By Tom Ryan
According to a new study, people who watch at least some online video each month - from short clips on YouTube to full-length programs on NBC.com - are an extremely small crowd. The highest-consuming fifth watches more than 140 times as much as the lower half.
According to the survey from Media Contacts, an online ad buyer, and research firm comScore, the heaviest viewers (top 20 percent of viewers) averaged 841 minutes of online viewing per month, while moderate viewers (next 30 percent) averaged 77 minutes, and the lightest viewers (bottom 50 percent) watched just 6 minutes each.
"It's a clear indicator of how early we are in online video," Jarvis Mak, a vice president at Media Contacts, told the New York Times.
Mr. Mak said the usage differences are reminiscent of the early days of the internet, and he expects this disparity will narrow as television networks continued to put programs online.
"It took a while to decide that this would not cannibalize their broadcasts," he said, "but now they're putting a lot of stuff on their Web sites" and deciding how much to distribute on sites like Hulu.com that aggregate videos.
Not surprisingly, the October 2007 survey shows that heavy users are big users of YouTube and other video-sharing sites. By contrast, moderate viewers show a high propensity to view specific video content on broadcast TV sites, including WorldNow (ABC), CBS TV Local, ABC Daytime, Scripps TV, and CMT, rather than video-sharing sites.
Light online video viewers conversely are the heaviest TV consumers, with 46 percent of this group indicating they watch more than 13 hours of TV per week. By comparison, just 39 percent of moderate video viewers and 30 percent of heavy video viewers watched the same amount of TV.
Discussion question: Should the apparent findings that only a small audience is watching online videos make consumer brands and retailers rethink launching online video campaigns? If not now, when do you think online videos will be a viable marketing tool for consumer brands?