The Rise Of Online Video
As more than half of the world is now logging on to the web, Alex Burmaster, European internet analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings, discusses the mushrooming popularity of video-sharing websites like YouTube, and why more and more people are turning to this platform for information and entertainment…
Over half of the world’s population now has access to the internet through a home PC and the demographic composition of the online population is gradually aligning itself with the general population. Across Europe and America, between the hours of 10am and 9pm, anywhere from 60-80% of people who have access to the internet are actively using it. These statistics confirm – if there is anyone still out there who doubted it – that the internet is officially a mainstream form of media as well as an increasingly accurate reflection of what is happening in modern daily life.
To this end, it isn’t surprising that we should be witnessing an explosion in the popularity of online video. After all, in life we are surrounded by moving sounds and images and, if the internet is increasingly able to mirror this life though advances in technology, such as high-speed broadband for the masses, then online video is a natural progression in this ‘virtual’ evolution.
High-speed broadband has resulted in an increase in technological ‘savvy’ amongst online consumers who now demand a more ‘real’ and immediate experience in the digital age. It’s not necessarily that people physically ask for this immediacy and relevance, but the nature of broadband promotes online promiscuity, and if a site doesn’t deliver engaging content straight away, there’s always one a click away that will.
Video is perfectly placed to take advantage of this new consumption dynamic and this is borne out by the fact that the fastest-growing sectors of the internet are dominated by online video. For example, four of the six fastest-growing brands across Europe in 2006 revolve around this technology. Between January and September of this year, the Unique Audience (UA) of video-sharing site Dailymotion grew by 1026% – making it the fastest growing brand in Europe.
The other strongest performing video-sharing sites were YouTube, zeitgeist of the online video age, whose UA grew 445%, and Metacafe (298% UA growth), whilst Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT video technology service is the reason for its inclusion (367% UA growth) in the top six hottest brands. Furthermore, DivX Player (179% UA growth), which allows people to create, share and play online video, and VideoLAN Client (37% UA Growth), a cross-platform media player supporting video streaming, were the two fastest-growing applications.
The Videos/Movies category as a whole in Europe experienced a 38% growth in Unique Audience across 2006 – second only in growth to the online photo category – and is now visited by over 37 million Europeans, or almost one third of the entire European online population.
The global picture paints an even more vivid picture about the arrival of online video. Whilst the growth of the Videos/Movies audience globally (30%) was not quite as impressive as in Europe, it does exhibit a greater reach – at 120 million people, almost 40% of the world’s active internet population visit a Videos/Movies website. YouTube and Metacafe were the two fastest growing brands on the planet across 2006 with YouTube’s global Unique Audience growing by 495% and was visited by over 47 million people in September. Astonishingly, that’s almost one in every six people active online across the world.
Of course, it’s not just the video-sharing sites that are benefiting from this revolution; video provides the opportunity for all sectors to improve the dynamic and engaging levels of their offering. This is illustrated perfectly by the inclusion of the world’s oldest and largest news gathering organisation, Associated Press (AP), in the fastest growing global online brands. AP’s audience grew almost three times in size across the first nine months of 2006, due primarily to its online video news service, which now accounts for 70% of its audience traffic.
News is a sector extremely well placed in the digital age to utilise online video, thanks to our increasingly connected world in terms of politics, economics, sociology and technology. More than ever before, people need timely access to news events happening across the world that could affect their immediate lives. More importantly, they need access to news content in more engaging and multimedia formats. People don’t just want to read the news online – they need to hear and see it.
The fact that today’s online consumers want more visual, engaging and ‘alive’ content means that online video should remain at the forefront of technology growth which continues to fulfil or create – depending on your point of view – this demand. The most ardent web-existentialists might even argue that the levels of ‘real’ demanded online outstrip that of the ‘real-world’ itself – I wonder if there’s a video of Jean-Paul Sartre discussing this on YouTube?