Adults Spend 5.5 Hours Watching Video Content: Do You Have A Video Strategy?
With the rapid expansion of smartphones and other web-enabled mobile devices that can stream video seamlessly, video content has taken a prominent role in the world of digital advertising. Whether you’re viewing an ad before a YouTube video or a pop-up that precedes a news article, we are exposed to countless forms of video content on a daily basis whether we realize it or not. For digital marketers, this is an enormous opportunity to expand their offerings, but the sheer scale of how much video content a U.S. adult views on a daily basis is even larger than most could have imagined.
Where are Americans getting their video content?
By and large, television is still the primary point of contact for video content, but there has been a significant shift in the split between TV and digital video since 2011. According to an April 2015 study conducted by eMarketer, American adults spent 4 hours and 35 minutes exposed to television content daily, while viewing only 21 minutes of digital video each day. However, over the past several years, this time split has changed dramatically. In 2015, American adults will still view a healthy amount of video content through television at an average of 4 hours and 15 minutes per day, but that will be supplemented by an hour and 16 minutes for digital content.
“While so much debate has centered on a supposed tug-of-war between TV and digital video, the reality is that digital video is growing not at the expense of TV, but because video content is more popular than ever,” said Paul Verna, senior analyst at eMarketer. “We might spend less time watching on the main screen, but we’re no less interested in TV programming, and in fact, we seek out more of it each year.”
Where are marketers spending on video?
During 2014, U.S. adults spent more time on mobile devices than they did on PCs for the first time, so mobile investment in video content should expect a major windfall in the coming years. Since 2011, U.S. adults have increased the time they spent with major media by nearly a full hour each day, but by and large, marketers are still making a major push into television advertising. According to eMarketer’s estimates, 40.2 percent of U.S. major media ad spending will go to TV, while only 4.4 percent will be spent on digital video ads, despite the major uptick in viewership.
Ultimately, while digital ads have seen huge growth, they still lag behind television ads in overall effectiveness. For instance, some ads aren’t always viewable or are watched to completion, so as long as this medium has these shortcomings, TV will continue to hold the top spot for video content advertising dollars. There is certainly a major market opportunity for advertisers in the digital sphere and a willing audience, but it will take some fine-tuning in the future for this medium to be a true moneymaker in the advertising world.
