The trends that are impacting on digital publishers include video, recruitment, sponsorship and display advertising. In particular, I was inspired to see that digital publishers are reporting a 14% lift in overall revenues after what has certainly been a challenging few years, with online video continuing to be the fastest growing advertising format for digital publishers, up 21% year on year.
There is no doubt that web video is taking off. Watching video online has quickly gone from a niche activity to mainstream. Today, more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube every month, spending more than 4 billion hours watching videos (YouTube). And, according to ReelSEO, 2 billion video views per week are monetised on YouTube and every auto-shared tweet results in six new YouTube browsing sessions.
The focus for online publishers is how can we enable our customers take advantage of this growing trend. While there are huge volumes of video being posted onto YouTube, this is typically user-generated content with consumers sharing their videos with friends and family. YouTube has a massive inventory and billions of archives of video footage, representing a very effective way of advertising to consumers. The problem for our customers however, who are predominately in the B2B and technology space, is that this area is far more niche and much more expensive for them to undertake video advertising, and likewise for us to undertake video production. This is because the publishing market focuses mainly on cost per impression (CPM) and due to the low volumes of impressions that a video of this nature would create (i.e. low volumes of traffic in this space), ROI would be low. I am approaching this from a slightly different perspective.
I can draw some parallels between the 18th Century Gold Rush in California which brought some 300,000 people in search of finding their fortune. At that time, who do you think made the most money? The gold diggers or the people who sold the tools to help people find the gold? You got it - it was the people who sold the tools.
As online publishers we see our part in the video revolution, helping our customers to produce value added programmes with thought provoking content, which we can then subsequently build for various video channels and after promote these programmes through our website as well a number of other online channels.
By providing these types of services to our clients, we find this is a much better way for us to deliver value and enable our customers to take advantage of this growing video advertising revolution.