Verizon's Attempt To Woo Millennials Is Equal Parts Creepy, Expensive And Sad

from the hip-cat dept

Thu, Apr 7th 2016 6:23am — Karl Bode

For some time now Verizon's made it very clear it wants nothing to do with its core fixed-line broadband business. Instead, Verizon's taking a huge bet that it can transform ye olde phone company into a huge advertising and streaming media empire, with a focus on wooing (read: selling ads to) Millennials. To that end Verizon acquired AOL and its ad technology for $4.4 billion last year. It developed a highly-controversial stealth ad tech that can track these youngsters around the Internet without their consent, and it created its own "Go90" streaming video service specifically aimed at Millennials.

More recently, Verizon announced it would be spending $650 million on a 25% stake in AwesomenessTV, a streaming venture aimed at, you guessed it, Millennials. AwesomenessTV was sold to Dreamworks for $33 million just three years ago, but Verizon believes the mark up is worth it, and the acquisition will be the cornerstone of the company's new Millennial sexification efforts:

"We are capitalizing on the emergence of these strong media brands that can reach millennials and Generation Z,” said Brian Angiolet, Verizon’s senior vice president for consumer product and marketing. “It’s like we’re in the early days of cable, and we want to participate more fully in the economics of that trend.”

AwesomenessTV will, moving forward, help feed exclusive content into Verizon's Go90 platform. The problem is that by all appearances, Verizon's Go90 rebranding efforts (which remove the Verizon name entirely in ads) aren't going all that well. Despite Verizon giving away some free, extra wireless gigabytes of data to users that try the service, Go90's ranking on most app stores appears to have only floundered since the initial launch last year. Analysts at firms like UBS aren't impressed either, noting that most Millennials are already getting their video content elsewhere:

"We believe Go90 will be hard-pressed to mount a meaningful challenge to mobile video and social networking leaders YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu,” wrote UBS analyst John Hodulik in the report. “That said, Verizon is pulling various levers to ramp up interest in and usage of Go90, including more live and exclusive content and free data for Verizon Wireless customers."

Even the company's plan to abuse its position as an anti-competitive gatekeeper hasn't really helped. The company gave the FCC and its net neutrality rules a giant middle finger recently by exempting Go90 content from company usage caps, but even this unfair advantage doesn't appear to have lit much of a fire under the initiative. As a result the effort has been mocked by T-Mobile CEO John Legere, who called Go90 a "debacle," that will in time be spoken of alongside things like Amazon and Facebook's failed attempts to sell their own phones.

Keep in mind that Verizon executives, after the departure of former Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg, decided to effectively give up on fixed line broadband -- something it was actually marginally good at -- to pursue this new initiative. As such, Verizon stopped expanding FiOS (despite billions in subsidies and tax breaks for fiber never delivered) and began trying to offload or otherwise ignore the company's DSL customers. In some instances, this even meant outright refusing to repair DSL customers hit by natural disasters, citing expense.

Many of these resources were instead diverted to wireless (which makes sense from a ROI and future-proofing perspective). But Verizon executives honestly believe that if they spend enough money they can become an ad empire akin to Facebook or Google. But not even Verizon's experience with shady privacy violations, notably anti-competitive behavior and PR distortion fields appears capable of turning the company's legacy telecom empire into a sexy new media brand. Still, it should prove entertaining to watch Verizon spend billions trying.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: millennials, streaming, television
Companies: awesomenesstv, dreamworks, verizon

18 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Ninja (profile), 7 Apr 2016 @ 7:38am

Obligatory gif of Verizon attempts at being cool.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
crade (profile), 7 Apr 2016 @ 7:45am

Hold on.. AOL sold for 4.4 billion?

*this* AOL?
http://justinakapaste.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-10-26-09_59_55-90s-Computer-Nostalgia. -_-Retro-Junk-Article.png
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2016 @ 7:49am

Re:
That gif is too kind. That old man dancing is awesome.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Fedor, 7 Apr 2016 @ 7:51am

Re:
The amount of incredulity that I felt reading AOL was purchased for that ungodly sum was physically palpable.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2016 @ 7:56am

"Jack just got pwned!"
"Don't you mean owned?"
"I dunno, the kids spell it p-w-n-e-d"
"You're not a kid, you're a ****ing fossil, and **** like this just makes it sadder"

Thanks MadWorld for telling us how old people sound when try and sound like kids or youthful adults.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Berenerd (profile), 7 Apr 2016 @ 8:04am

This would explain why go90 appeared on my phone the last OS upgrade and I can't remove it
[ link to this | view in thread ]
old man, 7 Apr 2016 @ 8:38am

Re: really?
That ole dude is cooler than shit, but ya.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2016 @ 9:18am

Expensive and sad, I understand, but...
The headline says the attempt is creepy, expensive, and sad. I understand the expensive and sad parts. What new thing are they doing that is creepy? The stealth tracking headers were nasty, but that's not new, so I expected something else to contribute to the creepiness.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
DB (profile), 7 Apr 2016 @ 9:20am

Do you know how housing developments are named after what they killed or destroyed to build them e.g. 'Fox Run', 'Oak Grove', 'Willow Glen', 'Back Bay'?

I present 'AwesomenessTV'
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2016 @ 9:37am

3 years ago it sold for 33M and now Verizon thinks its worth 2.6B? Thats almost as bad as buying AOL.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2016 @ 11:45am

I'm a Verizon customer and I've used the go90 app service and the content it offers absolutely sucks. May be because I'm 29 and I'm not the targeted audience but it still sucks ass.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2016 @ 11:51am

Keep spending those billions Verizon. I will keep stopping you with a free as-blocker.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
John Fenderson (profile), 7 Apr 2016 @ 3:56pm

Re: Expensive and sad, I understand, but...
You don't find the spying creepy?
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Mike Masnick (profile), 7 Apr 2016 @ 4:33pm

Re:
Disagree. That guy actually is cool.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Coward, 7 Apr 2016 @ 8:13pm

As a relatively happy FIOS user this is something that makes me Scratch my head. Yes it is expensive but once they get a customer they are sticky. Cell phone carriers are way too easy to change.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Glenn, 7 Apr 2016 @ 9:08pm

"Entertaining"? ...watching Vz spend billions of dollars "scammed" from the pockets of its customers? Uhh, yeah, real entertaining.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
But, 8 Apr 2016 @ 12:49am

A new fiber install spotted in in Philadelphia suburbs--April 2016
Somebody commented: ...Verizon stopped expanding FiOS...

Our houses are packed like sardines on 1/4-acre lots--maybe our irresistible "households per buried-fiber-mile" ratio made us the "last mile."
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Ninja (profile), 8 Apr 2016 @ 11:06am

Re: Re:
Aha, in retrospect he is. Bad gif to raise my point.
[ link to this | view in thread ]