Bill James' blog

The latest news to feed into your digital strategy – Online video is poised for explosive expansion in viewing.

Recent figures on digital media consumption in the United States (from investment bank Bear Stearns) say over 70% of internet users now stream video, watching an average of 7 minutes a day.

Based on my own non-scientific research of talking to my 20 year old son, his peers at university and the friends I have still in their twenties and early thirties I can see a real shift in behaviour where the viewing of US TV programmes/movies is often on PC rather than TV.

For me and probably most of my generation the real shift is unlikely to take a grip until we have a simple solution for getting our content from the internet to our big screen TVs. See my recent blog about Placeshifting.

Meanwhile back to the Bear Stearns report, and while video advertising spend is projected to reach $4.3 billion by 2012, they say that nearly 90% of internet users in the United States will be watching video online by then (that’s just four years from now).

According to comScore, the number of online video viewers in the United States rose by 15% over the last year to over 140 million. YouTube was the top site, attracting over half of them.

The number of streams viewed has grown even faster, by 40% over the last year, to over ten billion streams. Nearly a third of them were from YouTube, way ahead of any other site, growing by over 200%.

Video advertising spend has been growing accordingly and is projected to reach $4.3 billion in the United States by the end of 2011.

The Bear Stearns analysts conclude that internet video already has vast reach and is growing. Video advertising is acceptable to the majority of viewers and provides engagement that offers compelling value to advertisers. The viewer base is maturing and there is still much room for growth in monetisation.

So, have you given enough thought to the question of if/how online video fits in your digital strategy?