Since it’s launch in January, Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network has been somewhat of a disappointment in terms of viewership.
OWN’s live total day ratings among people between ages 25 and 54 were down 3.8% in the first quarter from the numbers that the channel it replaced, Discovery Health, delivered during the same period last year, says Deadline.
And Winfrey is finally starting to acknowledge this realization. She told a room of advertisers and ad buyers “we are all learning more and more about the viewers” and after the end of syndication of her daytime talk show in May, she will “get to devote [her] full attention to OWN.”
I’m not sure that her “full attention” is going to be enough to revive the network. What OWN needs is branding. Lifetime is “television for women.” BET is for “black entertainment.”
Who exactly is OWN supposed to be targeting, and why is the company so afraid to say it?
It seems Winfrey doesn’t want to put herself in a box and brand the network as a channel for _________. But unless her target audience knows that they are the ones she’s courting, it may be unrealistic to expect anyone to come flocking to OWN anytime soon.
It’s funny, she has so much money and experience but that just goes to show it’s just that hard to get a network going and make it successful. Which is all the reason why it was so upsetting to see the BET owners sell out the way they did. Hopefully Oprah perseveres and gets over the hump. Even though its not a network just for black people, it’s cool to see her trying to break into that area.