Thursday 9 December 2010

People Making Money Online

Online video is well and truly, having the best time of its life right now. It seems to be factoring in every marketing plan worth its salt, with some incredible videos being produced by brands that are lighting up social media. I wanted to explore the state of the online video industry a bit further and delve into the stats that show the huge growth curve online video is currently on. Right now it is one of the most fascinating aspects of online, as brands continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible and engaging the audience in completely new ways. It is a seriously big business and one that every brand wants to be a part of. And it’s easy to see why..
Over 35 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute

This stat on its own is pretty stunning and quite hard to get your head around. But when you look at in in the context of the past 3 years, or even 6 months, you realise just how impressive this is. The graph below from Youtube shows the average hours of video uploaded every minute, back to June 2007. While this started at 6 hours, in the past 6 months it stood at 23. That’s a huge increase of 12 hours per minute in just 6 months :

That is some seriously impressive growth and also shows that just as much as brand video is growing, ugc is growing at a staggering rate, due largely to the growth in mobile and ease of uploading. As Youtube note themselves there are other factors, such as upping the time limit in videos, which would obviously attribute for an increase in the total length of video uploads. But this is impressive nonetheless.
Blinkx shares up by 400%

At the business end of video, Blinkx are showing that online video is starting to become a profitable industry. While Google still won’t reveal whether Youtube is making them money or not, Blinkx have recently announced their first ever turn in profit in the 6 months up to September. And it comes 3 years after they first launched. Blinkx make money through running ads alongside the videos they index, acting as a huge video search tool. They have certainly had a good year, as the 400% share increase shows. It’s also encouraging to see that online video isn’t just about Youtube and there are some other serious players in the market with unique offerings.
Online video ads reach half of U.S. users

While some research shows that advertisers are cautious over online video advertising, due to factors such as standardisation of ad formats, online video advertising is going from strength to strength. A recent study from ComScore (the people who measure things), found that just over 45.4% of users in America viewed at least one video ad over a month. But more impressively, were exposed to 32.2 videos each, on average. That’s over 4.3 million video ads that were served to the online U.S. population in September 2010. This shows the power of online video ads to get right in front of your target audience. And while there are some definite rights and wrongs in the content of the video ad, I think we’ll see this grow even more and prove itself as a valuable industry up there with TV.

from Working Careers

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