By Staff, September 4, 2008
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Everyone seems to be down YouTube's throat for not pulling its weight at Google. The television networks earn a pitiful 1% online of what they rake in from their broadcast outlets with the same videos. And the "me too" video sites are venture-capital money machines of the burning kind. Online video now boasts a bigger audience than cable television, but its $1 billion in ad dollars is a fraction of the $70 billion in broadcast wealth many assumed would be redistributed.
When will online video be the behemoth business everyone always crows about? Maybe when we quit treating its biggest strength as a weakness.
Old model won't fit
You see, online video is not TV. Sorry to state the obvious, but even though we all know it's a very different medium, we are trying to force-fit it with a television ad model. Publishers are trying to divert TV ad dollars to online video platforms and feel the need to use the same language and formats as TV. They do this thinking it will help them bridge the knowledge gap and convince TV media buyers to shift their dollars.
It's a critical error
. The two media are so fundamentally different that making comparisons in format and language will eventually stunt the growth and impact of online video for creators and marketers alike.
Let me make a comparison. Imagine if Google's search business didn't include AdSense but marketers paid a CPM or flat fee to be listed within search results -- just like the Yellow Pages, or a newspaper. This does two things. First, it makes the search results unusable to users because it's placing paid-for hits above anything more relevant. Second, because the search is now not as useful, its future audience potential diminishes. We would have never experienced the incredible benefit that Google eventually provided to users and marketers. They could have easily gone down this road, but they didn't. They knew their medium was fundamentally different from print and used a new ad model that suited it better.
Click www.adage.com for the whole story.
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