VIACOM'S FLUX HAS ITS FIRST MAJOR TENANT: THINKMTV
MTV has just launched a new social-networking community for youth activism, ThinkMTV, which is designed to network members both online and offline around causes ranging from climate change to HIV/AIDS. While as a standalone network it's …
Context & Ripple Effects
ThinkMTV lands on Flux after a busy stretch of MTV digital dealmaking: the network teamed with RealNetworks and Verizon on Rhapsody America in August 2007 after ending its 15-month URGE partnership with Microsoft, and ran one-on-one political dialogues with Democratic candidates alongside MySpace — coverage at the time framed those as playing catch-up to the CNN-YouTube debates. It also put Twitter to work promoting the Video Music Awards.
Flux itself is the newer piece: Viacom's white-label social platform, and ThinkMTV — a youth-activism community spanning climate change to HIV/AIDS, online and off — is its first major tenant. The syndicated pickup by Profy shows the story travelled modestly beyond Webware, but the strategic signal is what matters: Viacom is hosting its own communities rather than renting space on MySpace or Facebook.
First-order effects
- Flux gets a flagship tenant that validates its white-label pitch internally — MTV's activism community runs on Viacom-owned infrastructure instead of a third-party network like MySpace, which MTV had just partnered with on politics.
- MTV gains direct ownership of member profiles and activity data around causes, an asset it does not control when campaigns live on MySpace or YouTube.
Second-order effects
- MySpace faces an odd double role: partner on the candidate dialogues while MTV builds a parallel activist community that could pull youth organizing off MySpace's platform.
- Other Viacom and MTV Networks brands become the obvious next tenants if ThinkMTV works, turning Flux into shared infrastructure across the portfolio rather than a one-off experiment.
Third-order effects
- If the tenant model holds, legacy media groups shift from syndicating content onto big social networks toward operating their own branded communities — trading network effects for data ownership, a bet whose payoff depends on whether audiences follow.
- Cause-driven programming becomes a distribution strategy: activism gives MTV a reason for members to join a proprietary network, not just watch a channel.
The trend: In 2007, major media companies are building white-label social platforms of their own so brand communities and their data stay in-house rather than accruing to MySpace and Facebook.