, about five stations a week.
Growing length and number of visits “can be traced almost directly to the implementation of video” in an expanded role on PBS.org, says Seiken. The growth of on-demand video is “an unstoppable trend,” he figures. “The audience wants to have control over when and how they’re watching.”
Two-thirds of the web visitors to PBS’s general audience site are under 45 years old, Seiken says. “It’s a whole new audience for stations to create relationships with.”
This story includes a correction of the print edition. PBS estimates it will install COVE at five stations a week, not five a month as printed.
Web page posted Sept. 25 and corrected Oct. 5, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC
