Our friends at TechPresident were mentioned in Lee Gomes’ “Portals” column of The Wall Street Journal yesterday, specifically the graphs (powered by TubeMogul) of YouTube views by presidential candidate.
For political junkies (myself included), Texas’ primary/caucus on Tuesday is too long to wait for results, so I threw together the race in online video views, using our custom Grouping feature, which allows you to aggregate different channels and videos into one line on a graph. The Barack Obama grouping is comprised of his campaign’s YouTube and Brightcove channels, as well as the “Yes We Can” music video; Hillary’s includes her YouTube and MySpace channels; neutral “Presidential Dialogues” appears at the bottom. Barack is clearly in the lead. The huge spike you see was the day after the Potomac Primary, when Obama buzz abounded.
And here are the groups separated:
Republican results are excluded, given that the primary is pretty much over (although Ron Paul continues to amaze with his fund-raising and video viewership prowess; he even beat Hillary on multiple occasions in video views these past two weeks).
According to a survey of viewers published by eMarketer, 44% of people who watched less TV in 2007 did so because they were watching video online instead (and only 9% were streaming TV shows). I am one of these people, which is really Comcast’s fault for not offering channels a la carte and forcing me into a $70 bundle that I don’t want.
TV executives are understandably worried that this chunk of the market will cut into their ad revenue, which topped $76 billion in 2007 in the U.S. according to Podslug. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) referred to TV executives as “Deer caught in klieg lights” by YouTube’s announcement last week of in-video text ads and clickable sponsored videos appearing alongside regular videos (a “klieg,” for those who not familiar with esoteric movie production terms, is a powerful electric lamp used in filming).
Now to be fair, some are calling YouTube’s offering a bit confusing. But clearly there is now the pressure from brands and advertisers to have the dollars follow the audience and content. We’ve all been writing about it for some time – our post is here. Once again, we’re left to speculate about how much and how fast.
Jerry Yang of Yahoo predicts that total online ad revenue will surpass television within five years. That doesn’t sound so sweeping, as current online ad spend is $21B, according to CNET, or 27% of television ad spend. We’re looking for someone to throw down the gauntlet and predict when online video ad spend will top television ad spend, or better yet, when it will be too difficult to distinguish which is which.
It’s been a long hiatus from the blog for us, and not intentionally. We ran into an issue with our WordPress where we were unable to submit new posts…yikes! The forums are filled with others trying to get help for this problem, but no answers. An upgrade to the newest version took care of it for us, though, so we’re back in action. Expect to hear more frequently from us as we have a new marketer here at TubeMogul - David Burch - who will be adding his own blog flavor to the mix. Welcome, David!
