• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, September 6, 2013

 I don’t think I watch online videos like other people do, and from what I gather, I certainly don't share them like other people do. Don’t get me wrong. I like to share.  But I don’t like to impose.

I was just watching a video from Sarah Myers (aka Austin, apparently) who is sometimes referred to as an ”Internet personality” and produced “Pop17,” an Internet series documenting Internet culture. Sarah talks Internet in a way that would make me jump off a plane—here’s an example from 2011 (when 3-G was still the thing, you should understand) that is just plain funny, and also frightening. The thing is, for the purpose of my actual point here, she goes on and on about how she went to a community pillow fight in New York’s Union Square and it was so much fun she had to broadcast it via her cell phone to everyone.

And that’s the thing. I think I could have had fun at a pillow fight, and just kept it to myself or told a few people later.

I don’t mean to NOT share. But unless you explicitly asked me to share many/most moments of my life with you, I just wouldn’t. The TV station in town wants me to send them photos of snow in my neighborhood. I probably wouldn’t do that either.

Why? I think the technical term for this is “older.”

I read this startling stat the other day on a Website called Business2Community:

“Data from marketing analytics company comScore shows that 183 million viewers watched 44 billion videos online in June alone. What’s more, mobile devices now account for more than 10 percent of video starts, and nearly all mobile viewers share the videos they watch with others. ...That equates to nearly 4 billion videos and 18 million mobile viewers in June—and many of those videos were shared with other people. This data raises the question: Is your video content strategy mobile-friendly?”

Well, that is certainly one of the questions. The other one might be the question I was raising earlier. Do “nearly all mobile viewers” really  share the videos they watch others”? Maybe so.  Adobe has another study that says, “Although more people use search or go direct to video,socially-referred video starts are more likely to be completed.Facebook dominates the social referrals but Twitter is three times more likely to refer to a video than other types of content.”

Reportedly, mobile video “starts” tripled between 2011 and 2012, and if those videos have that kind of spin from one user to the next and so on, it’s easy to understand why making it easier for advertisers to put video advertising on mobile devices is such a vital endeavor.       

pj@mediapost.com