Video online has been one of the most popular and emerging social media phenomenon of the last few years. With a notable increase of sites offering all sort of video embedded in them, one prominent problem is also emerging–commercials.
Why is this a problem? Many marketers discovered how effective video was for the promotion of any product or service on the internet. It has been well documented that a user who visits a site is more inclined to view a video online than read the content of the site, in that, it takes him or her less time and afford. Video has been a great tool for publishers and marketers because the user finds video online easy to use- just click and watch. But there are new videos emerging which contain at least one commercial in them. In other words, the user is not longer able just to click and play some of these videos any more; now the user has to sit and wait till the commercial/advertisement runs first–and most of the ones I have seen dont have an option to pause or mute the video commercial.
The feature of video on the internet:
I project that in the near feature, people wont find video online as appealing as it is right now. This will cost a decline on usage. Video will become nothing alse but another SPAM online vehicle–just as to what happened to emial advertising back in 2000. It’s already happening. For example, people who go to yahoo news, would rather read the news than click a video and have to watch its commercials of 15 seconds for a 40 second video. I do this myself. Lets think about this for a moment. If a user were to watch 4 videos on any given site, and each video contains a 20 or 30 seconds commercial, we are talking about a stimated time of 2 minutes of commercial per site. Now, if this same user is like me–very active in internet–he or she could be watching a minimum of 20 videos a day. This could sums up to a stimated time of 10 minutes a day dedicated only to watch commercials online. And this estimate does not include long video watch, such as the ones you find on abc.com (free episodes which run for 28 min with commercial interruptions of about 7 brakes of 30 seconds each).
Lets project into the feature of video online–parting form the present:
According to data provided by Nielsen Online, viewers of Internet videos in the United States now watch an average of three hours of the material each month. Online video viewing hasn’t ceased expanding, with the average time spent viewing the videos in U.S. being 169 minutes in February, then rising to 191 minutes in March, an increase of 13 percent.
The total number of video streams being viewed grew by 9 percent to 9.7 billion, from 8.9 billion, and the total number of videos per user rose 7 percent to 74, from 70.
The sharper rise in the minutes spent viewing video than the number of videos being viewed tells Nielsen that more users are switching to longer videos, with the average growing from 2.4 minutes in February to 2.7 minutes in March.
There’s almost no need to say it – but YouTube remained the number 1 video site with 5.5 billion videos and over 89 million people using the site in the United States. Hulu came in second with 384 million videos and 9 million users.
The last example is good. Lets say Youtube decides to follow this trend and includes 15 seconds commercials before displaying any given video. With 89 million people using the site, you do the math. Thre is no doubt, by checking these statistics,  the incredible amount of profit these commercials can generate for companies. Resaon why this commercial-on video trend is inevitable to happen. But, lets not forget about the end user, us. Do we really want to sit around watching video after video and saturate ourselves with endless hours of commercials?
I know what you are thinking, “don’t we already doing this with television?” The point of this article is to project into the feature of video online. We very well know how Television is evolving, we have TiVO, pay-per view, and commercial free subscriptions now. Then why we would want to go back to the stone age of television–online?