A new survey from Animoto, an online video-creation application, finds that four times as many consumers would rather see a video about a product than read about it. I don’t
want to be too cynical right here in the first paragraph, but if that survey said something different, I doubt you’d have heard about it.
The results of its polling of over
1,051 U.S. consumers are, to me, as obvious as they are important to note.
The finding that 56% of its respondents think any company with a Web site also should have a company video on it seems
a logical wish by consumers; also it’s not bad for Animoto, which is in business to help small businesses produce low-cost/low-hassle corporate videos.
The fact that lots of people like
to see them and will watch them if they’re served seems to be no-brainer information, but that’s just me. Instructional and how-to videos are one of the top categories on YouTube; business
videos just seem to be an extension of that.
This survey says one-quarter of its respondents say they lose interest in a company they’re researching if there’s no
corresponding video, and half said they have shared a company video with others. Another 43% said they like newsletters that have links to videos. And so do I.
In the developing
online world, how companies fill out that “About Us” or “What We Do” parts of their Web site is revealing to me. The ones that tell the story of their business well are
invariably companies I just believe are better, smarter, more focused.
In the tech space itself, a lot of Internet purveyors could stand to produce videos that actually show or somehow visually
describe what they do since so much of what they do is, in some way, brand new and at least slightly hard to grasp.
In a kind of informational shorthand I use, a bad “About Us”
section is a tip-off. Animoto’s own About Us page video is more playful than informational, but its entire Webs ite is filled with samples and little
tutorials that lead me to three conclusions they’d want me to have: Making a business video is necessary, it’s not hard to do, and Animoto knows what it’s doing. (The worst "about
us" sections, I find, are ones on news media sites.)
THE GROWTH OF OTT: Dollar signs always tell a story, and Juniper Research now predicts that by 2019,
subscription fees from OTT providers will reach nearly $32 billion, which is a neat four times more than what Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, etc. pulled in last year.
As reported by Digital Content Next, the huge swell in popularity is for all the reasons you
know and one that is worth keeping an eye on: Juniper says the OTTs are leading the way for 4K or UltraHD content, so that early adopters of that are finding the OTTest places to justify their
spend.
THIS IS THE END:The IAB’s marathon NewFronts, and the accompanying spike in hamburger slider consumption, ends today with presentations by
TheStreet, Endemol Beyond and The Daily Mail/Elite Daily in New York.
pj@medi-apost.com