Analog dollars for digital dimes = Analog hours for digital minutes
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Vivek Shah, president of digital publishing at Time Inc.’s Business News Unit, had some interesting things to say yesterday about why online content isn’t as attractive to advertisers as, say, magazines – its all about the time spent with the content and the saturation of advertising.
Speaking at Ad Age’s Digital Conference, Mr. Shah pointed out that many in the industry ignore the “time spent” factor, which skews every other aspect of the comparison between print and online content consumption. And that critically affects the pricing of online advertising.
I don’t disagree with his concept. But people are spending more time with online content than Vivek is giving them credit for. This article was in Variety yesterday:
“Lost” is still king of the fast-growing online video jungle. ABC’s island drama accounted for 35.8 million video streams of full-length episodes, clips and other shortform content viewed by 1.4 million unique viewers during the month of March, according to Nielsen VideoCensus stats…The average length of time that viewers spend watching online video is also growing — from an average of 169.3 minutes per viewer in February to 190.3 minutes in March.
Yup, accounting for all of the little pieces of its narrative universe, Lost is one of the most-watched shows online (and while we’re at it, let’s not forget that Hulu has become the #2 video site on the web by streaming long form content). I’m wondering if there are any statistics for how many minutes of video those 35.8 million streams translates into?
