"Drama surrounding 'The Tonight Show' has nothing to do with Conan O'Brien or Jay Leno, but is instead a demonstration of the changing tide of consumer habits from television time slots to the Web," says the NY Times' Bits blog.
That's a bit of an over-simplifications, but Bits has a point, "Mr. O'Brien's youthful supporters won't crowd around the television at a specific time, instead they go to YouTube and Gawker to watch their late-night television."
So should Conan ditch TV and go web only? Bits thinks so. "He should come back and make the Internet his time slot."
But socialvibe's Joe Marchese disagrees in a column at MediaPost, "Even if Conan O'Brien could generate the same audience, with even greater levels of transparency and tools for engagement, he would generate orders of magnitude less revenue."
