Eye On Digital Media: We're All TV Stations, Now

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Steve Smith

We're All TV Stations, Now

Exactly how much video can the online market consume? Apparently we are not anywhere near that threshold yet. Among the most impressive metrics I have seen lately comes from an AOL/ADVERTISING.COM comparison between video usage in late-2006 and early-2007. The chart below shows the percentage of 18-to-34-year-olds who regularly access various forms of video content. Among that core demo of young adults, video consumption spiked radically in the first half of this year.

To be sure, the content providers have no idea yet where, how, when and why Web surfers access video, but my guess is that neither do the users. We know how people viewed "appointment television" and prime-time blocks. We know that "drive time" is radio time. But on-demand short-form video that most people use online is a whole different animal. Much like the early years of film, radio and tv, the audience itself is trying to figure out how this new medium fits into their lives.

One of the problems with tracking digital video is its inherently scattered nature. There are scores of portals out there now hosting buckets of clips and countless series. The big video hits seem to be one-shots like the SNL "Dick in a Box" short that went super-viral and Will Ferrell arguing with a two-year-old landlord at FUNNYORDIE.COM. A big question for advertisers and media programmers is whether Web video can create loyal return audiences. If video traffic continues to be a catch-as-catch-can affair, with eyeballs dipping in to sample random piece here and there, then ad networks and programmers have to build solutions that field this random traffic opportunistically. Plus, inserting ads into the capricious flow of video-seeking eyeballs and scattering one's clips to blogs, portals, and social networks is very different from having brands align with specific media properties and well-defined loyal audiences.

The biggest challenge for online video is surfacing the good stuff that is going on. Publishers have been ramping up magazines' video production in the last six months, but only now are we seeing the second part of the strategy kick in: syndication. Getting those clips into the still-evolving video eco-system is going to be critical. Distribution networks like Veoh, Broadband Enterprises, and Brightcove have landed more than a few major media clients.

Look for a number of interesting partnerships developing between magazines and YouTube, Facebook, DailyMotion, and the emerging networks like Revver, BREAK.COM, BLIP.TV, and MANIA.TV. Young audiences especially have discovered portals that serve up the kinds of video they like, and the aggregators, not the original content providers, have become the destinations of choice.

Just as important will be video search optimization. This nascent field suddenly became very important in recent months as Google introduced Universal Search, a results page that blends text hits with image and video hits. This gives your video a shot at being discovered in a general search. But it also means that your text results are competing with video for placement in that coveted first page of results.

The swiftly changing online media habits have a number of implications for all content providers. The insatiable hunger for video seems to make everyone into a tv station. Perhaps worse, all of your content is now competing directly with video for attention. One has to wonder what the budget meetings will look like at print media companies in five years when allocation decisions have to be made between the relative value of text over video.

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