The number of ways to watch video is mind-boggling. The options include:
- Live TV
- Time-shifted TV (DVR)
- YouTube
- Online (other than YouTube)
- Cinema
- Video-On-Demand (VOD)
...and a host of non-advertising-supported media - Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, OTT (in-app) etc. The list seems to grow every week.
Despite all the TV-is-dead nonsense, every major media player seems to want a piece of the video pie. As we mentioned in Newsletter #3, live TV still represents about 80% of all video viewing in the U.S.
One of the key questions for advertisers is not where people view programming, but where they view advertising. There's an important difference. It's the advertising that sells stuff, not programming.
In the UK there is an entertaining spat going on between YouTube (owned by Google) and Thinkbox, the commercial TV trade organization. It's based on YouTube's claim last year that marketers should put 24% of their video advertising targeted at young people into YouTube.
To dispute YouTube's assertion, Thinkbox did a round-up of third party (independent) reports of where people actually view spots. I have not been able to find similar numbers for the U.S., but figures for the U.K. may be instructive.
In the U.K., the average person watched 18.5 minutes of video advertising a day. Between live broadcasts and DVR playback, television accounted for about 93% of video advertising consumption. Online video, Video-on-Demand, and Cinema accounted for about 7% combined. YouTube accounted for about half of one percent.
Since the BBC (non-commercial TV) is a much larger factor in the U.K., one might conclude that the percent of video advertising seen on ad supported TV in the U.S. may be even higher.
Bottom line: If these numbers are correct, the average person sees over 150 times as much advertising on television as she does on YouTube.