Everyone seems to be down YouTube’s throat for not pulling its weight at Google. The television networks earn a pitiful 1% online of what they rake in from their broadcast outlets with the same videos. And the “me too” video sites are venture-capital money machines of the burning kind. Online video now boasts a bigger audience than cable television, but its $1 billion in ad dollars is a fraction of the $70 billion in broadcast wealth many assumed would be redistributed.
When will online video be the behemoth business everyone always crows about? Maybe when we quit treating its biggest strength as a weakness.
Online video is not TV. The two media are so fundamentally different that making comparisons in format and language will eventually stunt the growth and impact of online video for creators and marketers alike.
People use them differently. TV attracts watchers, while online video attracts users.
Though I have seen expensive, professional video get smoked by a homemade video of a guy dancing at a high-school talent show, an advertiser is still more likely to prefer the expensive professional video than the one (er, many) that people actually watch, share, embed and comment on.
So why are we treating this inherent strength of the medium as a weakness? Even worse, why are we blindly accepting that the best way to build online-video markets is by applying an ad model from a completely different medium?
Usage keeps growing as users find, consume, comment on, create and share videos by the billions. There is a value gap. The gap is between what people are actually doing and what advertisers think people should be watching. These two things are simply out of synch, and until we get them aligned, the market will putter along, with many lost opportunities.
People are moving to this new medium with or without the marketers’ involvement — that much is clear. The questions remaining to be answered are whether marketers will see the fundamental value and exploit it, and whether online-video companies will step up to the plate to get them there.
Capitalizing on Online Video’s Strengths - Advertising Age - Digital: Columns
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