Time and motion: online video

While Federal Reserve Governors continued to list inflation as their 2009 new year's resolution, at least one aspect of our lives into the new year is already rapidly inflating: the amount of time spent watching videos online.

Comscore released its numbers and the rise looks like this: a 40% jump in one year in the number of videos viewed online. In addition, the average length of a video viewed was a whopping 3.1 minutes. (See chart below or press release).

So what?

Google (which is YouTube) dominates...more than 5 Billion served in one month...followed by MySpace (which is the Fox Interactive Media number). But what the numbers also may be saying is this:

1. Broadband is enabling the rapid growth of video online.

2. Cheap digital video capture devices are continuing the growth of user-generated video online (prior post on mobile video here)

3. There is a role for professionally produced video online (via traditional network sites like Hulu, Disney, Turner) it just doesn't look like double-digit share online.

We've said it before, but if you are a network, you want all the content you can get your hands on. If you are a content producer, you want to be on the network with the broadest exposure...YouTube fits the bill. As does MySpace and certain others who let anyone be a content creator...

And in another irony of the online marketplace of ideas, some are even taking YouTube video to the big screen (see here)

Now, if the Fed, er, Google could just figure out how their YouTube debt can be monetized...

Mobile Video: an army of amateurs

Comscore has released its latest 3-month stats on mobile video use and the numbers are interesting for two reasons:

1. More than one-third of all mobile subscribers in the US have watched video on their device

2. Amateur video clips represent the most viewed type of video followed by music and comedy videos

While a single data point certainly does not equal a trend, the growing number of mobile subscribers accessing video supports the notion of anywhere, anytime, anydata connectivity becoming the expectation. 

It also speaks to the growing value that people are finding in their mobile devices, making the mobile device something most would have difficulty giving up (see here for data on wants vs. needs). 

The predominance of amateur and short form video, combined with the resistance to marketing on mobile devices, suggests marketers will have to find ways to engage amateur's (customers?)--either as content providers or as willing participants in the distribution of any mobile videomarketing effort.

Prior postings on mobile here and here.

Comscore press release here

YouTube Video gets to the point

One of the challenges of video snacking on YouTube is that sometimes the best part of a video is buried inside a longer cut. When forwarding to friends and colleagues, YouTube now allows you to send a link to the specific part of the video by adding the timestamp to the end of the link.

Like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjBFb9rj-Zs#t=0m24s 

Getting to the point...or the lack of one.

Time is on their side: GooTube

There is a bit of a kerfuffle about Google's purchase of YouTube last year.

In one corner, you have Marc Cuban (Billionaire Dallas Maverick's owner, founder of HDNET and sometimes-rumored aquirer of the Chicago Cubs). He thinks Google screwed up buying YouTube because they aren't making money on it...now...and he doesn't see the near term potential for them to. Marc thinks a TV network site like Hulu (see my previous posting on Hulu) has it right (see Marc's testosterone-fueled blog posting on the subject).

Then there's the others, like Forbes columnist Quentin Hardy (see posting on Quentin's panel at the South by Southwest Interactive panel). He thinks they have it right using YouTube as a data goldmine. In essence, YouTube is the biggest station on the planet.

Personally, I think it's hard to argue with numbers like these, which might indicate that YouTube has it right (source, comScore Media Metrix):

For one month, March 2008:

• 73.7 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
• 84.8 million viewers watched 4.3 billion videos on YouTube.com (50.4 videos per viewer).
• 47.7 million viewers watched 400 million videos on MySpace.com (8.4 videos per viewer).
• The average online video duration was 2.8 minutes.
• The average online video viewer watched 235 minutes of video.

When contemplating what people do online--and therefore where they choose to spend their time--it would appear that the long tail of YouTube has sticking power.

Numbers like these support the idea that a distribution network (like YouTube or NBC) wants all the content it can get...while content providers want to be where there potential audience is. For a distribution network like YouTube, they can have both the best content (in the sense of well-produced by people who do it professionally) AND the most demanded content (even if the demand is from small groups of 10-15 friends, family, and colleagues who could care less if the shot was in HD or from a single camera). A network like Hulu or Joost are tied to the content providers who have locked in with the traditional broadcast networks...amateurs content producers need not apply.

Google has time to make it work...both the YouTube audience's and their cash flow statement's.

Online video: Attention Deficit Spending

As all breathing humans who care seem to know, the major TV broadcasters are attempting to move their content online in a format hereafter and cleverly referred to as 'Online video'. Great names like Hulu and Joost mask the question these these brave entities undertake: how do you pursue monetization of video content in the land of free?

Well, like many newspapers have found out, it may turn out that they don't...at least not as much as they did when they controlled the means of production, the distribution channel and the supply of attention.

Mark Cuban has a post talking about a' la carte content and its implication on his blog. An interesting excerpt:


On the web, early evidence suggests that consumers will tune out – click away – if they are forced to watch more than 30 seconds or so of advertising up front, and maybe another 90 seconds of advertising over the next thirty minutes. Hulu.com, for example, which has already been lionized by many as the future of TV, serves two minutes of advertising for every 22 minutes of programming(i.e. the programming duration of a typical half hour show from television). Assuming identical CPMs for web video and TV, and after accounting for lost affiliate fees, a 30 minute program on the web with two minutes of advertising yields approximately 1/8th as much revenue per viewer. Are content producers prepared to reduce production costs...by 88%?


They better be. Content is commodity to everyone but the individual who finds it of some value. And in the online world, where an individual's interests can be identified and served individually, the method to monetization of content may be that, in fact, content providers pay consumers for their attention. Say what?

Let's ask a few questions and suggest answers:

Q: If content is available but you don't know about it, does it have value to you?
A: Potentially, but not actually.

Q: If you are aware of content but are unwilling to spend time with it, does it have value to you?
A: No.

Q: If you are aware of content, you are willing to spend time with it, and therefore it has some value to you, what is it worth?
A: What you are willing to spend...in money (pay per view) or attention (willingness to watch adverts).


So, as a content provider online my objectives are simple:

1. Be sure that I make you aware of content you care about.
2. Price my content at a level you are willing to pay (in the form of time-as NCB has done with its hulu.com ad supported content--or money--as NBC has done with it's $1.99 downloads fo commerical free programming for the Zune media player).
3. Match my investment in content to the market for it. (NBC has to sell alot of $1.99 episodes or get alot of advertisers willing to support 30 minutes of programming in exchage for 120 seconds of advertisements)

Simple enough. But how?

If I knew that in detail I'd be somewhere else...but you can reason that it would involve the following:

1. Consumer Search
2. Contextual Advertising
3. Social Networking/Community Content
4. All of the above
5. None of the above

As it stands, mass media franchises seem to be pursuing none of the above quite well...Google, Yahoo, and the other online networks seem already to be integrating All of the above.