Commentary
Those 8 Billion Video Ads in March? That's a Doubling from a Year Ago, Thanks to YouTube
- by Daisy Whitney , Op-Ed Contributor, April 24, 2012
What’s even more impressive than the record number of online video ads served up in March is the year-over-year growth. Late last week, comScore reported that Americans had watched more than 8.3 billion online video ads in March, a record month.
That 8.3 billion figure is also a doubling of the number of ads served up just one year ago. According to an analysis of comScore’s own figures, in March 2011 Americans had watched 4.3 billion online video ads. That makes the March 2012 number a 93% increase in one year.
Some of this growth is coming from rising ad loads. From which sites is the doubling in video ads coming though? The number of video ads Hulu served rose from 1.26 billion in March 2011 to 1.75 billion in March 2012, a 38% jump. The ad exchange Brightroll also brought a hefty year-over-year bump, having served up 397 million video ads in March 2011, a number that rose to 953 million last month, for a 140% boost. Other ad networks saw big jumps too, such as Adap.TV, up 61% in video ads served year-over-year.
But I suspect where the big doubling gets its high-octane lift is from YouTube. The world’s biggest video-sharing site didn’t even register on comScore’s top 10 properties ranked by video ads in its March 2011 report, when the 10th site on the list delivered 188 million video ads.
But one year later, the Google-owned site landed second in the top 10, serving up nearly 1.3 billion ads.
That’s a staggering rise.
Staggering but, perhaps, meaningless. I know, how could a billion be meaningless?
Think chemistry. How many atoms in a mole? Huge, vast numbers. How meaningful? Only to the committe chemist. And the chemist knows a mole isn't a whole lot of stuff.
It's sad how often new media guys tout big numbers without giving us meaningful numbers.