There are few growing internet trends that marketers and online business owners must pay attention to in 2012: The social media, mobile and online videos. In this post i would like to focus about the online videos trend- How it is infiltrating to the internet users regular surfing habits in (almost) all markets around the world and how it is integrating in the marketing industry.
Social Networks and Mobile Reinforce Online Videos
I stated that social networking and mobile are also among the growing internet trends and actually they are only reinforcing the third trend, online videos. If we ignore for a moment that the biggest online video site YouTube is a social networking service by itself, other social networks like Facebook are also a very popular destination to watch videos online.
In fact, according to many reports like the online video rankings by comScore and the 2011 review by Nielsen, Facebook is one of the most popular destinations to watch videos on the web, as users are discussing, commenting, sharing and “Liking” them. Therefore, we can conclude that social networking only supports the growth of online videos.
The tremendous increase in mobile devices also strengthening the online videos trend. One of the most common mobile activities is to watch videos online- Studies are showing that in 2012 about a third of all U.S. online video viewers (54.6 million people) will watch them through their mobile devices and by 2015 it will increase to 40%!
More People Will Watch Videos Online
While more and more people are discovering and connecting to the internet every year (mostly from undeveloped regions of the world), which obviously affects and elevates the number of online videos being watched, there is also an increase in watching online videos among the internet users themselves (reach).
According to eMarketer estimation and forecast, in 2011 there were 158.1 million Americans that have watched videos online which represent 68.2% of all U.S. internet users. In 2012, it predicted to go up to 70.8% of all U.S. internet users (169.3 million Americans) and by 2015 76% of all U.S. internet users will watch videos online (195.5 million Americans).
But online videos isn’t just an American growing trend, it is incredibly popular all around the world and in some places even more than in the U.S.- comScore is indicating that in Canada each viewer is watching about 304 videos each month and the U.S. is only second with 286 videos for each viewer. Other prominent markets are the U.K. (269 videos per viewer), Turkey and Germany (251 videos per viewer).
How Online Videos Integrating In The Marketing Industry
In a recent study by the digital entertainment content company, Break Media, it appears that marketers and advertisers are also noticing the online video growth. The study has found that the average video share out of the total online display marketing budget will increase in 2012 to 35% from 27% it was in 2011.
The most plan-to-use video ad formats by marketers and advertisers in 2012 are pre-roll (63%), mobile (55%), in-banner (53%), expandable banner (47%) and rich media overlay (45%). Here is the full list most popular video ad formats marketers plan to use in 2012 compared to how it was used in 2011:
