I will preface this by saying that if GSN wants a good president and CEO, I feel they should be banging on Bob Boden’s door and begging him to come back to GSN now that Cronin is gone. We’ll get to this a bit later. However, we have a long voyage to go through first. This also includes 2002 ratings which are very interesting. Those are after the break.

A press release for GSN went under the radar recently, and perhaps it was for the best. GSN has announced that they spent $500,000 on a new online marketing campaign to focus on online gaming rather than the television network. They will be focusing 85% of their online presence on their casual gaming and only 15% on the network. Because, you know, when you’re at a .3, why bother trying to improve? Take a look at GSN’s new front page here to get a glimpse. The first time I saw it, I really could not tell if it was a video game website or a television network.

“GSN is the network for games and GSN.com is the Web site for games,” said John P. Roberts, senior VP of digital media and interactive entertainment at the company. As a matter of fact, the site’s 21 games have gotten over 3.1 million views just in the month of June. However, they obviously have heavy competition from places such as Yahoo and MSN. Read on for some opinions on this matter. Also, someone emailed me a very interesting press release from around five years ago that has some ratings information from 2002-2003. It’s very interesting to see what has happened.

I have always said and will always say that the GSN people are some of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with. However, I’m just not a fan of this focus on the online gaming. It seriously looks like Boxerjam or something along that line. At least in my opinion, there should be a bit more of a focus on the actual network. I’m not saying that it’ll drive in more people to the network, but I doubt the online games are helping any in that area. GSN hasn’t been able to get out of the .3’s in some time, and their head count has continually gone down in a very alarming rate. I don’t know if this is leaving-CEO Rich Cronin’s doing or not, but the new CEO should at least try to recognize that online games are not going keep a network afloat.

Now onto the ratings. The ratings information comes from Variety, by the way. Back in 2002, roughly two months after new shows debuted, here are some ratings on the former shows. Friend or Foe? was was averaging a .6. Russian Roulette was averaging .7. Note that Roulette was on at 11PM ET and Friend at 10:30PM ET. Whammy! was averaging a .4 from April to August. Now that’s the highest rating that any show has. Lingo received an average of .7 over the first four episodes.

This really isn’t even a hypothetical, but what happened? At least from my viewing, the quality of original programming has gone down. Back then, the cheap shows were (for a majority of episodes) Whammy! and Friend or Foe?. At least they looked like they had high production costs. Most shows on GSN right now look and are cheap. I really wish the network would take one big chance with a relatively big-budget high profile show. One thing I’ve definitely noticed is that the shows now have easy bonus rounds for low money. What about some show that has a hard bonus round or a game that makes it hard to win, like Russian Roulette or Whammy!, but offers a lot if you play perfectly. Grand Slam is getting back to that area a bit, but if you factor in all costs, it still equals the $25,000 a week budget. If GSN could somehow entice Bob Boden back to being CEO, I would hope they would snatch that opportunity as soon as they could. The fact that Whammy! barely got renewed with a .4 and now the highest show, High Stakes Poker, has a .4 and gets renewed instantly, is a bad sign to me.