Tag Archives: statistics

Top 10 Stats About Online-Video Usage and Advertising for 2016 and Beyond

What do you need to know about online video for 2016? Here’s a convenient “round up” for your viewing pleasure.

Here's a guy looking at mobile video. It's trending.
Here’s a guy looking at mobile video. It’s trending.
  1. Mobilization. Mobile advertising is growing 66% and desktop is just 5 percent. What’s interesting to me is that 36% of our time is spent on TV, and 39% of the ad spending is there. But we’re spending 25% of our self on mobile, while only 12% of ad spending is on mobile. Implication: watch for way more advertising in your apps, on mobile-enabled site, and perhaps even while you text. (KPCB Internet Trends, June 1, 2016)
  2. Mobile vs desktop tie. By 2020, online-video advertising will be about 50% mobile and 50% desktop.
  3. Pay TV is stuggling. About 86% US Internet users think pay TV is too expensive. Some forecast a decline (source: TVFreedom, : SNL Kagan as cited in Video Advertising Bureau, 2015).
  4. TV ain’t dead. According to eMarketer “TV will continue to grow and remain the top video advertising format through 2020.” That said, our time with digital video (versus TV) changed in 2012 and the gap has widened, with digital outpacing TV (Nielsen, eMarketer).
  5. Netflix is rocking it for time. The streaming time of Netflix is growing insanely. 600M hours in 2009 and 42 billion hours in 2015. And originals are the reason (Netflix and Cowen & Company, 2016)
  6. Digital Video Ad Spending is Growing But Slowing. We’re seeing about 30 percent growth in digital video ad spending this year, but in the next few years the growth will slow somewhat…. Down to 20 percent next year and about 10% by 2020. Still growing, just not as radically.
  7. Watch out. We're gonna block that online-video ad on mobile.
    Watch out. We’re gonna block that online-video ad on mobile.

    Video ads need help. Many Online video ads are ineffective. About 80% of us mute video ads, and the majority (62%) are annoyed with pre-rolls. And 93% consider using ad-blocking software (Unruly Future Video Survey, July 2015). Given mobile use behavior, online videos are going to have to adapt.

  8. Block You. You know that thing about mobile users being annoyed by ads? The growth of mobile ad blocking is happening radically faster than desktop (as cited by the KPCB report, PageFair & Priori Data 2016 Adblocking Report.).
  9. What works in mobile video ads? Keep it less than 10 seconds, shoot it for mobile, and try for full-screen delivery. (Snapchat and other sources).
  10. What makes for good video ads? Unruly’s recommendations: be authentic, entertain, evoke emotion, go personal/relatable, be useful, give viewers control… and work with sound off and in non-interruptive ad format.

See more at eMarketer. Or KPCB for internet trends. Or Invisia for more.

Latest YouTube Stats in Infographic Video

Here’s everything you wanted to know about YouTube in 2012 courtesy of James Wedmore. Examples:

  • 76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing …making it the top marketing strategy to invest in for 2012.
  • YouTube is STILL
    1. …the 3rd most visited website in the world
    2. …the 2nd Largest Search Engine in the World
    3. …the world’s largest video sharing platform

YouTube has

  • over 800 million monthly unique viewers worldwide
  • YouTube Receives over 4 Billion Video Views Daily
  • In 2011, YouTube had over one TRILLION total views
  • That’s over 140 views for every man woman and child on earth.

TopRank finds that online video is expected to grow 55% this year and is the top format for content marketing. With a 41% higher click-through rate than plain text, video is predicted to reach 90% of all web traffic by the year 2014

Kony 2012 Viral Summary

We’re three days away from when participants of the Kony 2012 movement will be blanketing the town with posters, but one could argue they won’t do much better than the 180 million views to date.

Visible Measures has a stat roundup of the social-cause campaign that popped in early March 2012. For comparison, M&M’s 2012 Super Bowl ad, Just My Shell, has 41.7 million views. Honda’s Matthew’s Day Off, another top five Super Bowl campaign this year, has 25.3 million views.

And I have 250 million after 6 years of posting, so… yeah, they should have monetized it. It would have raised about $100,000, assuming advertisers wouldn’t mind appearing next to it.

Kony View Growth

How Many People Are Watching Online Video in 2012?

comScore reports that 181 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 40 billion videos of online video content in January. YouTube ranks first with 152 million views, and the rest of the pack (Sony’s VEVO, Yahoo, Viacom, Facebook) attracted about 45 to 52 million viewers (about one third of the Google-owned leader).

Some interesting statistics from this month’s comScore report:
> 84.4 percent of the U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.
> The duration of the average online content video was 6.1 minutes, while the average online video ad was forty seconds.
> Video ads accounted for 12.2 percent of all videos viewed, but just 0.9 percent of all minutes spent viewing video online.

YouTube viewers watched 18.6 billion videos in 2012’s first month, and that’s 4 per day per person (by my calculations, which haven’t been reviewed by Stalkerofnalts).

And how about ads? We viewed 5.6 billion video ads in January, with Hulu again leading with 1.4 billion ad views. The advertising networks (who stream ads on a variety of properties) ranked next, with Adap.tv at 652 million ad views, followed by BrightRoll Video Network with 598 million, Tremor Video with 580 million and Specific Media with 398 million.
Finally- YouTube channels? Warner and Vevo lead the pack, but Machinima and Maker Studios (aggregates of top YouTube channels) are third and fourth.

And here’s a photo of my niece and nephew.

Nephew and Niece of Nalts

Tablet Viewing is 30% Higher Than Desktop (and more stats on online-video viewing by device)

I just discovered a report published late last year on video trends observed in the 3rd quarter 2011 (ending Sept. 30). It seems we watch 30% more video when on an iPad (versus desktop). Ooyala, a service provider to media companies, tracks a mess of activity and provides some nice signals in this report (see PDF). The company defines “conversion” as the percent of videos viewed against those displayed. I’d estimate these to be rather small (low single digits) on YouTube. But the publisher sites seem to be doing much better, with 40% to 60%. Game players take the lead with 60% which is remarkable, but probably a function of fewer content choices.

I really like this visual of the complete rate by form factor. It confirms what we’ve been saying about our tolerance for longer form when on devices beyond desktop.

Our complete rate varies fairly significant by device

P.S. Here’s some cheese.

Do you Hunker for a Chunk of Cheese?

Are You in the Online Video 15 Percent?

Last year about 4% of us watched online video for more than 6 hours a week. In fact most of us microbinged in minutes at a time.

Now according to TVGuide, 15 percent of respondents saying they watch more than six hours of online video a week. Last year, that number was still at four percent. Sixty-two percent of all respondents said they watch more online video than just a year ago.

Advertising Specialist Burst Media‘s data is more bullish. The Burst Media Online Insights survey (PDF) has the number of people who tune in online for more than six hours a week at close to 30 percent. Almost three percent even profess watching more than 24 hours of online video per week.

So… are you in the 15 percent?

And what are we consuming? Check out this quote from Matt Wasserlauf, Executive VP, Video Platform & Services, at Specific Mediaduring an interview with Beet.TV at the recent OMMA Video conference:

“I see digital video the same way you might look at cable in the early ’80s. Lots of stations, lot of channels with nothing on,” he said.

Online-Video is Looking More Like Television

 

Online-video is looking more and more like TV with ads, networks/studios, and a virtual monopoly.

comScore’s September data sheds some light on the non Google video-sharing sites, the top ad networks, and the top-1o channels on YouTube, all of which are professional. The biggest takeaway? The Santa María, La Niña, and La Pinta have long since landed and the corn-sharing Indians are being run off the east coast.

  • Professional content (or web studios representing amateurs) are leading the charts
  • The market remains highly centralized among one or two key players
  • Ads are now pervasive
  • YouTube is increasing its personal white-glove service among the top 100 YouTube partners (including lavish events), and moving many subordinate Partners to e-mail only deidentified support (this isn’t reflected in comScore).

Now let’s look at comScore highlights…

  1. Google/YouTube retains its leadership with 161 million unique viewers (followed by Vevo with about 57K). More importantly, it clocked in a 378 minutes per viewer, which beats Hulu’s 180 minutes. Hulu’s 27K unique viewers watched 642,000 minutes of video (YouTube’s got 18 million). Also worth noting is Microsoft and Viacom’s overtaking of Facebook and Yahoo (two sites that could have been online-video leaders)
  2. Ad networks run those prerolls and keep the online-video body flowing with life saving blood. Here are the leaders: Hulu is #1, Tremor Video ranked second overall with 811 million ad views, followed by Adap.tv (803 million) and BrightRoll Video Network (665 million).
  3. Professional studios rule the most-viewed channels, but note that some amateurs are represented by these players. Gaming channel Machinima ranked third with 17 million viewers, followed by Maker Studios (which has signed a number of YouTube weblebrities) with 9 million, Demand Media with 6.8 million and Revision3 with 5.4 million.

10 Online-Video Stats (Advertising & Reach) Worth Knowing

youtube statistics

There are too many and too few statistics about online video and YouTube. We’re quite tired of hearing some of them: like how many videos are uploaded in a given timeline. But thanks to Pew and the increasingly popular “infographics” for giving us more than we could ever remember.

This one (image on right) is courtesy of Mashable and was created by Emily Caufield. It’s somewhat miss-titled “The History of Advertising on YouTube” because it starts with a history of the video-sharing site, then expands to mobile stats and other areas).

If you want a quick scan of some key online-video and YouTube stats that are public, here’s my list….

  1. YouTube represents more than 22% of mobile traffic. That’s data not time, and mobile use has skyrocketed by 70% over the past six months, according to Allot Communications Mobile Trend Report.
  2. About 70% of YouTube’s traffic is outside the United States. Yep- only a third are in America.
  3. Globally, YouTube is monetizing 2 billion video views per week. The number of advertisers increased 10-fold last year (good timing on the publication of that amazing online-video marketing book called Beyond Viral).
  4. Daily views are more than 2 billion a day as of the 5th year birthday Yeah two billion.
  5. To learn more about YouTube advertising, visit this page.
  6. YouTube scans more than 100 years of video each day using “Content ID.” That’s an automated tool to identify, claim and monetize content that belongs to you.
  7. One in four Americans watch a video online each day (Huffington Bloat). And 71% of us use online-video sites. comScore actually upped it to 85.6% as of June 2011. Remember when people said only teenagers watched videos online, and I said it would soon mimic web use? I did. What matters, however, is not whether or not we do something online… but how frequently.
  8. Only 8 percent U.S. subscribers to broadband users don’t have television subscriptions (the infamous “cord cutters” also don’t consume much more online video than the rest).
  9. Hulu has done somewhat better with advertising than YouTube, according to many analysts and idiots. Hulu did 1 billion ad impressions (that’s not all pre-rolls, friends).  Each viewer watched 38.8 ads in the month. Sigh.
  10. And here’s eMarketer’s forecast about online video from 2008. Just tossing in an expired piece of data to make the rest fresh by comparison.

    The Pew data shows online-video growth is on the rapid incline.

 

Are Video Preroll Ads on Rise or Decline?

Yes. Video prerolls are both growing and declining. The good news for viewers is that we saw fewer prerolls. But we saw more “polite prerolls” (option to escape) in Q1 2011 as reported by AdoTube/eMarketer. Since this doesn’t include YouTube data and presumably a small sample of total online-video ad streams it does need to be taken with a grain of (Morton’s: when it rains it pours!) salt.

Viewers will appreciate fewer prerolls (as reported by AdoTube), and advertisers will enjoy more "engagement" models
This "Right Guard" ad begs for engagement. Did you notice the "close" button?

Forget prerolls, friends. The increasingly competitive ad networks have a whole sleuth of weapons in their online-video ad formats that range from the innocuous “polite pre-roll,” to a bit more ominous names like in-stream takeover, ad selector, in-stream skin, inside-out roll, interactive overlay, video-in-video, interactive gaming overlay, data entry and capture, branded player, over the top, and beyond stream. I believe that Seroquel example, placing a “reminder” ad without “fair balance” adjacent to depression content is (shhh) a violation of FDA guidelines, but I digress. ANY of these ad-format names beats the “fat boy” branded by Point Roll.

Take a look at some of the bold “engagement” formats presented in AdoTube’s ad-format gallery and you’ll see why viewers are, according to eMarketer, about 30% likely to engage in an ad… even when not forced (hence the term “polite”). You’ll also see that it’s often not clear there’s an opt-out available.

The eMarketer report, titled “Options for Online Video Ad Viewers Leads to Higher Engagement” is encouraging. With online video being one of the leading (if not #1) fastest-growing portion of a marketer’s “media mix,” advertisers will want and expect formats that achieve their goals: from branding to engagement. This chart is important to viewers because it shows that “cost per impression” remains the dominant percent of spending. In “cost per impression” (often called CPM, or cost-per-thousand), the advertiser simply pays a few bucks to reach 1,000 eyeballs without much accountability.

"Cost per impression" still leads, but more interactive "engagement" ad formats are increasing (Brightroll Data)

While few of us welcome more aggressive online-ads, this also substantiates a business model to fuel the medium’s growth. While it’s easy to complain about intrusive ads (especially as the pendulum seemed to swing dangerously to the advertiser’s benefit in the past year), it’s a vital element to online-video’s maturity. If the advertisers don’t get what they need, friends, we won’t be seeing our content for free.

There are three ways to increase “engagements” in this online-video advertising medium, and I’ll list them from best to worst in order of sustainability: novelty, creative and targeting:

  1. Novelty: A new ad format generally enjoys a period of high engagement that’s deceptively high. We’re curious about what the ad does, and may not realize we’re engaging, so it’s not necessarily suggestive of purchase intent. In early February, a debut YouTube customer of YouTube’s “skip this ad in x second” preroll told ClickZ he was seeing a 30% engagement rate. That’s far higher than we’ll see as a norm, and a tribute to the novelty effect.
  2. Creative: Great creative always wins, and this is a fairly enduring trait. While overall engagement might slip when we’re “numb” to an ad format (like monkey-shooting banner ads, or even the “InVid” format that creeps up on YouTube… the best creative wins the best attention, engagement and results.
  3. Targeting: Ultimately the most sustainable and important characteristic of a high-engagement online-video ad is its ability to reach the right target. I can engage in a tampon ad, but it’s not going to sell more maxi’s. But if I get a rich-media ad over (or adjacent) to my valued content, then we’ve got a win-win-win (advertiser, publisher, viewer). That’s where we can expect Google/YouTube to be better in the long haul, but it appears the sophisticated advertiser networks are ahead. These ad networks marry data from a variety of sources to serve ads invisibly on the videos across a variety of websites.

So what are the takeaways to advertisers, video sites and us viewers?

  • First, the options available to advertisers means that online-video ads will begin to get as aggressive as other forms of interactive ads. This has positive and negative effects, but as long as it’s targeted it’s sustainable.
  • YouTube, which reports very little about its ad performance, has not radically departed from its debut formats, with the exception of breaking its early commitment to make pre-rolls optional. Now most pre-rolls are mandatory, but we can opt-out of some after a few seconds (at which point the “opt-out” means the advertiser pays YouTube and the creator less).
  • Ads are a vital cost-offset for those of us that have been enjoying free video content for 5 years and would like that to continue without avoid pesky Hulu-like subscription models (unless a “value ad” bonus to the cable contract, assuming we haven’t “cut chord.”).
  • And finally, Morton’s salt can be trusted. Trusted I say.

 

YouTube News You Missed

Okay I forgot I had a blog again. The past two weeks have included trips to (in sequence) Virginia, Minneapolis, NYC, Washington, D.C. and NYC again.

Shitty clipart makes a blog visual

Enough about me. Let’s focus on YouTube today, since it’s turned 6 (that’s a near-death 94 years in TechCrunch years). If you missed the comment stream on my last post, you’ll want to catch up. It’s steamy, and Sukatra’s on a Charlie Sheen tear.

And after this humble attempt at “aggregation,” stay tuned for my patented “synthesis” below… what all this means to a changing ecosphere-marketplace-ecosystem-valuechain-universe.

    What Does All This Mean?

    • YouTube is going mainstream with musician chart-toppers exceeding the once amateur-only club. Alas, the site is a free jute box rivaled only by Limewire in the day.
    • YouTube is embracing its new role, hoping attracting familiar faces will attract a larger base of “regulars,” who until now have chosen their own weblebrities.
    • Still, amateur hour isn’t over… especially if you’re a quasi professional. While no YouTube star has yet jumped mainstream with any endurance or consequence, we may see that change in 2012.
    • Most importantly, albiet somewhat tangental, what the hell happens to the sales of my “Beyond Viral” if Borders goes bankrupt? Perhaps you can find a local Borders that’s folding, and snatch a discounted copy of the book. Be sure to take a photo and let me know.

    This post has been brought to you by the letter S. Big S.