John de Mol aimed to achieve a 10 per cent market share with his ambitious television project one year after the start.
De Mol made an investment of millions and bought TV stars such as Linda de Mol, Beau van Erven Dorens, Jack Spijkerman, broadcasting rights for the premier league football and invested in numerous new formats.
A mix of football, games, Dutch drama (Gooische Vrouwen, Van Speijk), talk shows, a reality soap with porn star Kim Holland and a programme where corpses were cut up.
The viewing figures fell short of expectations and fluctuated between 6 and 7 percent. Even the main crowd puller, premier league football, scored less well than expected. The programme 'The Matches' attracted over 2 million viewers on Sunday night: 1 million less than Studio Sport before. Financially, TIEN did not do well either. De Mol's channel lost millions of euros every year. Media analyst Oskar Tijs of investment bank Kempen estimates that De Mol lost between 125 and 150 million euros annually on salaries and broadcasting rights, among other things. Despite an investment of millions of euros and despite a host of stars that did score on other channels, TIEN/Talpa did not survive independently. TIEN has now been integrated into parts of RTL Group. Talpa Media acquired a 26.3 percent share in the new RTL Nederland.
John de Mol started the television station TIEN and invested millions in it. While the channel had many TV stars, the viewing figures remained very low. De Mol's channel was losing millions of euros every year and eventually De Mol stopped the channel and TIEN was integrated into parts of RTL Group.
People have ingrained patterns. John de Mol says that he himself underestimated how loyal the viewing public is. "Many people tuned in to Vara on Saturday at eight o'clock for a comedy-like programme. After the departure of Jack Spijkerman, Vara very cleverly programmed Paul de Leeuw there. Apparently it takes longer to get people out of their habit."
The main criticism is that the profile of the channel was not clear: TIEN tried to be there for women, men and families. Compare the profile with Net5, for example. That channel has a clearly defined target group: young, powerful women. "Unfortunately, Tien hasn't succeeded in getting the target group right," says media analyst Oscar Tijs. Marceline Beijer of media agency Kobalt: "Talpa seems to focus on three target groups simultaneously: with football on men, with drama series on women and on families with for example Lotte. That is unclear. Advertisers do not know who they reach. In the future, it is therefore useful to carefully consider which parties are all important, because now the advertisers have not been taken into account and do not know which group they should focus on.
In many places, John de Mol's TV channel is depicted as a failure. John de Mol himself disagrees. "I have always said that it would take three to five years before we would be where we wanted to be. And I have always said that 90% of the new programmes would fail," the media tycoon said at the table with Nova. "The losses we suffered were all calculated in, everything went according to the business plan." Nevertheless, he acknowledges that some calculation errors were made, such as bringing NSE out too early. "It would have been better to bring that in only in the second or third year. NSE didn't get any viewers and was a big failure of TIEN Timing is very important for a project, too late and someone else has already taken the chance and if it's too early there is no interest in it.
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