Comparing TV and web audiences really is akin to comparing apples with oranges. On TV, while cable has eaten into the networks’ market share; the fact remains, marketers can reach a high percentage of TV audiences by relying on ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX.
Online, you need to be on YouTube to reach 1 out of 3 users, but the truth is, there’s no guarantee that you will reach 1 out of even 300 YouTube users given how non-linear media consumption is on the Web: a user can land on an inside page on YouTube, watch 3 or 4 videos and then disappear from a marketers’ sight. Why? YouTube does not run ads on all pages, only those with whom it has a commercial relationships, examples being CBS or our own WatchMojo.com.
The SF Gate has a story on traditional TV companies’ attempts to move online and admittedly, to quote NBCU’s Digital head George Kliavkoff: “We’re sort of in the first inning of how some of these digital platforms will develop,” said Kliavkoff. “We still don’t know what the winning business model will be at the end.”
Some media companies are aiming for distribution (Disney), others for distribution (CBS). Some are playing both strategies: the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture Hulu.com (one of WatchMojo.com’s distribution partners)
“as well as CBS are testing a ‘ubiquitous’ approach, making their content available across dozens of Internet partner sites, including YouTube, rather than drawing viewers to a single destination.
It’s not clear which model of delivery will prevail. None of the networks disclose how much ad revenue they collect from online show streams, but all have made major investments in what is a growing business.
Don’t worry, we ran some numbers to estimate Disney’s share of revenue from video streams, here it is.
As a new media, made-for-web content producer, we’re totally going after distribution over destination and had a banner month in March 2008 with 4-5M streams in one month. We also experienced 100% growth in one month, so that threw off some metrics.
Usually the stream-to-unique ratio would be very different, but for March, using a triangulation method and adjusting for a few variables, I estimate that WatchMojo.com reached over 2M unique users during that same period. This is really comparing apples with oranges on numerous levels, but it’s worth noting that relative to traditional media companies who favor destination over distribution, this stacks up pretty well:
According to comScore Media Metrix, ABC.com led the network pack with 8.5 million unique visitors over its entire lineup of shows for the whole month of February, followed by NBC.com with 7.9 million.
ComScore’s metric above for ABC and NBC are for February, not March, but I presume February and March stats for thse giants are fairly consistent month over month. I also fully realize that if you consider how many users ABC and NBC reached outside of their sites around the Web, the number would be much higher…
But connecting all of the dots, in terms of value-added audiences to an advertiser: ask yourself, what is worth more to a random client: reaching the user on ABC.com that be reached via any ad method (display banner, video ad or text link online or ads on TV’s ABC network) or reaching that elusive 19 year old guy or girl on YouTube that no longer watches all that much TV?
In that context, having a fully distributed model as we do ain’t a bad thing. Mind you, does that pay the bills? To most people, simply offloading and uploading your clips to YouTube etc., doesn’t, but if you can find a way to make it work financially, then you might have found a solution to the monetization challenge of online video. I’ll say this: we’ve decoded that problem, but content producers need a few variables to be able to do it, too.
Anyway, over the next few months, I’ll address the destination over distribution debate some more, but right now, I need to hold the cards a bit close to the chest… (is that a hook I see out of the corner of my eye?)
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