This weekend I read Brett Pulley’s The Billion Dollar BET: Robert Johnson and the Inside Story of Black Entertainment Television. Pulley details Robert “Bob” Johnson’s path from poor kid from Mississippi to cofounder of BET and billionaire.

When Bob landed John Malone’s investment in BET, he’d never run a business. He asked Malone for advice (after getting the investment check). Malone was direct: “Get your revenue up and keep your costs down.”  Bob took that advice to heart and combined it with a mercenary founder mentality to find a profitable content strategy.

Bob couldn’t afford to produce content on par with broadcast networks like NBC and CBS. He needed something else. Music videos were the new craze, but Black artists weren’t being played on MTV. BET got promotional videos from record labels free of charge and aired them. Viewers loved them, and artists loved getting national exposure.

Bob had hit on a winning strategy: Find a form of entertainment with high Black demand not being satisfied by other networks and a large supply of Black talent. By connecting supply to demand, he added value to both sides. Also important was that the talent valued the national exposure it couldn’t get anywhere else and didn’t expect much, if any, compensation. Bob had found a highly profitable content strategy.

ESPN launched and was a success. Bob noticed that ESPN didn’t broadcast games played by Black colleges. BET began broadcasting football and basketball games from well-known Black colleges such as Grambling and Jackson State. He made sure to broadcast the half-time performances of school marching bands and dance teams, something Black communities enjoy to this day. BET could broadcast games for less than $15,000 per game, while networks like ABC paid up to $50,000 per game. Black colleges enjoyed the national exposure, viewers enjoyed watching games they couldn’t watch anywhere else, and BET got exclusive low-cost programming.

Bob also noticed there were many talented but undiscovered comedians. BET launched ComicView, and the show became one of its most successful shows ever. The show propelled the careers of now-famous comedians such as D.L Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer, and Kevin Hart. Keeping costs down was taken too far, though. The result was a mini public relations crisis. BET learned from this and modestly increased pay to comedians and moved production from Los Angeles to Atlanta, whose comedians were plentiful and non-union. A one-hour episode of ComicView cost $18,500 to produce—while “inexpensive” half-hour sitcoms cost big networks $500,000 an episode and hits like Friends cost over $6 million an episode.

Bob’s focus on entertainment content gained him critics in the Black community. But his goal was clear: generate profits and become wealthy. He aligned his content strategy with that goal. Advertisers were paying BET rates that were less than half of those they paid MTV and other networks, yet when Viacom acquired BET for $2.3 billion in 2000, BET’s profit margins were the highest in the industry and strongly influenced Sumner Redstone’s decision.

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