One of these things ain’t like the other… and we hope you choose Porn Song. Mobuzz.tv and The Daily Buzz gives us some props, and then transitions smoothly into the YouTube video, “I Want More Porn.” Hopefully no one mistakes us for a porn site! Well, now that I think about it, the spam I receive in my blog comments may mean that hope was dashed long ago.
The Mobuzz buzz would be embedded here rather than linked, but their embed code doesn’t seem to work. So… here’s the “I want more…” song.
Gavin O’Malley of MediaPost writes on the latest Pew Research that reports a doubling in traffic to video sharing sites from surveys taken at the end of 2006 and again at the end of 2007, which Duncan Riley of TechCrunch attributes to the WGA strike. We wrote last month about our personal battle with ourdesensitization to web video growth stats. Thank you, Gavin, for distilling the Pew Research into something that we can easily process.
O’Malley also shares some interesting findings on which demographic segments compose a disproportionate share of this increase. That’s interesting, and got me wondering whether specific categories of content have driven more of the increase than others. I checked out the Pew Research memo to see if there is any category breakdown, but there isn’t. We’ve seen some reports in the past that report on category breakout for traffic, and we’ll be looking for more to make some comparisons. If anyone else has that info or is interested in looking into it, let us know what you find.
In addition, we’ve been looking at some of our own data and will be sharing our analysis very soon in a new Research section of our site. Perhaps we’ll start with a snapshot on traffic by category. If your a press/analyst/blogger-type and want a sneak peek of our analysis, shoot me an email: mark here at tubemogul.
There are many great nuggets from this interview. One thing of note is how Hanlon feels that the new medium’s ability to target allows (or will allow) advertisers to focus on quality rather than quantity, which is a huge sea change.
He notes:
…technology allows traditional programmers and ad sellers to offer advertising in a more sophisticated manner. This unbundling has historically been a tightly wrapped packaged of availability, buttressed by a less than elegant measurement system (example, Nielson) that has given us a relatively crude measurement device called ratings, and demographically oriented at that. We are now able to measure more granularly. That brings an increased sophistication of audience definition that goes far beyond a generic grouping.
Hanlon goes on to say that new technologies provide opportunities that make the game “really less about mass and scale and more about targeting and quality…. the only way to achieve the scale that marketers need to be successful is for agencies and marketers to aggregate numerous audiences on their own.”
Clearly this is what the niche content players and micro-television networks like Next New Networks and Revision3 have been thinking for some time. The big questions are:
- Will media buyers agree with this (and when)?
- Will higher quality audiences through better targeting translate into higher CPMs (and when)?
I’ll let you know as soon as I have the answer. Please do the same.
We loved reading all the 2007 recaps on the web video industry as well as the predictions for 2008. Upon deciding to write our own predictions (or prediction, rather), we realized that predictions are hard. Especially in an industry that has as much change each month as many do in a year.
But out of our biggest marvel from the past year springs a single prediction: “super-distribution” of video content will become mainstream. This might seem obvious to you. It does to us, but then again, we’re an online video distribution company, so we’ve seen the growth and heard the demands of the industry.
It is impressive to think back for a moment - a year ago the media was abuzz at rumors that the big media companies were in discussions with YouTube. Then, in March, Viacom sues YouTube for not taking down their copyrighted content. That same month, NBC-Universal and News Corp. announce that they would team up to provide prime-time quality content through a website they would develop together. Uh-oh. And the pendulum swings again in April when CBS announces (as the WSJ calls it) “a flurry of deals to distribute shows.” Loosen the grip on your content, tighten the grip on your content. Drive viewers to your content, drive content to your viewers. Back and forth, back and forth, and so often that for those taking cues from the industry, it’s a bit dizzying.
Even with the back and forth, and even though predictions are hard, we predict distribution becomes the prevalent strategy in 2008. As organizations start to realize the lift in viewership they see by doing so, there won’t be any going back.
