WHY IS ONLINE VIDEO GROWING FASTER THAN ALL OTHER ADVERTISING FORMATS?
The main reason for online video advertising to be growing significantly faster than TV and most other digital formats can be attributed to advances in technology, which has changed the behavior of consumers who watch video content. Consumers are now watching their TV content when and where they decide.
What did we do before the DVR, the internet, high speed internet access, Netflix, Hulu and YouTube? We watched TV live and had to sit through commercials. The fact is that consumers don’t watch commercials anymore, unless you are talking about the SuperBowl.
Thanks to mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers, consumers are now watching TV online. Advertisers realized this and started shifting the advertising to the Internet. Now, once again consumers are forced to watch 15 seconds, or in some cases 30 seconds of advertising before they can watch TV content online.
The other shift in consumer behavior is their desire to create and share video content. Thanks to the smartphone, we all now have a video camera in our pocket. And thanks to social media and mobile apps, video can be shared through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Vine, Instagram and SnapChat.
TV advertising has always been the most expensive form of advertising and therefore was a marketing tool only available to companies with large marketing/advertising budgets. With the shift of TV advertising to online the cost for distribution has gone down considerably. Granted, content on TV is shared with thousands if not millions of people at the same time and on the internet it is done one person at a time. But as a result, now smaller companies with smaller budgets can leverage video to grow their business.
Here are a few recent statistics that support this shift.
  • In November 2014 alone, more than 192 million Americans watched online videos. (source)
  • The number of viewers watching video on their mobile devices has increased in 200% compared to 2013 and 400% compared to 2012 (source)
  • In 2014 Online Video streaming grew in 60%, whereas TV consumption declined in 4%. (source)
Looking at these statistics it is easy to understand why advertisers have shifted their focus to online video advertising. Simply put, this is where the audience is.