Online video advertising spending to increase…but is anyone watching?

I recently read a poll on BusinessWeek.com about online viewers and their so-called “attention span”. Basically, the article stated that the longer the video, the shorter the attention span. This is basically common sense and did you know that only 1 in 5 online video viewers has watched or downloaded a full-length movie or television show? Most of those videos being watched are news clips, followed by short clips/movies, music videos, sports clips, and amateur video.

As a result, I believe that the folks who are now hosting pay-for-download video sites, such as iTunes, AOL, etc. are rather disappointed in this finding because it is the hope that more people would visit their ad-sponsored sites to download full (and probably decent quality) videos of their favorite episodes or movie…all for a moderate fee of approximately $1.99/movie. While it may not be pleasing to those providers that sell full-length movies, it’s an encouraging lift to those sites that have short clips that last a few minutes. It makes perfect sense though, because if you’re sitting at work or at home, you probably don’t want to be there watching an hour video on the news in one sitting, right? You’d probably just want to see that one specific clip. Shorter the better, but always a little bit longer because of those pesky advertisements.

Wait…advertisements, you say? Why yes…there are advertisements that follow those short video clips. But while advertisers might be able to squeeze in more advertisements in a full-length movie or on their site, it actually will prove to be a boom to ad-sponsored sites. The reason? Well let’s take a look at the chart to see how advertisers feel about this trend…

In a fascinating article on eMarketer.com, advertisers definitely see an increase in the number of short-film websites and postings. Who’s leading the charge? Well YouTube is for one and with probably over 20 million users in a year, that’s a pretty good market to target. According to eMarketer.com:

Video online is growing faster than any other aspect of online marketing—more than 71% this year, according to eMarketer projections.

So the answer is…according to advertisers…they truly believe that someone is not only watching and downloading these videos, but also seeing their ad. In the end, a well placed ad will begin shortly after these messages…

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