Contrary to
popular belief, ad spending is actually keeping pace with the growth of online video consumption, according to new data from eMarketer. By 2013, online video ad spending is positioned to nearly
quadruple from more than $1 billion this year to more than $4 billion.
Yet for online video to ever attract "TV dollars," video platforms and producers will have to convince
consumers to lean back and relax.
"Today's online video advertising will not support substantial advertising dollars," said David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer and author of the
report. "The lean-forward, immersive mindset of Internet users is often not receptive to the story-based brand messages of typical video advertising."
"Lean-forward media consumption creates a
readily distracted audience, which will deter a substantial scale of video content online, the kind of scale that will shift large ad dollars from TV to the Internet," Hallerman added.
Today,
online video ad spending is dwarfed by TV in terms of absolute dollars. For every $1 marketers spend on Web video ads in 2009, they will spend nearly $65 on TV commercials. However, online video is
ahead in terms of dollars spent per hour of content viewed.
In the United States, eMarketer projects that TV advertisers will spend only $0.13 per hour of viewing, while
their online video counterparts will spend 38% more, at $0.17 per hour.
That imbalance must end in order for marketers to find equivalent value for online video, rather than greater costs,
according to Hallerman.
"By 2010, the difference between Internet video's and TV's spend per hour will start to even off -- which indicates a potential tipping point for online video
advertising," said Hallerman.
In order for Internet video to grow more quickly, it needs to reach an inflection point where Web video and TV video have substantially converged.
"In the
lean-forward computing mode, people are mousing and ready to click at the slightest provocation," Hallerman said. "In the lean-back TV mode, while people may certainly click with the remote, they tend
to spend extended time with the content and absorb messages with a more receptive frame of mind."
Matching ad spending to viewer eyeballs in a ratio comparable with TV will support online video
ad spending growth, making the generally higher CPM pricing for online video more acceptable to many marketers.
Since the time people spend watching video or TV content produces potential
engagement points -- moments to reach them with the marketer's message -- this, according to Hallerman, is a suitable method for gauging the strength of these two parallel ad spending formats.