Exploiting consumer demand for videocsting and online videos on YouTube is the next challenge for those in the online marketing and Internet advertising industries.
Media polling firm, Ipsos-MediaCT, reports a drop in the percentage of time active Internet users – i.e., those who have ever downloaded a video from the internet – spend watching video on TV from 75% in February 2007 to 70% in February 2008. This is highly significant when one considers that “about half of all Internet users aged 12 and up have streamed a video file online in the past 30 days,” according to Ipsos’ research.
As YouTube’s owner, Google moves to capitalize on the video sharing site it purchased for $1.65 billion in 2005, its investment is paying off. Forbes.com, the online branch of the magazine that specializes in tracking wealth and riches, estimates that YouTube’s billion-plus views per day will garner Google $200 million in revenue in 2008, and a further $350 million in 2009. There may be even more upside to this, as Google moves to allow its “content partners”, primarily indie film makers, to upload 1 gigabyte video clips the size of feature length films to YouTube. Longer clips will mean more advertising opportunities and additional revenue.
The growing importance of video as a tool and medium for online marketing and Internet advertising is seen in the search results on the main search engines where YouTube videos are beginning to consistently rank on relevant key word terms. The rise of video and the importance of YouTube as an online advertising platform is only likely to expand as Google has made figuring out how to monetize and make YouTube pay off one of its top goals for 2008.