When Jump the Shark Jumped the Shark

Jump the Shark - sounded like a great plan, right? Not exactly. There have been several popular Web sites that were bought because of their traffic. You can think of traffic as much the same thing that ratings are to television and radio, and circulation is to newspapers and magazines. All thrive on ad revenue. With Web sites the more traffic you get the more you can charge advertisers. And unlike television where ratings are basically guesswork, Web sites are able to tell exactly how many computers logged onto the site and which pages they looked at. Each time a page is viewed the advertiser on that page pays the host. A lot of traffic and you could be making millions, that is provided you have the ability to market your Web site. Marketing is something many home grown Web sites are not too good at, most not realizing the actual money they could be making, while others simply do not have the money to invest in a web design which will allow them to place advertisements. Even those who fully realize the money they could be making each year in advertisements a lump payment is enough for them to sell. After all, what guarantee is there that the same Web site will still be popular next year? Take the money and run.

There can be a lot of unforeseen problems with buying a popular Web site. Sponsors tend not to like their product ridiculed. And with TV Guide their sponsors are the television industry itself. And the last thing the television industry wants is someone on a Web site saying their show has "Jumped the Shark", especially now that they are trying to sell every single season of that show on DVD. It was inevitable that TV Guide would be pressured to censor the comments on the Jump the Shark site. Inevitably this lead to the comment section being eliminated altogether. Today the Jump the Shark Web site gives you the home page for TV Guide's Web site. TV Guide only wanted the traffic, and after getting that did not really need to maintain the original site. There has been discussion that perhaps Jon Hein, who's column was cancelled by TV Guide in 2008 when they eliminated the rest of the original content, will begin a new Web site similar to Jump the Shark. has Jumped the Shark. One of the Internet's most popular Web sites is now nothing more than a few common press release articles on current television shows. So what happened? Corporate greed is the common explanation. TV Guide bought the Jump the Shark Web site simply to bring traffic to their Web site and were not really interested in anything else.

Jump the Shark began with founder Jon Hein who in college had begun a discussion with some friends about the show Happy Days. As with most long running television shows it reached a point where it's best years were behind it and it was no longer as good as it use to be. In trying to identify just when the series started to go downhill Jon said it was around the time that the Fonz decided to strap on water skis and jump over a live shark. Jon theorized that this was the beginning of cheap gimmicks on the show to bring in higher ratings, as well as the beginning of poor quality writing for the episodes. The discussion moved to other television shows where Jon was asked what was their "jump the shark" moment. From there the term "jump the shark" was used to describe the event during a television series that separated the earlier classic episodes with the later weaker episodes prior to the show's cancellation. Jon later created a simple Web site where contributors gave their opinion to when their favorite shows had jumped the shark. The Web site took off and soon Jon was being asked as a guest on shows like Howard Stern as a media expert. Jon had planned to expand his Web site to discuss other media, such as recording acts, book series, movie franchises and video game series. He was also in development of a Jump the Shark game show.

That was when TV Guide showed up with a million-dollar offer to buy the Jump the Shark Web site. For Jon the decision was easy. Aside from the money TV Guide, who already had their own Web site, had promised to upgrade Jump the Shark's graphics as well as hire Jon to contribute articles. At the time Jump the Shark had become so popular that Jon could not keep up with monitoring the contributions. He was still using the original Web design for his old site where submissions were sent through emails to his computer and he in turn had to hand write them onto each web page. Jon never had the time nor money to upgrade his Jump the Shark site to allow message board contributions. Also, he had just accepted a job with Sirius Satellite Radio to work for the Howard Stern Show and would no longer be able to work on his former Web site anyway.

Speaking of Jumping the Shark, TV Guide did it in 2005. A popular digest sized magazine, it's success was due to it having local listings for every television market. This meant that hundreds of different versions of the TV Guide were published across the country, each having different black and white television listings. New management at the top decided to change the TV Guide into a glossy magazine, doing away with the local listings and replacing them with a grid of the top network's programming. Part of TV Guide's plan was for the magazine to draw traffic to their Web site which was to be the organization's moneymaker. Despite TV Guide being a well known name traffic to their site was low. Thus came the idea of buying a popular Web site and linking it to the TV Guide Web site. Jump the Shark was the best logical choice.