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 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.
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
Do you get a sales pitch op-ed with an ad buy now? Boring.
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.
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
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*
Why is all non UGC content considered high quality and premium? Sure isnt my experience.
YouTube stats are huge! Check out this video which shares stats for Australia also http://tinyurl.com/The-State-of-Video