• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, June 5, 2013

When it comes to understanding mobile and its real impact on changing media habits, you will have to understand your kids. According to BuzzFeed’s COO and President Jon Steinberg, 50% of the company’s video views are now coming from mobile devices. Speaking in New York this week, Steinberg admitted he didn’t quite get it. He hardly ever watches video on his smartphone, he admits. But when he asks a group of Millennials whether they watch videos regularly on their smartphones, almost all of them say they do. And that is his company’s main target.

BuzzFeed has had 60 videos with more than 1 million views each. They have 1 million YouTube subscribers and get 60 million views a month. And so that famous native advertising model that they have been using in their standard text and image feed is now migrating into video. For Virgin Mobile they made a video from Lady Gaga fans explaining how the singer made them a better being. It got over 180,000 views so far. For GE, their video "Why Inventors Are Awesome" has already been seen by more than 640,000. And the compilation of six fake commercials to commemorate YouTube’s Comedy Week has already exceeded 1.3 million views.

If you combine that with one of Steinberg’s other observations, then you can begin to see how mobile becomes a powerful pass-along channel for video as users begin treating this medium in much the way they always did images and text. Steinberg argues that in order for content to be truly viral among Millennials, it must be easily viewable and shareable across mobile devices. That is simply where they live. The functions that our generation identified with the desktop -- and likely still does -- are now identified with devices among younger users.

Making video easily accessible on devices and easily shareable needs to be a core discipline for sites. And I am not sure that a lot of publishers even believe how much streaming media people want to consume on their devices. I go to many sites and their mobile iterations to find that video is buried three and four layers deep, making it hard for the publisher to get a firm sense of how much of it the mobile user wants. And the media players themselves have not caught up with the usage either.

In most cases the embedded viewers have only rudimentary sharing and saving tools and fail to recognize how much users are treating video in much the same way they did text and images for years -- as basic media types they need to manipulate more fluidly.