Online Video Advertising continues to grow quickly in the UK. For small to medium-sized businesses, the targeting efficiency, relative cost versus television, and measurability make it an irresistible option.
From a distribution perspective, the most successful online video is now highly optimized for search engines and viewed based on providing total search relevance. Instead of pure sponsored / paid for ‘click here’ space (traditional online advertising). Smaller, niche businesses are using this approach to great effect. Especially as search engines now rank video very highly in search rankings.
With broadband speeds accelerating and increasing numbers of smart phones, ipads and other video friendly devices continuing to pour into the market, it’s still very early days.
According Cisco’s Forecasts, two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2015. Mobile video will more than double every year between 2010 and 2015.
Today in the UK, 66% of online video viewers watch more video now than they did a year ago. Among online video viewers 35% claim that online video has cut into their TV viewing. Perhaps most importantly to marketers, consumers skip more ads when watching TV than when watching online video. Sites like Hulu and YouTube engage users more as compared to TV.
In April 2011, 32.6 million UK online video viewers watched a total of 5.4 billion online videos, of which 238.4 million were ads.
In the same month, nearly 8 million females were exposed to more than 126 million online ad videos and 15.3 million women watched 1.7 billion content videos. On average, females were exposed to 7 ad videos for every 100 content videos.
This goes on to show that : Online Video ” is probably the best ” Medium” to get more visibility.
Surprisingly the story is very different for men, who were only exposed to 3 ad videos per content video. In total 8.7 million men were exposed to 112 million ad videos and 16.8 million watched 3.5 billion content videos.
Last year Online video views from U.K. users grew 37 percent in 12 months, according to data from comScore. The measurement firm estimates users streamed a total of 5.5 billion videos in February 2010, up from around 4 billion in February 2009.
We look forward to seeing how this unfolds over the next few years.
