Video Advertising Doesn't Pay?
Jeremy Liew has an excellent opinion piece up at NewTeeVee that points out the current dilemma with trying to make money via online video advertising:
Suppose that instead of watching a video, that user spent the same five minutes looking at regular web pages instead. Comscore says that the average time spent per page for the entire internet is about 0.7 minutes (April 2007 data). So in 5 minutes they would have seen 7 pages. Since the average webpage has multiple ad units (say 2), they might have been exposed to 14 ad impressions in those five minutes. So even if a video ad unit had a 5-10x pricing premium, the site might still have generated more revenue from regular web pages in the same amount of time because they would have served 14x more impressions.
We’ve noticed that many video sites (YouTube included) have attempted to bridge this gap by using a hybrid model of including banner advertising along with video content but that probably still doesn’t make up the gap. That leaves only two options: hoping that the premium for video advertising will grow to 20x-30x that of banners (which may take years) or grow the amount of alternative text and interactive content surrounding video.
