Commentary

Video News is Good News: 85% of Media Sites Now Use Video

The explosion in syndicated content, easily embeddable code, and the torrents of clips coming to the Web are paying off in streaming media pretty much everywhere. According to the third annual survey of web media companies by D S Simon, 85% of them now carry video, representing an increase of a third from last year. Television media was already at peak penetration, with 96% of venues carrying clips, but the 2011 Web Influencers Study found that virtually every other category of news, especially newspapers and radio, now make video de rigueur.  According to Doug Simon of D S Simon, the meaning here is clear. "The big news is that online media has now officially become a video programming network."

All of which goes to show how much users bring an expectation of streaming media experiences to a site. In order to feed the need for full motion, 84% of site users says they use third party providers along with in-house media. While traditionally non-video media are embracing the trend, it doesn't mean that all of them are going full-bore into production. Understandably, 93% of radio stations say they rely in some measure on external sources of media, with 86% of newspapers and 80% of web media. TV entities tend to rely much more on their own assets, but still 63% user third parties.

We have said it before in these pages; video is the new text, and the Web is a primary accelerant of that trend. Watching this evolution from the vantage point of an old digital fart (yeah it has been long enough to have them) has been fascinating. Back in the day of Time Warner's Pathfinder, everyone thought the Web was going to be a newsstand, a cheap and fast way to distribute print. Still, hang times for web sites were disarmingly short, and there was nothing like the engagement with sites that most old media saw in print. "Lean-in" was the catch-phase of the moment. But in the end, it turns out that the Web had more to do with the triumph of video as a principle mode of communication.

And the acceleration will continue. D S Simon says four fifths of its respondents plan to use or much more video in 2011 than they did in 2010. Most venues prefer fully produced video wares (57%) and then b-rolls (49%) followed by sound bites (47%). Preference for third party footage varied by medium, however, with 98% of TV stations wanting b-rolls compared to 29% of newspapers.

And what would a report on the new ubiquity of video in media be unless it also came to us in video format. Doug Simon is featured in the Vlog entry outlining the top line of the report.
1 comment about "Video News is Good News: 85% of Media Sites Now Use Video".
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  1. J S from Ideal Living Media, May 4, 2011 at 3:44 p.m.

    I agree -- generally -- having been working with web video for 10 years or so. However, if you look at blogs with posts of text + video, or even text + image versus just a video, you will notice much fewer comments and, presumably, user engagement. In my experience, web stats bear this pattern out.

    I believe that is because video takes time, which is something we all have in short supply.

    I suggest that if you have to shoot, edit, upload, & embed a video -- and then describe it with in-depth text anyway -- that oftentimes an image and text will suffice, particularly when you consider that there seems to be little or no SEO benefit from embedded video.

    I suspect that the sizzle of web video, as a novel format in itself, has passed, particularly for avid users. It takes a very compelling title + text intro for a video (and an engaging static image on the paused video embed) to get users to actually click and view it. And they often scroll down the page while the video is running anyway.

    Granted, part of this lessening of interest in video may be due to Flash blockers, which are built-in to many browsers. A growing number of users seek to avoid the frequent crashes caused by the load of too many Flash objects built into many pages. This page alone has 5 flash embeds which, with several tabs open and a similar number on each page, is simply too much for many users' computing devices to handle. Hence, the growing use of Flash blockers, which means those users never see anything but a grey box for all your video efforts. Which is not very compelling at all.

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