As video adoption and bandwidth speeds increase, users are beginning to embrace longer-form video content.
Brian Stelter of The New York Times reported, “The viral videos of YouTube 1.0 — dog-on-skateboard and cat-on-keyboard — are being supplemented by a new, more vibrant generation of online video. Production companies are now creating 10- and 20-minute shows for the Internet and writing story arcs for their characters — essentially acting more like television producers, while operating far outside the boundaries of a network schedule.”
Stelter said that TV networks have really helped the online culture accept long-form video. “In the past two TV seasons,” he reported, “nearly every broadcast show has been streamed free on the Internet, making users accustomed to watching TV online for 20-plus minutes at a time. By some estimates, one in four Internet customers now uses Hulu, an online home for NBC and Fox shows, every month. ‘Dancing With the Stars,’ the popular ABC reality show, draws almost two million viewers on ABC.com, according to Nielsen.”
Hulu, which is a pioneer in the new long-form video adoption, has built a pretty profitable revenue model. While attending South by Southwest last spring, I wrote about how shows on Hulu were getting higher advertising CPMs than they do on broadcast TV.
While Eric Feng, Hulu’s chief technology officer, wouldn’t spill any numbers at SXSW, Tameka Kee at paidContent.org recently reported:
“… premium video sites like Hulu and TV.com are finally starting to deliver ad rates that are greater than what the networks would get for their shows on air. Running an ad during The Simpsons on Hulu, for example, costs about $60/CPM, Bloomberg reports; running the same ad during prime-time on TV costs about $20-$40/CPM — or over 60 percent less in some cases.”
Long-form videos aren’t for everyone. A study from late 2008 pointed out that the vast majority of Web video is still very short, as are people’s attention spans.
Nicholas Carlson from Silicon Alley Insider wrote: “After clicking play, viewers only watch to the end of 5-minute long Web videos about 10 percent of the time. Only 16 percent make it through three minutes, Web video services provider TubeMogul reports, after measuring 23 million streams on six top video sites over two weeks.”
