Online video: Don’t think premium, think popular
Last week Mumbrella reported on an Adtech debate on whether video could ever be monetised. In this guest post, YouTube’s Karen Stocks argues that the starting point is understanding what people are already watching.
Cricket matches are now being broadcast at unreasonable hours of the night, and the sports reports are filled with pre-season training stories ahead of the AFL season.
Winter is on the way and I find myself wondering about the media community’s craze with “premium content” online. Industry executives are constantly debating the rate at which TV dollars will move to the Web, but when it comes down to it, the advertising budgets can’t move in significant ways until the marketing and media communities fully understand and get what people are actually watching online.
Yes, my 12-year-old daughter watches Hannah Montana on the Disney channel and Designing Houses on the Lifestyle channel, but this content represents a very small percentage of her online video viewing behaviour. The same is true for my 18-year-old niece who loves “Modern Family” on TV but also spends hours watching Natalie Tran and other “gurus” on YouTube.
The bottom line is, people watch everything and they don’t focus on whether the content is professionally produced or user-generated. People just watch what they like, right? So why don’t we, as marketers, start embracing media in the same way people consume it?
Yes, there are gating factors like formats and standardisation and length of commercial spots, ad serving complexities, measurement, etc., but the primary factor seems to be psychological — it’s about understanding how the 2011 users perceive video.
Today’s video consumers are content agnostic — they don’t differentiate between professional produced (often called “premium” content) and any other types of content (which I like to call “popular”). How do we know this?
Let’s compare how online video creators with “popular” content stack up to commonly consumed “premium” content on TV. Big summer TV hits like Packed To The Rafters, My Kitchen Rules and Criminal Minds all received significant viewership in the second week of March 2011.
Then look at the audiences “popular” content creators were attracting in the same week (see box below). The viewership is staggering. You may not be familiar with all of these content creators, but people are consuming them online, tuning into all definitions of “shows”, “tutorials” and “news”.
I surveyed a focus group of one 12-year-old and one 18-year-old. Not a representative sample, because YouTube has just as many users over 45 as under 18. My subjects spent about 50 minutes watching digital video and another 20 watching traditional television. On YouTube they watched Katy Perry, Fred, nigahiga, Michelle Phan and Natalie Tran. On TV they switched from Glee to Modern Family to the Disney Channel and back. The point is that they watched everything and nowhere in their session did they categorise what they were watching as premium or user-generated videos. It is all just content.
This was one experience in my own family, but YouTube’s user experience team contends that this user session is typical. Users move through content fluidly and without contemplation of content origin. And more of that content is watched on YouTube than anywhere else.
• Over 2 billion videos are viewed every day on YouTube worldwide
• We have more than 15,000 partners across 21 countries to date
• We pay out millions of dollars a year to partners around the world
The full potential of digital video will not be realised until we let the obsession with “Premium-ness” of content go, just as our users have. Think about the single word “Popular”. Popular content is where it’s at online. Users consume everything and don’t differentiate between big studio productions and web originals (e.g., Natalie Tran’s communitychannel. Check her out: she’s now producing travel videos for Lonely Planet).
YouTube, which will celebrate its sixth birthday soon, is still very much at the centre of pop culture. YouTube is where the popular content lives. And if we, as the media and marketing community, can’t get our heads around what people are really watching online, it’ll take years. Here’s to getting it right in 2011.
- Karen Stocks is Head of Display, Media Platforms & YouTube, Google Australia & New Zealand
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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The YouTube stats are just incredible, and thanks for your point of view here Karen. Todd and Kath, with Megan facilitating, will be discussing this issue again at ad:tech Melbourne in a couple of weeks so I expect they will take all of this in to account in the session. I’ll be interested to hear their response to your input here.
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Hi Karen
The problem I have found when pitching user generated content against premium content is that media buyers are rightly wary about what the user generated content contains.
I guess they’re worried about creating a PR nightmare if their advert is placed next to user generated content which is in bad taste or would potentially damage the brand.
Tom
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Do you get a sales pitch op-ed with an ad buy now? Boring.
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2 billion video views a day globally on YouTube – pretty impressive.
But so is the fact that on Australian TV during that same second week of March the daily average ‘video views’ was just under 150 million, and peaked on the Monday at just over 160 million. And that is just for programme content – no ads, promos, idents etc included – so we’re talking long-form content here.
For a country that is just 0.34% of the world’s population to generate 150 million TV video views when the king of online video does just over 10 times that volume globally is pretty remarkable.
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When you hear this breathless stuff from self-interested parties a bit of perspective (that they are unlikely to share) is very healthy. For my regular dose of perspective I love the Ad Contrarian out of the US, and this article is in response to someone over there offering up the same sort of argument about online video ad share:
http://adcontrarian.blogspot.c.....sense.html
Salient point for me is Nielsen’s 3 screen report (admittedly from a year ago) suggesting that 2% of video watching is done online, the other 98% is via good old fashioned tv.
so if these guys want parity of ad spend based on their share of viewing then they should get no more or less than 2% of the traditional tv advertising market, and that’s all of them, not just youtube.
and creating a platform for the upload of free-to-produce rubbish by self-indulgent twats all over the world is a very different proposition to producing high-cost, quality programming that can generate large audiences week in and week out, which ultimately is what attracts advertisers
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Something “funny” going on with those numbers. I just checked my own views for the same period out of curiosity and according to my reported stats, I should be second on that list, by a very wide margin, over “Guy”. Weird. *shrug*
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Why is all non UGC content considered high quality and premium? Sure isnt my experience.
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YouTube stats are huge! Check out this video which shares stats for Australia also http://tinyurl.com/The-State-of-Video
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